Purpose: This study centers on high school pre-teacher education students' reviews of their peers' digital stories. The purpose of this study is twofold: to bring digital storytelling to the forefront as a literacy practice within classrooms that seeks to privilege students' voices and experiences and also to encapsulate the authors' different…

Language learning that is grounded on learners' sociocultural realities promises to be a meaningful experience they are likely to treasure when it comes to grappling with practical day-to-day matters. This article reports on a research study aimed at fostering socioculturally constructed language learning in a group of pre-service English…

This paper reports the uses and practices of literacy in English of primary schoolchildren in Malaysia. Data was gathered from two children, their parents and the English subject teacher. The results reveal four major findings. First, the results reveal that the students' experience with out-of-school literacies in English were largely afforded by…

Across curricular terrains in education in North America, the use of the term "inquiry" has become more prevalent than ever. This radical turn from traditional content curriculum toward inquiry-based approaches to teaching raises issues about the promise and potential challenges of contemporary curriculum in K-12 L2 settings. This…

The high school English classroom is a complex space of literacy practices and communicative interaction. Teachers and students engage in literature study in ways that are dialogic and multifaceted. The navigation of both print and digital texts along with the constructive operations surrounding those texts including the textual operations…

There is growing interest in using digital multimodal composing (DMC) as an integral part of ELT pedagogy. While the use of DMC for multiliteracies development is well documented, the important question of how DMC can facilitate English learning is underexplored, particularly in EFL contexts. Drawing on findings from a DMC programme in China, this…

Many observers have argued that minority language speakers often have difficulty with school-based literacy and that the poorer school achievement of such learners occurs at least partly as a result of these difficulties. At the same time, many have argued for a recognition of the multiple literacies required for citizens in a 21st century world.…

This research describes some of the salient features of Indigenous ways of working with multimodal literacies in digital contexts of use that emerged within an Indigenous school community with the oversight of Aboriginal Elders. This is significant because the use of multimodal literacy practices among a growing number of Indigenous school…

Access to digital technology in the classroom enables the composition and organization of ideas on screen with a variety of semiotic systems of different modes and media. This study explores patterns of communication and preference of design in digital meaning-making of twelve 7-8 years old students. Meanings were shaped in complex uses and…

Youths' learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice…

A subcommittee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Executive Committee wrote the "NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing" in 2004. In over a decade since, the everyday experience of writing in people's lives has expanded dramatically. Increasingly, handheld devices are important instruments for people's writing,…

This article is derived from a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a sixth form college in north-west England. Through a project in which teacher-researcher and student-participants co-constructed a group Facebook page about the students' scaffolded research into dyslexia, the study examined the…

With the revolution that has taken place in the functionality and uptake of portable networked "smart" technologies, educators are looking to see what potential applications such technologies might have for school education. This article reports on a study on the use of portable personal computing devices in the early years of schooling.…

Urban Literacies showcases cutting-edge perspectives on urban education and language and literacy by respected junior and senior scholars, researchers, and teacher educators. The authors explore--through various theoretical orientations and diverse methodologies--meanings of urban education in the lives of students and their families across three…

In this study, we draw on three interrelated concepts, i.e. placed resources, multiliteracies and the carnivalesque, to understand how information and communication technology (ICT) resources are taken up within the context of a print-based journalism club. Our research participants attend an under-resourced girls' residential secondary school in…