A successful collaboration resulted in a researcher and a teacher linking professional development with change in small-group reading instruction and student achievement. The context was a two-way Spanish-English bilingual immersion first-grade classroom with many English language learners (ELLs), located in a low-performing, high-poverty school.…

This teacher-research study examines the roles of talk and metaphorical representation in the construction of personal and social literary interpretation. Over three years, the investigator collected data from fourth-grade children's sketched interpretations about literature, their written commentaries, and conversations that occurred before,…

In this essay, I address the problem of White racism in the classroom, proposing a way of reading racist discourse that takes into account its emotional dimensions and hence its persuasive appeal for White students. This way of reading begins with the insight that racist language functions metaphorically, and that it acts as a rhetorical bridge…

One under-researched writing practice of today's millennial youth is online journaling. Despite the plethora of online journals on the Internet and their ubiquitous use by adolescents, little research has been conducted on online journaling as a literacy practice. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to explore how and why adolescents choose…

This teacher-researcher/university-researcher collaboration focuses on teaching and learning in untracked English classes, but has implications for all classrooms where students have different needs. We primarily examine the teacher-researcher's (Delp's) eighth-grade untracked English class but also include data from a group of beginning teachers…

Dudley-Marling discusses the nature of research in the teaching of reading and the possible connections between such research to teaching and to policy. He questions what he calls the "leitmotif" of federal education policy, specifically, the call for "scientifically based research" to determine reading teaching practices, arguing how such…

In this study we investigated the lives and academic histories of eight students enrolled in an alternative-school program in a mid-sized Midwestern city. Through the triangulation of interviews, fieldnotes, local newspaper articles, artifacts such as student work and information provided in cumulative folders, and a battery of measures of…

Research in the Teaching of English (RTE) is the flagship research journal of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in the United States. It is a broad-based, multidisciplinary journal composed of original research articles and short scholarly essays on a wide range of topics significant to those concerned with the teaching and…

While recent studies have demonstrated the importance of material structures in shaping writers' roles and practices in academic settings, relatively little attention has been focused on temporality, which exists as an embedded aspect of all such structures. Using the perspectives on temporality articulated in Anthony Giddens' concept of "time…

English departments are increasingly under pressure to offer writing courses online, but research that informs effective pedagogies--including effective ways to respond to students' drafts--is still limited. By investigating students' perceptions of online teacher response to student writing, this study suggests that in order to develop sound…

In 1986, while still at Harvard, I started teaching summer school at the Bread Loaf School of English, the graduate program in English of Middlebury College. Bread Loaf offers courses in literature, theater, and writing--here I fit in. I came to that job with a background in applied linguistics and cognitive development, but not in literature, and…

This article explores the writing opportunities provided to Spanish-speaking and mandarin speaking English Language Learners at the fourth and fifth-grade level across the various classroom settings in which they participated daily: an all-English speaking classroom, an English-as-a-second language (ESL) classroom, and a native-language classroom.…

The question of whether written genres can be learned through explicit teaching or can only be acquired implicitly through writing in authentic contexts remains unanswered. The question is complicated by the different parameters associated with teaching genre to first- or second-language learners, to children or adults, in settings in which the…

Drawn from a year-long study in a combined first- and second-grade classroom, this article presents an interpretive portrait of two young students engaged in spontaneous talk while writing. We analyze their conversations to explore the subject positions these student writers assumed, those they assigned each other, and the related functions they…

Researchers of literacies in out-of-school settings often argue that their studies hold significant implications for teaching practices. This argument seems to be partially supported by studies that have won the Alan C. Purves Award between 1998 and 2001, acknowledging RTE articles most likely to impact educational practice. Yet this line of…