2017 Annotated Bibliography Of Research In The Teaching Of English

Annotated Bibliography AB1
Research in the Teaching of English Volume 52, Number 3, February 2018 AB1
Annotated Bibliography of Research
in theTeaching of English
Jessica Dockter Tierney
Ann Mogush Mason
University of Minnesota
Amy Frederick
University of Wisconsin, River Falls
Jodi Baker, Richard Beach, Alissa Case, Sam David, Elizabeth Fogarty,
Ezekiel Joubert, Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr, Debra Peterson,
and Andrew Rummel
University of Minnesota
Kathryn Allen Mikel Cole
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh Clemson University
Anne Crampton Candance Doerr-Stevens
St. Olaf College University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Kris Isaacson Anne Ittner
University of Wisconsin, Stout Western Oregon University
Madeleine Israelson Lauren Aimonette Liang
College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University University of Utah
Michael Madson Lisa Ortmann
Medical University of South Carolina University of North Dakota
Maggie Struck Erin Stutelberg
Hamline University Salisbury University
Mark Sulzer Amanda Haertling Thein
University of Cincinnati University of Iowa
Left to right: Amy Frederick, Ann Mogush Mason,
Jessica Dockter Tierney
Copyright © 2018 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

AB2 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 52 February 2018
Introduction
Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research
in the Teaching of English.” We are proud to share these curated and annotated
citations once again in 2018. The goal of this bibliography is to select, compile,
and abstract high-quality research studies related to the teaching of English lan-
guage arts in order to construct a manageable body of important research that
RTE readers may want to explore further. Abstracted citations and those featured
in the“Other Related Research”sections were published, either in print or online,
between June 2016 and May 2017.
The bibliography is divided into nine subject-area sections. A three-person
team of scholars with diverse research interests and background experiences in
preK–16 educational settings chose the manuscripts for each section. Team mem-
bers reviewed library databases and leading empirical journals to select relevant
reports in each area of the bibliography. Teams identiied and abstracted the most
signiicant contributions to the body of peer-reviewed studies that employ system-
atic analysis of phenomena using a variety of research methods. Works listed in
the“Other Related Research”sections may include additional important research
studies in the ield, position papers from leading organizations, or comprehensive
handbooks. The listings are selective; we make no attempt to include all research
that appeared in the period under review. Because this bibliography is published
for readers of Research in the Teaching of English,articles from RTE are not included
since they would likely already be familiar to the audience.
The subject-area sections of the bibliography are below.
Digital/Technology Tools
Discourse/Narrative Analysis/Cultural Difference
Literacy
Literary Response/Literature/Narrative
Media Literacy
Professional Development/Teacher Education
Reading
Second Language Literacy
Writing
The National Council of Teachers of English provides free access to the an-
nual bibliographies as downloadable PDF iles at http://www2.ncte.org/resources/
journals/research-in-the-teaching-of-english/.Please enjoy this valuable service to
the RTE scholarly community.

Digital/Technology Tools
The research included in this section focuses on digital literacy research on technology for instructional
purposes. Priority was given to studies that address aspects of pedagogy connected to the knowledge
and skills needed to use digital technologies to facilitate literacy learning. Specifically, digital literacy
in English language arts contexts incorporates digital writing,production,communication,or reading
tools/apps; technology for instructional purposes, including blogs, coding, wikis, e-books/e-reading,
digital storytelling, online discussion, digital video production, podcasts, and digital portfolios;
and how social networking, online feedback, and learning management systems enhance literacy
instructional practices. (Maggie Struck, lead contributor)
Benko, S., Guise, M., Earl, C., & Gillt, W. (2017). More than social media: Using Twitter with
preservice teachers as a means of relection and engagement in communities of practice. Con-
temporary Issues in Teacher Education, 16(1), 1–21.
Examines the use of Twitter to provide opportunities for relection and collaboration during
methods courses in two English education programs. Identiies affordances and limitations of
using Twitter in methods courses and suggests revisions to help other teacher educators consider
ways to use Twitter in their own courses.Finds evidence that Twitter is useful for ongoing relec-
tion and offers potential for preservice teachers to engage with larger communities of practice
outside of their own institutions.Cautions that students may need scaffolding and guidance for
developing critical relection skills and maintaining involvement in communities of practice.
Cercone, J. (2017). “Standing at the crossroads”: Content creation in the 21st-century English
classroom. English Journal, 106(3), 25–31.
