In the face of the traumas of a global pandemic, it became pertinent for teacher training programmes and educators like me to be intentional about practices that foreground a pedagogy of care with a focus on wellness and healing, courageous conversations and what Price-Dennis and Sealey-Ruiz (2021) has described as critical love. What does it mean…

The preparation of student teachers to be effective teachers of writing requires attention to both their writing skills and their personal confidence. When teachers have confidence in themselves as writers and strong writer identities, they are likely to better placed to develop strong writer identities in their own students. It is suggested…

Students must be able to produce legible and fluent text when completing classwork and for exam purposes. Some students, however, present with handwriting difficulties in secondary school. When these are significant, intervention may be necessary or alternatives to handwriting may be offered (e.g. use of a word processor). Little is known about…

The contribution of spoken language to outcomes for education and beyond, including attainment, wellbeing and empowerment is long-established and has recently become more prominent under the title of oracy, often conceptualised as learning both to and through talk. Part of the renewed interest in oracy is due to its potential for driving social…

Interactive Fiction (IF)--a digital form of non-linear narrative writing--requires readers to respond, to make choices that shape their reading experience. I argue that such choices can be put to use in the classroom, helping teachers to facilitate metalinguistic talk. In this article, I offer a clear conceptualisation of metalinguistic talk,…

Student engagement in the process of transduction concomitantly affords them with opportunities to develop and express their critical and creative thinking competences. Reconfiguring or remaking knowledge or meaning in modes other than those of the original sources of information requires affective, imaginative and cognitive activity by…

Based on an analysis of three literacy events in nursery schools, this article focuses on how literacy forms part of children's social practices and co-creates the language environment in the nursery and how place, affect and materiality play a key role in children's multimodal and embodied meaning-making around literacy. The analysis is based on…

This qualitative study highlights how children's literature can serve as a springboard for discussing current events while making connections with a similar historical event. Undergraduate students enrolled in children's literature courses read the graphic novel "Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918" and discussed the parallels between the…

Reading to Dogs (RTD) in schools, a form of animal-assisted education (AAE), is growing in popularity and prevalence. RTD involves children reading to a registered dog with benefits to well-being and reading outcomes thought to arise because of the unconditional positive regard and non-critical listening bestowed on the child by the dog. Yet RTD…

Incorporating climate change into literacy curriculum is an important goal globally, but one that has gone unmet in typical elementary classrooms. One reason may be a lack of preparation of teachers to select texts on this topic. This research involved preservice elementary literacy teachers in a children's literature course evaluating children's…

Developments in technology have led to a rethinking of teaching delivery--instructors have found in digital devices an important way to attract students' attention. One of the many applications this technology could potentially have would be to encourage young learners to read through new multimedia products such as Web 2.0. In this article, I…

Though discipline-specific approaches to literacy instruction can support adolescents' academic literacy and identity development, scant attention has been paid to ways of targeting such instruction to address individual student needs. Dialogic writing assessment is an approach to conducting writing conferences that foregrounds students' composing…

In this study, we examine various aspects of BookTubers' literacy practices, regarding the personal and social factors that lead readers to devote themselves to the BookTube community, the elements that BookTubers consider as they create and publish video book reviews and the sort of literary learning this digital literacy practice entails. For…

This paper presents Chinese heritage parents' perspectives on young children's use of technology as a tool for language and cultural learning. Growing up with Confucian heritage culture, some Chinese parents have particular cultural beliefs about learning that value effortful learning practices and the social context of learning. However, some…

This study examines how 31 middle-school children conducted multimodal analyses of video games. Over four consecutive days, students played video games for 30 minutes and then wrote written reflections about the multimodal symbols within the game and how these symbols influenced their interpretation and decision-making processes during gameplay.…