Revisiting reading for pleasure: Delight, desire and diversity

To what extent do children in the early 21st century choose to read for pleasure, for leisure and for enjoyment? Are they reading for themselves, or for their teachers and the assessment system? Does the desire to read independently, to engage with others’ worlds, to wonder and ponder and find out more about issues of interest run deep enough to sustain the young as readers of today and tomorrow

Multimodal K-12 Assessment Frameworks and the Interactive Audience: An Exploratory Analysis of Existing Frameworks

Multimodal writing often occurs through membership in an online, participatory culture; thus, the audience for student writers potentially can shift from imagined readers to actual, accessible readers and responders. In this article, we thoroughly review the idea of audience and then report results from an exploratory review of K-12 assessment frameworks and analyze how key frameworks address the need for consideration of an interactive audience. We found that multimodal composition is being defined consistently across all frameworks as composition that includes multiple ways of communicating, but the majority of multimodal composition examples were texts that were non-interactive composition types (as far as online and participatory interaction with the actual audience is concerned) even though many authors acknowledged the emergence of interactive online composition types that afford the writer the ability to communicate and collaborate with an audience

What, why and how–the policy, purpose and practice of grammatical terminology

© 2018, © 2018 National Association for the Teaching of English. This article critically examines the literature around grammar and grammatical terminology. It is essentially a critical consideration of the debates in England and Wales in four main parts. Part 1 considers debates in policy, the “What”, i.e. grammatical terminology from the perspective of national policy as defined by the English National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2, and the Key Stage 2 “Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling Test”. Part 2, Debates in Purpose, examines the “Why”: it views grammatical terminology through a more theoretical lens which considers the potential purpose and value of explicit grammatical terminology in the classroom. Part 3 touches upon Debates in Practice, the “How”, examining what is already understood about the teaching of grammatical terminology in terms of grammar pedagogy, language acquisition and word learning. While each part has a distinct focus, the field is complex with overlap and interrelated issues. The final part looks briefly at teacher and pupil perspectives

The Effective Use of 21st-Century Learning iPad Applications in the Primary/Junior Literacy Classroom

The purpose of this major research project was to develop a practical tool in the form of a handbook that could facilitate educators’ effective use of technology in primary and junior classrooms. The main goal was to explore the use of iPad devices and applications in the literacy classroom. The study audited available free applications against set criteria and selected only those that promoted 21st-century learning. The researcher used such applications to develop literacy lessons that aligned with curriculum expectations and promoted 21st-century skills and traditional skills alike. The study also created assessment models to evaluate the use of iPads in student work and explored the benefits and limitations of technology usage in student learning

What place has grammar in the English curriculum? An analysis of ninety years’ policy debate: 1921 to 2011.

Since 1921 England’s governments have commissioned enquiries into English and literacy teaching, leading towards published recommendations and requirements for English grammar teaching. Governments’ officially sanctioned publications represent their policy aspirations for English and literacy. Research studies have explored the subsequent challenge for schools and teachers who must integrate grammar into a subject whose wider philosophies may conflict with an explicit grammar element. My study draws on critical theory to analyse the ideological discourses of English grammar these official policy documents reveal, and how they conflict or coincide with wider ideologies of English and literacy in schools. My study uses a two-stage analysis. First is an intertextual analysis using a corpus approach to identify the data’s grammar topics through its keywords and argumentation types. Second is a qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the documents’ main ideas and ideological discourses. The CDA analysis reveals three main ideological discourses of grammar, namely of ‘heritage and authority’, ‘standards and control’, and ‘life chances and skills’. These discourses are constructed from both prescriptive and descriptive traditions of linguistic thinking, and draw on ideological perspectives of teaching and teachers, learning and learners, and changing philosophies of English over time. The findings show no direct connection between the topic keywords policy authors use and the ideological positions they adopt. But there is a clear trend in argumentation approaches used to make hoped-for claims for grammar’s place and benefits in subject English. The discourses found question whether teachers are sufficiently prepared for grammar teaching and whether learners are sufficiently prepared for communicating in the workplace. The policy ideologies of grammar found in the qualitative analysis are finally re-mapped against wider philosophies of subject English to identify the broad policy trends

Reading fictions: reading reader identities in Black Country further education communities

This thesis ‘opens up’ an exploration of the relationship between identity and achievement in reading, taking as its focus a case study of 16 – 19 year olds studying at Black Country further education colleges. As a group Black Country young people are often characterised through quantitative measurement, league tables and inspection reports, as underachieving in ‘schooled’ literacy. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from Bourdieu, Bernstein and Foucault this project seeks to explore, problematize and challenge these representations offering a more dynamic account of young people’s engagement with textual experience that is grounded in young people’s own accounts of their experience of their out of school literacies. At the same I offer a critically reflexive account of the process of researching and representing research and attempt to achieve homology between the theoretical perspectives I put to use in my analysis and the practices of writing a PhD. I aim to present a reflexive piece of work that explores the situatedness of the PhD, and its authoring, as product and process