Examines the use of content creation via digital video composing to facilitate development of
critical literacy skills in ELA classrooms. Outlines the ways in which the ELA teacher designs
and sustains a space for ongoing digital video composing. Provides a case study of one student’s
development of literacy practices through repeated digital video composing—speciically, the
student’s rhetorical understandings of symbolism, audience, and multimodal expression. Peti-
tions English educators to extend already-established pedagogical practices of writing instruction
to include digital video composing as a “rigorous, academically challenging” practice.
Chu, S. K., Capio, C. M., van Aalst, J. C., & Cheng, E. W. (2017). Evaluating the use of a social
media tool for collaborative group writing of secondary school students in Hong Kong. Com-
puters & Education, 110, 170–180.
Investigates the value of wikis for supporting collaborative writing quality among secondary
school students in Hong Kong. Examines students’ group writing projects using PBworks, a
popular wiki tool. Analyzes data gathered from revision histories, a questionnaire, and group
interviews with students.Finds evidence that (1) students who made more collaborative revisions
on the wiki produced higher-quality writing output, and (2) students reported a moderately
positive attitude toward the pedagogical value of the wiki.Concludes that wikis promote collab-
orative writing,but teachers need to adopt pedagogical strategies that equip students to use wikis.
Clayton, K., & Murphy, A. (2016). Smartphone apps in education: Students create videos to
teach smartphone use as tool for learning. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 8(2), 99–109.
Makes a case for allowing smartphones in classrooms as an educational resource, rather than a
distraction, drawing on “digital divide” data showing that more students have access to phones
than any other form of technology. Describes a collaborative digital research project at two
geographically separated high schools in which students created instructional videos to teach
their peers how to maximize smartphone use for academic purposes (e.g., how to use apps
such as Scanbot). Finds that students’“ownership” of the production experience was high, and

attributes this to freedom in choosing both the content and approach to their instructional
videos. Notes that while students were not initially impressed with the genre of instructional
videos, they became highly engaged upon realizing that their work would have purpose and
real-world audiences (YouTube).Provides details about how students interacted with each other
across these two settings through video and feedback entered into shared documents during
the production process. Concludes with a plea to view smartphones and other mobile devices
as tools, and students as producers.
Davis, K., Ambrose, A., & Ornad, M. (2017). Identity and agency in school and afterschool set-
tings: Investigating digital media’s supporting role. Digital Culture and Education, 9(1), 31–47.
Examines possibilities of identity expression and agency for secondary students in public
school and afterschool settings in the United States. Investigates digital media’s supporting role
within these opportunities. Shares data from focus groups and interviews with 43 students and
6 teachers. Finds that afterschool programs provided students ample opportunities for identity
expression that frequently involved digital media production.Suggests that institutional restric-
tions and sociopolitical factors that frame students’experiences in formal and informal learning
contexts are similar despite the utilization of technology in these settings. Provides insight into
how digital media production can support students’ identity and agency in learning settings.
Howell,E.,Butler,T.,& Reinking,D.(2017).Integrating multimodal arguments into high school
writing instruction. Journal of Literacy Research, 49, 181–209.
Addresses the need for research on teaching argumentative writing that integrates a multilitera-
cies approach with more conventional composition instruction, pointing out that production
of conventional argumentative writing is still a pressing demand for students and teachers.
Explores an intervention to help secondary students construct multimodal, digital arguments
using claims, evidence, and warrants in an assortment of online platforms. Describes how the
research team’s use of a formative experiment method allowed for multiple modiications to
the intervention, in collaboration with the participating teacher. Finds improvement in argu-
mentative multimodal writing,including a more complex understanding of argumentation,but
notes scant evidence of transfer from multimodal construction of arguments to conventional
construction/writing of arguments.Makes a number of key pedagogical assertions based on the
study’s indings, suggesting a process approach for both multimodal and conventional writing,
drawing explicit links between multimodal and conventional texts, and troubling the view of
students as “digital natives,” as many do not typically compose using online tools.
Ioannou,A.,Vasiliou, C., & Zaphiris, P. (2016). Problem-based learning in multimodal learning
environments: Learners’ technology adoption experiences. Journal of Educational Computing
Research, 54, 1022–1040.
Employs a problem-based learning approach to teaching and learning within a human-computer
interaction course by enhancing the learning environment with common technologies typically
found in university classrooms (e.g., projectors, tablets, students’own smartphones, traditional
paper and pencil, and Facebook). Studies 60 postgraduate learners over a three-year period.
Finds that participants evaluated their learning experience positively on scales of communication
and interaction, relection, perceived learning, and satisfaction. Employs quantitative content
analysis to document how students made use of Facebook as a record-keeping and communi-
cation tool. Concludes that the utilization of Facebook was fundamental to the problem-based
learning process.
