Successive UK government policies have strengthened the phonics element of the National Curriculum for English in England. The policies have included inviting publishers to submit completed self-assessments of their systematic phonics programmes. The self-assessment criteria focus on what is deemed to be 'high-quality provision', as defined in the…

This essay examines the role of educators in the tangled economic, social, environmental and technological crises of the present time. It argues that a central purpose of education in this period is to support students to imagine and make liveable futures on their own terms. To do this, the paper proposes that the colonizing, optimizing and…

The teaching of writing has been a relatively neglected aspect of research in literacy. Cultural and socio-economic reasons for this are suggested. In addition, teachers often readily acknowledge themselves as readers, but rarely as writers. Without a solid grasp of compositional processes, teachers are perhaps prone to adopt schemes that promote…

Posthumanism, or the material turn, refuses to take the distinction between human and nonhuman for granted. Currently discourses in literacy education focus on the ways of incorporating new tools and technologies (products) but within a design perspective, which does not get at the social and participatory ways (processes) of students creating new…

New research findings are presented in this paper, responding to a significant knowledge gap about the role of pedagogy in tackling persistent educational inequalities. The paper examines the potential of reading for pleasure (RfP) pedagogy to disrupt 'pedagogy of poverty' in low socio-economic (SES) schools and to enable children to reap the…

A survey questionnaire was administered to 146 MEd students enrolled in a teacher-training institute in Singapore to determine the strategies they use to promote engaged reading in the classroom. The majority of the teacher respondents when asked how they motivate students to read, wrote down "Not Applicable," and 38% were unable to…

With the advent of digital technologies, a new adventure began. How the world works has changed, and we cannot go back. Digitally savvy children born in the digital age (i.e., DigiKids) are interacting with and responding to rich, curatable multimodal communications as part of their daily-lived experience. For DigiKids, traditional text-based…

This manuscript describes how innovative literacy practices such as multigenre writing and artifactual critical literacy have been used to tap into pre-service teachers' cultural identities while responding to literature. In the process of responding to literature, personal experience is crucial; therefore, in this study, I focused on the…

This article explores children's imaginative interaction with Internet games in the belief that an understanding of children's life experiences is essential to effective teaching and learning within the classroom. It is underpinned by the idea that imaginative play is, at least in some part, the work of children undertaking identity practice. It…

At the time of writing, primary English education is, once again, at a crossroads. Within the context of a continuing focus on underachievement in writing for key groups of learners and a large body of research, which suggests that classroom talk is a powerful means of improving children's success in all areas of the curriculum including writing,…

This is a follow-up study regarding one of the early readers whose metacognitive reading strategies were explored in my 1991 qualitative case study research, published in "Reading", 29 (2), 30-33. Unique factors in the original study involve the inclusion of young children as informants related to self, task and text. Six-year-old…

This paper draws on early data from a cross-Canada research project in which researchers at six Faculties of Education have been engaged in introducing picture books with multiple and diverse representations of Canadians to classes of pre-service teachers, inviting them to explore the pedagogical possibilities of the picture books and to discuss…

Although teachers are acutely aware of variance in students' literacy needs, many are unsure exactly how to support these needs in the dynamic classroom. This study reports on compelling evidence from Grade 2/3 classrooms in which teachers differentiated instruction in a variety of ways to benefit all students. In particular, teachers provided…