In 2016, the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina, the nation's 15th-largest school district, confronted two dilemmas common in U.S. education. First, a quality review had revealed weaknesses in its literacy curriculum. Although curriculum can have profound effects on student learning, not all curricula are rigorous and engaging…

In this study we are concerned with the informal dimension of formative assessment (FA) in an L2 classroom. We examine those instances that are embedded into everyday learning activities and that emerge in and through classroom interaction contingently, continuously and flexibly. Drawing on the methodological underpinnings of Conversation Analysis…

To challenge resistance to required literature courses, instructors quiz students regularly on the readings; they also require examinations that ask students to define key terms, to answer background questions focused on authors and dates, to identify key passages by author/title/speaker, and to explain the thematic significance of each quotation.…

This qualitative case study documents a secondary English teacher's making, writing and teaching. The focal teacher engaged in diverse making practices -- including composing, crafting and digital fabrication. She also participated in a National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute that focused on both teacher writing and digital composing. Data…

Adolescents with disabilities have great difficulty with academic content in middle school, and their teachers have difficulty teaching them to understand and use academic language. We taught teachers of sixth-grade students with learning disabilities, more than half of whom were also English language learners (ELLs), to implement about 15 min of…

English has become a key subject of educational systems worldwide. Thus, researchers have centered their attention on psychosocial processes that influence English proficiency in EFL settings. The aim of our study was to investigate the relation between affective variables, motivation and proficiency and assess which attitudinal/motivational…

Self-disclosure, simply defined, is the intuitive understanding of private feelings, thoughts or experiences between interlocutors. It is revealing information about yourself to others. This revealing is believed crucial in building up a completely personal connection among teachers and students, which might give cause for students' engagement,…

The academic oral presentation (henceforth AOP) is an important genre for tertiary students across various courses and disciplines in the university. Despite the importance of AOPs for undergraduate students, relatively little is known about this genre. Using Swales' (1990, 2004) notion of move analysis, this paper compares the rhetorical…

The substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition (SAMR) model offers a framework by which schools and teachers can implement digital tools through curricular design that encourages participatory learning. 21st Century students should be producing content and making meaning in educational settings with high levels of engagement and by the…

This article draws on Donna Haraway's call for feminist speculative fabulation as an approach to qualitative research methodologies and writing praxis in schools. The first section of the article outlines how I conceptualize speculative thought, through different philosophers and theorists, and provides a brief literature review of speculative…

This article takes as its starting-point four moments that occurred in the course of a year of teaching A-level English Literature in an inner-London sixth-form college. It argues that these moments represented forms of learning and experience that were valuable, but that fell outside the prevailing version of what (English) lessons are for. It…

This paper explores students' engagement in reading poems, examining data on their self-perceptions of their confidence and competence in reading poems before, during, and after using the "I Notice" methodology as adapted from The Academy of American Poets' unit plan, "Noticing Poetry" (Slaby, 2017). The data was collected over…

Bakhtinian concepts of persuasive and authoritative discourse, this study reports on science and English language arts instructional practices in a multilingual, rural, fourth-grade classroom in Kenya. Situated in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) and through the use of case study, the study explores classroom discourse data to illustrate…

In this article, the authors reflect on their experiences of integrating visual arts, specifically painting, into an English language arts curriculum. Although each of them had previously used art as a response to literature with our students, neither of them had before collaborated with professional artists or been as intentional about…

Students who are African American and male living in the United States have been marginalized from gifted and talented and Advanced Placement (AP) classes in public education. Students who have enrolled in specifically AP English and have taken an AP English exam have been shown to outperform other types of students in college (Barnard-Brak,…