Kimmons, R., Darragh, J. J., Haruch, A., & Clark, B. (2017). Essay composition across media:
A quantitative comparison of 8th grade student essays composed with paper vs. Chrome-
books. Computers and Composition, 44, 13–26.
Investigates emergent media utilized for student essay composition with regard to quantiiable
text indicators. Compares a set of eighth-grade student essays (collected from students at three

schools) composed via Chromebooks (n = 139) with those written by hand (n = 319). Finds
that Chromebook essays were commonly lengthier than handwritten essays and displayed a
notably higher grade-level of writing (i.e., more advanced language and grammar). Yields new
knowledge with regard to writing complexity and also proposes that the medium itself may
inluence the complexity of student writing.
Lee, C. H., & Soep, E. (2016). None but ourselves can free our minds: Critical computational
literacy as a pedagogy of resistance. Equity & Excellence in Education, 49, 480–492.
Asks how learning with technology can advance the skills-based goals advocated in traditional
educational programming,alongside goals of social justice and civic participation for youth who
have been marginalized through racial, economic, and other kinds of structural inequalities.
Explains Lee’s framework of critical computational literacy,which combines critical literacy with
computer programming.Applies critical computational literacy to digital projects (radio,mobile,
and desktop apps) in a community organization, Youth Radio Innovation Lab. Argues that the
development of digital media apps (such as an interactive map about gentriication in Oakland,
California, highlighted in the article) entails deep analytic thinking. Identiies implications of
youth engagement in this complex and sustained analytic project for future participation in
both high-level academic and technology-based work/career settings.Urges continued attention
to the critical and transformative affordances of trans-media and digital projects for both the
youth creators and their audiences.
Rowsell, J., & Wohlwend, K. (2016). Free play or tight spaces? Mapping participatory literacies
in apps. Reading Teacher, 70, 197–205.
Builds upon research on the use of app maps. Pushes for app evaluative practices to include
participatory literacies. Draws from North American elementary school studies on students’
technology play with iPads. Compares four common literacy practices with apps: practicing a
skill,reading an e-book,animating a ilm,and designing an interactive world.Introduces a rubric
and radar chart to help teachers evaluate and imagine educational apps’ potential to cultivate
six dimensions of participatory literacies: multiplayer interaction, productivity, multimodality,
multilinearity, pleasurableness, and connectedness.
Saunders, J. M. (2013). Life inside the Hive: Creating a space for literacy to grow. Journal of
Language and Literacy Education, 9(2), 94–109.
Investigates how a virtual igured world is constructed and maintained by a ifth-grade teacher
and her students within an online site.Analyzes the virtual igured world of “The Hive Society”
via excerpts from the website, photographs of class and school events, and observational data
of teaching and learning within the Hive. Finds that through the integration of twenty-irst-
century technological tools, the students were positioned as scholars and critical thinkers who
engaged with technology in inventive ways and aided each other’s learning. Recommends more
research that explores teachers using multimedia, technology, and virtual practices within
classroom literacy practices.
Shamir-Inbal,T.,& Blau,I.(2016).Developing digital wisdom by students and teachers.Journal
of Educational Computing Research, 54, 967–996.
Studies the impact of tablet computers on teaching and learning. Follows a pilot integration
of tablets among ifth-grade students, both in the classroom and in an extracurricular setting.
Finds that results were most promising in situations when mobile learning was part of the
curriculum design. Notes that teachers in the study experienced the tablets as limited in their
technical capabilities in comparison with laptops, a inding consistent with earlier research
on the use of personal mobile devices, including tablets. Uses a technological pedagogical and
content knowledge framework (referred to as TPACK) to reine ive desirable qualities of mobile
learning: apps/tools that extend learning, opportunities for creative work, increased modes for

participation and collaboration, and ability to gain and share knowledge through expanding
the borders of the classroom. Draws on the notion of “digital wisdom” to suggest that teachers
integrating any new technology should seek to promote excellence in teaching and learning while
also contributing to the technical/digital capabilities and experience of students.
Vossoughi,S.,Hooper,P. K.,& Escudé,M.(2016).Making through the lens of culture and power:
Toward transformative visions for educational equity.Harvard Educational Review, 86, 206–232.
