Using Beck, McKeown and Kucan's (2002) three-tiered model as a general framework for vocabulary, this article sheds light on the construct of academic vocabulary and how it might be measured. Using illustrative writing samples of student work of different genres and drawing on corpus based studies, I highlight the distinction between general, high…

The Instructional Conversation (IC) is a complete classroom pedagogy that focuses on teaching through small-group dialogue with students allowing responsive instruction for each student. The IC is anchored by cognitive-developmental theory and by four decades of multi-method quasi-experimental studies. This study describes the first research of an…

The literature indicates that teacher educators have a responsibility to prepare new teachers philosophically and practically as reflective "researchers" who are in the habit of systematic, active, and goal-directed problem-posing and are attentive to the processes in which they are immersed (Braun & Crumpler, 2004; Cochran-Smith-Lytle, 1999;…

Students reading below grade proficiency have been a concern for educators. Students who attended third grade at this Title 1 intermediate school have demonstrated a lack of early literacy skills as measured using a variety of assessments. An early literacy reading program was initiated in 2008; however, the effectiveness of the instructional…

"Using the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts With Gifted and Advanced Learners" provides teachers and administrators examples and strategies to implement the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) with advanced learners at all stages of development in K-12 schools. The book describes--and demonstrates with specific examples…

Based on interviews with state officials in the six Southeast Region states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina), this study describes state processes for adopting the Common Core State Standards (a common set of expectations across states for what students are expected to know in English language arts and…

Based on interviews with state officials in the six Southeast Region states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina), this study describes state processes for adopting the Common Core State Standards (a common set of expectations across states for what students are expected to know in English language arts and…

High academic standards are an important first step in ensuring that all Alaska's students have the tools they need for success. These standards reflect the collaborative work of Alaskan educators and national experts from the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. Further, they are informed by public comments.…

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has created tools and supports intended to help teachers adapt to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. The tools seek to find the right balance between encouraging teachers' creativity and giving them enough guidance to ensure quality. They are the product of two years of…

In this article, the author describes a section of Stealing Home, a unit she created about ways the homes of people of color have been stolen through "race riots" and "urban renewal" in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Los Angeles' Chavez Ravine; and Portland, Oregon's Albina neighborhood. This is the first of a two-part series about the unit.…

This article uses the analytic lens of power relations and models of power to examine how the participation of two students in an urban US eighth-grade English language arts class was symbolically and literally deleted. The researcher asks why do some students fail despite being placed in a technologically rich educational environment that…

And so a middle school language arts teacher begins her Saturday. Before coffee, Facebook. In this themed issue on professional development in an era of nick.com, the authors propose that teachers' new literacy learning is as close as their own screens. Teachers, too, live literate lives online in this new age of composition, with impulses to…

Lesson transitions are important units for analysis not only for establishing the presence of group/pair work but also for examining the contextual conditions for small-group learning. Scholars have suggested that the "open" or "closed" contextual conditions set up through the teacher's use of language to introduce group/pair…

This paper discusses the social positioning work three Appalachian adolescents engaged in during two literacy events drawn from a year-long critical teacher-researcher ethnographic study in a twelfth-grade English class in a rural Appalachian high school. Data analysis indicates that in these literacy events, the focal students positioned…

As part of the "Bridging the Language Gap" project undertaken with 86 State and Catholic schools across Queensland, the language competencies of Indigenous students have been found to be "invisible" in several key and self-reinforcing ways in school system data. A proliferation of inaccurate, illogical and incomplete data…