Creole-speaking contexts are significantly underrepresented in language and literacy research yet present a unique context for understanding the nature of language and literacy development among numerous learners in the Global South. In the Caribbean in particular, the poor writing outcomes of Creole speakers across all levels of education has…

The author invited two teachers affiliated with their graduate program in literacy to explore how children's social identities impacted students' reading process. The teachers, Taylor and Dana, worked in urban elementary charter schools in New York City, at the time. The participants agreed to share samples from their classrooms to illustrate how…

Seventh-grade students engaged in a guided historical inquiry about slavery, freedom, and unfreedom. The teacher carefully intertwined historical content, close reading, critical thinking, and text-based writing -- both extemporaneous and refined-- during Social Studies. Students scrutinized primary sources to build their historical schemas over…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss the impact of an international book exchange project done with elementary students from a professional development school partnership on the understanding of project-based learning by pre-service teachers. Design/methodology/approach: A collaborative project between a school in Uganda, a…

Education consultant Samantha Bennett describes an inquiry unit in which 2nd graders practice the habits of lepidopterists to learn about butterflies and to create a literary nonfiction story that incorporated their butterfly research. She takes the reader through the teacher's process of planning this unit, including choosing the "4…

Building on existing research on Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), the current study investigated the collateral effects of social skills prompts on the writing outcomes and problem behavior of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). Generalization measures involved the use of video prompts to explore their impact (if…

In the context of our work as literacy specialists, we taught teachers to use sentence frames to support ELL students' writing. We then studied the impact of their instruction on students. Our analysis of student writing samples revealed no group wide developmental trends so we posed deeper questions about their work using the data analysis…

This article reports on a collaborative inquiry into the use of a researcher-designed digital tool for the support of writing instruction in elementary classrooms. The digital tool in question is an online collection of original writing samples produced by elementary children that was conceptualized as a resource for coaching new writers using…

This case study reports the results of a genre-based approach, which was used to explicitly teach the touristic landmark description to fourth-grade students of Spanish as a foreign language. The instructional model and unit of instruction were informed by the pedagogies of the Sydney School of Linguistics and an instructional model for…

In this mixed methods study, qualitative, quantitative, and single-case methods were combined to provide a comprehensive investigation of teacher and student outcomes following practice-based professional development (PBPD) for self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) in writing. Qualitative observations were used to determine outcomes among the…

Increasingly, there is a growing move towards using global languages such as English as media of instruction. Does one swim against this growing tide or does one look at strategies to accommodate English in multilingual contexts such as prevail in South Africa? In this article I examine the debates in South Africa about the role of English in…

This essay considers whether the neuroscientific concepts of conceptual blending (from cognitive linguistics) embodiment and analogy offer insights into why and how drama-based pedagogies strengthen classroom learning. Pilot writing samples from eight-and nine-year-old students suggest that conceptual blending is enhanced through drama-based…

In many cases, teachers shy away from including much writing because of the many hours it requires to read and provide substantial feedback on such papers. Yet writing is widely understood as critically important to learning (Applebee & Langer, 2013; Mayher, 1983; Zinsser, 1989). This article describes a program from the Northwest Arkansas…

Theories of writing development posit several component skills as necessary to the writing process. This meta-analysis synthesizes the literature on the correlation between these proposed component skills and writing outcomes. Specifically, in this study, we examine the bivariate relationships between handwriting fluency, spelling, reading, and…

Theories of writing development posit several component skills as necessary to the writing process. This meta-analysis synthesizes the literature on the correlation between these proposed component skills and writing outcomes. Specifically, this study examines the bivariate relationship of handwriting fluency, spelling, reading, and oral language…