Critiques culturally normative deinitions of making practices and the uncritical implementation
of maker practices into the educational ield.Reviews multiple perspectives on maker pedagogi-
cal designs within educational settings. Analyzes qualitative data gathered from the Tinkering
Afterschool Program. Introduces a framework that includes the following tenets as preliminary
points for equity-oriented pedagogy and research: critical analyses of educational injustice;
historicized approaches to making as a cross-cultural activity; explicit attention to pedagogical
philosophies and practices; and ongoing inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes
of making. Argues that pedagogical designs guided by these principles will be more receptive
to the histories, needs, and experiences of marginalized students. Calls for more research that
theorizes agentive teaching and learning opportunities within makerspaces.
Warner, J. (2016). Adolescents’ dialogic composing with mobile phones. Journal of Literacy
Research, 48, 164–191.
Explores mobile phone–based composing practices among“mainstream”adolescents,speciically
those who are regular users of social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. Stresses
the importance of studying youth who have not been successful in their traditional academic
composing/literacy learning, as research has tended to focus on the less widespread practices
of “exceptional” youth (e.g., bloggers, or writers of fan iction). Uses connective ethnography
to follow the utterances of youth across online and off-line spaces. Drawing on Bakhtin, inds
that participants’ mobile phone–based composing practices were dialogic and heteroglossic,
were multimodal (using photos instead of or in addition to alphabetic text), and demonstrated
a nuanced awareness of and response to audience in the curation of an online identity.Considers
the enthusiasm and skill of these participants in their smartphone productions, and proposes
an expanded deinition of composition for school settings.
West, J., & Saine, P. (2017). The mentored multigenre project: Fostering authentic writing
interactions between high school writers and teacher candidates. Journal of Adolescent & Adult
Literacy, 60, 629–641.
Examines the inluence of a learning management system,Edmodo,to facilitate writing partner-
ships between high school writers and teacher candidates. Outlines the ways in which teachers
prepared and supported the high school students during the project. Provides an illustrative
case study of one high school writer’s virtual collaborative writing experience and evaluates
the extent to which it created authentic writing. Concludes with relections and suggestions
for others seeking to use learning management systems to connect high school writers with
teacher candidates.
Wilson, J.(2017).Associated effects of automated essay evaluation software on growth in writing
quality for students with and without disabilities. Reading and Writing, 30, 691–718.
Sounds a warning about the state of writing instruction in the United States,pointing to statistics
that show only a third of students in grades K–12 meet or exceed grade-level writing proiciency
standards. Talks about the need for more practice and feedback throughout the complex task of
writing,especially for students with disabilities (SWDs).Proposes addressing this need through
use of the Project Essay Grade (PEG) system of automated essay evaluation software,which gives
immediate feedback on writing. Analyzes the effects of PEG when implemented at a statewide
level, using data from 1,196 students in grades 4–8, with participant samples divided between

students with disabilities and “typically developing” students, among other factors. Claims sig-
niicant growth for SWDs in the drafting process, especially on higher-level writing revisions.
Finds little evidence of transfer of learning based on measured improvement in participants’irst
drafts for a different writing prompt.Makes a case for SWDs to have automated essay evaluation
software for writing improvement,exploring questions about fairness in access to quality digital
tools and correlation of school quality classiications (excelling,progressing,transitioning,etc.)
with initial writing strength and rate of growth, especially for SWDs.
Other Related Research
Amicucci, A. N. (2017). Rhetorical choices in Facebook discourse: Constructing voice and
persona. Computers and Composition, 44, 36–51.
Ayotte, L., & Collins, C. (2017). Using short videos to enhance reading and writing in the ELA
curriculum. English Journal, 106(3), 19–24.
Bassford, M. L., Crisp, A., O’Sullivan, A., Bacon, J., & Fowler, M. (2016). CrashEd—A live im-
mersive, learning experience embedding STEM subjects in a realistic, interactive crime scene.
Research in Learning Technology, 24, 1–14.
Gerber, H. R., & Lynch, T. L. (2017). Into the meta: Research methods for moving beyond social
media surfacing. TechTrends, 61, 263–272.
Johnson, L., & Kendrick, M. (2017). “Impossible is nothing”: Expressing dificult knowledge
through digital storytelling. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 667–675.
Kyei-Blankson,L.,Iyer,K.S.,& Subramanian,L.(2016).Social networking sites:College students’
patterns of use and concerns for privacy and trust by gender, ethnicity, and employment sta-
tus.International Journal of Information and CommunicationTechnology Education,12(4),62–75.
Lackovic,N.,Kerry,R.,Lowe,R.,& Lowe,T.(2017).Being knowledge,power and profession sub-
ordinates:Students’perceptions of Twitter for learning.Internet and Higher Education,33, 41–48.
