This essay on three recent books by outstanding scholars--"La raison scolaire" by Bernard Lahire, "Histoire de l'enseignement du francais du XVII[superscript e] au XX[superscript e] siecle" by Andre Chervel, and "L'ecole et la lecture obligatoire" by Anne-Marie Chartier--offers the opportunity to acquaint readers with French research on teaching…

In this article, I examine literacy artifacts placed by students in different locations of a state-run secondary school in the city of Madrid, Spain. The data were gathered as part of a two-year long multilevel ethnography focused on the social and academic trajectories of immigrant students in Spanish compulsory secondary education. The analysis…

This essay reviews six competing positions on U.S. school reform: a speech from Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System"; Frederick Hess's "The Same Thing Over and Over"; Charles Payne's "So Much Reform, So Little Change"; Anthony Byrk and others' "Organizing School for…

This essay offers a commentary on how the relationship between language and literacy practices in and out of school has been conceptualized. It draws upon two new books in the field. Shirley Brice Heath's new book, "Words at Work and Play: Three Decades in Family and Community Life," which makes use of rich ethnographic accounts of children's…

This article presents the argument that consideration of non-European and nonalphabetic writing makes possible new understandings of literacy and, in addition, that contemporary literacy forms and practices can be fully understood only by expanding our historical perspective. The field of literacy research remains largely unaware of the multimodal…

The definition of literacy has become narrow, bounded, and associated predominantly with measurement of cognitive skills used to decode words. In this article, the author explores the absence in the literacy instruction of a clear, deliberate, and intentional focus upon "connectedness" between the reader and the text. The author maintains that…

The commentary argues for an understanding of how texts are put together that accounts for multimodality and draws on children's ways of being and doing in the home, their "habitus". It focuses on identities as socially situated. It argues that it is important to trace the process of sedimenting identities during text production. This offers a way…

Ethnographic "New Literacy Studies" question the idea that literacy as such has any uniform effects, arguing instead that effects of literacy inhere in the social practices that impart it. What change, then, does literacy produce where it arrived from two opposed sets of practices? In Quechua-and Aymara-speaking villages on the high plains of Lake…

The purpose of this theoretical essay is to explore the limits of traditional conceptualizations of reader and text and to propose a more general theory based on the concept of a literacy agent. The proposed theoretical perspective subsumes concepts from traditional theory and aims to account for literacy online. The agent-based literacy theory…

In many literacy classrooms, students engage in public performances in which they use various texts, movements of their bodies, and verbal interactions. How do we interpret such events? In this article, we critique a representational mode of interpretation and describe an alternate mode. We argue that literacy performances are often about creating…

In this commentary, the author identifies what, in her opinion, has been left out of the discussion of "scale up." She expresses particular concern that the rhetoric of scaling up, and the concomitant assertion of scientific underpinnings for programs brought to scale, may overstate the relation of the developers' programs and program materials to…

This theoretical article examines reading processes using chaos theory as an analogy. Three principles of chaos theory are identified and discussed, then related to reading processes as revealed through eye movement research. Used as an analogy, the chaos theory principle of sensitive dependence contributes to understanding the difficulty in…

Forty-three years ago, Bloomfield and Barnhart (1961) published "Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach." Their notion of linguistics-informed literacy instruction was to carefully control the vocabulary of texts in order to exploit phonetic regularities. In Lesson 4 students read, "A man at bat had a tan cap" (p. 63). Even as far along as Lesson…

Considers how writing personal and professional narratives together has taught the author the complicated ways in which he uses his early childhood skills in caring for his parents--the importance of routines, transitions, relationship building--and they in turn have prompted him to rethink the early years of life, including the learning of…

Contends it is important to examine the role of new media and online literacies in the lives of reading researchers and teachers. Proposes reading researchers and educators need to view new media and online literacies as a central aspect of literacy research. Concludes that taking mainstay ideas about media and literacy from different disciplinary…