This column features two prominent literacy scholars, Catherine Compton-Lilly and Eve Gregory. They discuss their recent research studies in various contexts and describe the reciprocal relationships between school, home, and community literacy practices.

The article focuses on the notion of tablet technologies as placed resources (Prinsloo, 2005; Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012) by exploring how an international research project in Australia, Canada, and the United States forged community through online spaces. There is a tendency in media and in literature to romanticize technologies like iPads as a…

This piece shares preservice teachers and instructors reflections on their perceptions of a course on Spanish language arts methods in Puerto Rico. The course was redesigned to focus on interrelated curricular and pedagogical aspects such as literacies as situated social practice, funds of knowledge, popular culture and critical literacy. In…

Schools bring people together. Yet for many children there are major discontinuities between their lives in and out of school and such differences impact on literacy teaching and learning in both predictable and unpredictable ways. However if schools were reconceptualised as meeting places, where different people are thrown together (Massey, 2005)…

Traditionally, assessing student writing ability has often been product-focused. Advocates of child-centered process-oriented classrooms, however, suggest that teachers should also focus on understanding children's writing behaviors in the context of meaningful communicative tasks. In such an approach, writing conferences are one way in which…

Review New Zealand's language arts assessment practices at all grade levels. Suggests alternative approaches to student evaluation. (MM)

David Booth, internationally renowned educator, author, and professor of education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at Toronto University has presented workshops in all areas of language learning and has won several awards for his classroom teaching, his contributions to the teaching of reading and his books for young people. He…

A British educator discusses the role of self-expressive talk in the learning process and the influence of teacher attitudes on learning through language. (HTH)

Discusses several observation-based methods of student assessment that are recommended in the "Primary Language Record," a book developed by schools in the Inner London Educational Authority. (MM)

Examines British education in which students who have not learned to read in infant (primary) school are given "remedial" instruction, arguing that these students are not "remedial" but rather are learning language for the first time. Recommends teaching based on the similarities between remedial instruction and second language…

Reviews the typical approach (synthetic phonics) to teaching reading in Finland. Suggests that teachers in English-speaking countries can learn from problems Finnish teachers face and vice versa. Finds that, despite a highly regular writing system, Finnish teachers find that a heavy phonics emphasis does not solve their reading instruction…

Describes how the educational museum Clarke Hall provides a stimulus to language use by involving children in the daily life of the seventeenth century. (DD)

Discusses four British educational practices dealing with reading instruction, written language, copybooks, and oral language and how they differ from American practices. (HTH)

Describes the interaction in an Australian tenth year English class. Discusses the perceptions of three of the students, sometimes as spectator and sometimes as participant. Recounts the teacher's thoughts as she composed the curriculum, then speculates on teaching as science and art, observing the many disciplines inherent to English instruction.…

Focuses on the issues of skills in reading instruction in New Zealand. Feels that instruction can maintain a reciprocal and mutually supportive relationship between teaching word-level strategies and comprehension strategies. (MG)