This interpretive study provides a cross-case analysis of the literacy instruction of two first-grade teachers, with a particular focus on their grouping practices. One key finding was the way in which these teachers drew upon a district-advocated approach for instruction--an approach to guided reading articulated by Fountas and Pinnell (1996) in…

This essay raises concerns over the future direction for educational aid designed to promote literacy in developing countries. The essay focuses on the EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment) initiative in Africa. At one level, this essay challenges the claims for empirical and research-based support for the EGRA. At a broader level, this essay…

In order to prepare effective writing teachers, teacher educators need an understanding of how preservice preparation programs, inservice professional development, and the policies and practices of K-12 schools work together to influence teachers' writing instruction. This qualitative case study uses complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006) to…

In this article, we share findings from our process of "reading the past, writing the future" of elementary research in NCTE's journals. Our analysis focused on major domains of the field, including literature, writing, reading, language, and multimodal literacies, and spanned "Elementary English Review", which first appeared in 1924, was renamed…

Elizabeth Dutro and Kathleen Collins have written a fascinating and broad-ranging review that captures the richness of perspectives and findings in elementary literacy research, based on an examination of roughly 7,700 titles published in NCTE journals. This daunting figure provides an indication of the productivity and extensive contributions of…

Using a sociohistoric developmental lens, this paper traces the construction of texts composed by fifth graders in an urban classroom in order to answer the following questions: How do children develop as writers in school? How do writing and drawing function in children's texts? How do teaching practices shape children's writing development?…

In this study we take up challenges regarding researcher positionality, representation, and the construction of difference as a launching point to reflexively analyze our own practices within a research project exploring multilingualism, multiliteracies, and teacher development. Our data were drawn from a teacher study group we facilitated during…

In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of third graders' experiences with a unit from their district-mandated commercial reading curriculum in which the children made strong connections between a fictional account of a Depression-era farm family's economic hardships and their own 21st century lives in a city with one of the highest…

The year-long case study described in this article examined the transactions between a sixth-grade social studies teacher, Mrs. O'Reilly, and a struggling reader within her classroom, Sarah, in relation to the reading-task demands of their classroom. Findings indicated that Mrs. O'Reilly's transactions with Sarah were influenced by a cognitive,…

Beth Maloch reflects on her Alan Purves Award-winning article, which was chosen because of its demonstration of the ability of one teacher to make a difference in young students' use of informational texts to develop complex, literate lives. (Contains 1 note.)

This study focused on 189 sixth and seventh graders in two large suburban schools and their use of computer technologies as part of their everyday literacy practices. The authors were especially interested in the students' conceptions of computer technologies and how computer use varied across grade and reading levels. The study included a survey…

Research on persuasive writing by elementary children posits primarily a developmental perspective, claiming that elementary-age children can effectively argue through talk but not through writing. While this view is commonly held, this article presents counterevidence. Drawing on two cases of third and fourth grade children writing persuasive…

This article explores a third-grade teacher's use of critical writing pedagogy to encourage students' exploration of issues that were important in their lives from personal as well as social perspectives. She used a particular version of critical writing pedagogy--social narrative writing--in which students read and discussed children's literature…

In this article I use a double theoretical lens of Bourdieuian (1985, 1991) and Bakhtinian (1981, 1986) perspectives on social space and the dialogism of everyday literacy events to analyze and discuss a classroom literacy event. In this event, which takes place in a diversely populated classroom with a social justice language arts curriculum,…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…