In this study, the researchers explore how teacher candidates (TCs) across one content area literacies course and one bilingual education course engaged with their past linguistic experiences through two literacy autobiography assignments across the two separate classes. Borrowing from culturally sustaining, multiliteracies, and translanguaging…

The transition from high school to college is challenging for many students, especially first-generation college students. College courses require disciplinary specific reading, writing, and thinking skills not often taught in high school, such as reading and analyzing complex texts and constructing original arguments in discipline-specific…

E-book sales are down nationwide, and younger readers are proving to be surprisingly persistent in their preference for printed books. Although 66% of schools nationwide offer e-books, adoption is growing at a slower than expected rate. This study takes a closer look at high school students' experiences as they read John Steinbeck's fictional…

Because authenticity in education is a subjective judgment regarding the meaningfulness of an activity, a need exists to co-investigate with students classroom factors increasing authenticity of writing. In this case study, one 8th grade student's needs for authentic writing are explored in detail. Xavier's take on authentic writing…

Although immigrant youth make up more than 20 percent of school-age children in the U.S., little is known about how they manage school assignments and texts. In this paper the author presents Tara (pseudonym) as a telling case of a first-generation immigrant youth who is encountering and grappling with academic literacy--defined as not only the…

Academic writing is a mainstay of expression in secondary schools. However, many students think of academic writing in terms of local operations that include spelling, punctuation, use of third person, and so on. Teachers may expect mastery of local operations, but often they want students to navigate the terrain of the content area or discipline…

This article describes an assignment piloted in spring of 2008 called the Rhetorical Analysis Project, which required students to analyze three different texts addressing a common issue, compose an argument about the representation of that issue as illustrated by those texts, and revise that argument to match a rhetorical model they chose from…

The Poetry Generating Loop is a new kind of generative writing circle that offers concrete, creative ways to get students involved in and excited about poetry. By writing poems in groups, students are able to learn poetic terms and experiment with techniques through their writing--a process that can shed new light on the world of poetry. (Contains…

Offers a humorous account of a writing assignment in which seventh-grade students, in response to a detailed description of a living room, wrote descriptions of who lived there, much to the chagrin of their teacher, whose living room it was. (SR)

In this article, the author advocates the use of literacy narratives--assignments in which students are asked to describe and reflect upon their experiences with reading and writing. Among their other uses, she believes that they provide a sense of students' prior literacy experiences and of their general feelings toward reading and writing, and…