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…

This study identified historical continuities and discontinuities across a century of secondary research published in "English Journal" (1912-1966) and "Research in the Teaching of English" (1967-2011). It highlights considerable methodological continuity across six decades of "English Journal" and some shifts in research emphases that tended to…

This article reflects on where and how empirical research, focusing particularly on college/adult writing and literate practice, has appeared over the last century in the complete runs of "English Journal," "College English," "College Composition and Communication," "Research in the Teaching of English," and "Teaching English in the Two-Year…

In the current research climate favoring rigorous experimental studies of instructional scripts using randomly chosen treatment and control groups, education and literacy researchers and policy makers will do well to take stock of their current research base and assess critical issues in this new context. This review of research on classroom…

In this article, we present secondary students' perceptions of their writing and writing instruction. Using the NCTE/IRA Standards as the foundation for a survey, we questioned nearly 2,000 public-school students concerning what they wrote, how they wrote, and the extent to which they wrote in their language arts classes. We chose Florida as our…

Understandings of the ways home and school languages shape classroom dynamics and influence development, identity, and subsequent school success are important for teachers of both bilingual and African American students. This article builds a link between these complementary bodies of research by analyzing interactions in a second grade mainstream…

Examines three questions concerning the quality of reading and writing among students: (1) is reading achievement today better or worse than in the past? (2) how well do students read in relation to the demands of their schooling and their later work? and (3) how different is reading achievement by socio-economic status? Finds that the perceived…

Summarizes the research on the condition of literacy and concludes that the poor performance of the last century can be traced, in part, to faulty teaching methods, oversimplified textbooks, and the false diagnosis of innate learning disabilities. (TB)

Reports on changes in reading skills of students for the period 1970-90; the progress made by 9- and 14-year-old students in 1990; and the efficiency of reading pedagogy in United States schools compared with efficiencies in other leading industrial countries. Finds that reading progress in the United States is the worst among leading industrial…

Argues that the standards by which literacy is judged have gone up, which produces the impression that schools are doing worse than they have in the past when in fact they are doing well. Examines a cross section of studies and data. (TB)

Shows that of the 300 bilingual program evaluations studied only 72 were methodologically acceptable and of that 72 only 22% found traditional bilingual education better than regular classroom instruction when the outcome is reading, 7% when the outcome is language, and 9% when the outcome is math. Suggests that findings do not favor transition…

Summarizes the findings of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) pertinent to reading and response to literature and suggests ways the IEA data bank can stimulate research by suggesting hypotheses. (DD)

Documents a model that resulted from an analysis of context clues to determine which were amenable to instruction and what pedagogical approach should be used. (DD)

The usages of transaction and interaction are differentiated as reflections of differing paradigms, the transactional theory of reading is disassociated from information processing and interactive processing, and the implications for research of various concepts basic to the total transactional theory of reading are discussed. (HOD)

Presents the advantages of an analytic, constructivist, holistic view of language learning and training, whether native or foreign, written or oral, productive or receptive. Argues that context (setting the linguistic forms in a communicative competence framework) is the critical issue. (HOD)