Mangen,A.,& Weel,A.(2016).The evolution of reading in the age of digitisation:An integrative
framework for reading research. Literacy, 50, 116–124.
Rodrigo,R.,& Romberger,J.(2017).Managing digital technologies in writing programs:Writing
program technologists & invisible service. Computers and Composition, 44, 67–82.
Discourse/Narrative Analysis/Cultural Difference
As in recent years, we cast a wide net to identify articles for this list. Beginning with an exhaustive
review of top journals that publish work in these areas, we identified strong research by authors
writing from diverse standpoints on a wide range of topics, highlighting methodologies and episte-
mologies that center youth and other marginalized voices. We took note that while much research
was published that could be considered for inclusion in this category, our list became too repetitive
if we included each piece; thus, the articles abstracted and listed below reflect what we consider to
be the strongest contributions to ongoing conversations in educational literature and practice. (Ann
Mogush Mason, lead contributor)
Berchini, C. (2016). Structuring contexts: Pathways toward un-obstructing race-consciousness.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29, 1030–1044.
Examines the presence and role of race consciousness for a novice English teacher while she
navigates and evaluates an inherited curriculum and her own racialized identity. Through a
detailed case-study analysis, this article challenges common and oversimpliied generalizations
of White teacher identity and engagement with an antiracist pedagogy by suggesting that race
consciousness is a complicated, nuanced, and never-ending developmental process. In two key

episodes,critical obstructions—curricular and discursive—to race consciousness are illuminated
within an English language arts unit on the Holocaust. Calls for an ELA curriculum that identi-
ies and examines structural oppression,as well as teacher education that critically considers the
ways in which context and curriculum obstruct teachers’ racialized consciousness.
Butler,T.(2017).“We need a song”: Sustaining critical youth organizing literacies through world
humanities. Equity & Excellence in Education, 50, 84–95.
Examines critical youth organizing literacies in a ninth-grade world humanities classroom
while engaged in social justice capstone projects. Drawing from critical literacies and youth
organizing, the students crossed the physical and metaphorical borders of scholar-researcher-
youth to collaborate on a revolutionary music/song project. Youth organizing literacies about
social issues such as sex-traficking were mobilized and strengthened by using popular culture
through a process that included dialogue and critical analysis of music lyrics and videos.Results
indicate that such school projects help transform the consciousness of students,prompting them
to consider their investment in social justice, their communities, and each other, as well as the
roles they choose to play in making social change.
Crampton, A. E. (2016). Emergent student practices: Unintended consequences in a dialogic,
collaborative classroom. Journal of Educational Controversy, 11(1), 1–23.
Uses activity systems analysis and narrative discourse analysis to explore dialogic pedagogical
practices in a middle school classroom.Shows how middle school students operated within and
beyond discrete academic disciplines, exploring both stereotypes and their complex racialized
identities while also navigating social power dynamics within the setting. Critiques popular
notions of “best practices,” situating this concept as part of larger movements toward stan-
dardization. Offers careful consideration of both teacher practice and student practice, each in
relationship with the other.
Johnson, L., & Bryan, N. (2017). Using our voices, losing our bodies: Michael Brown, Trayvon
Martin, and the spirit murders of Black male professors in the academy. Race Ethnicity and
Education, 20, 163–177.
Analyzes the metaphorical and physical killings of Black males in the United States as they relate
to the development and retention of Black males in the academy. Uses critical race theory to
illuminate racial microaggressions in predominantly White institutions and teacher education
programs, and how they contribute to the spirit-murdering, or metaphorical killing, of Black
males in education spaces where they are underrepresented. Through a text-messaging per-
formative writing method, inds that Black males in teacher education classrooms experience
silencing, rejections, and disrespect from students and colleagues. Calls teacher educators to
consider their identity, their pedagogy, student’s racial knowledge, and the ways these factors
affect the lives of Black males in and out of the academy.
Joubert, E., Ortlieb, E., & Majors, Y. (2017). Reading things not seen: A relection on teaching
reading,race,and ghosts in juvenile detention.Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 5, 581–584.
Examines the presence of ghosts in an integrated reading curriculum for juvenile detainees.
Analyzes the perpetual narratives of racial violence and death in the curricular texts to ques-
tion how they were used as a means to teach freedom and justice. Using teacher self-study and
participatory observations, identiies the potential of racial ghosts as a means to read the world
in critical and relective ways. Concludes that reading with ghosts helps teachers and students
evaluate the function of loss,suffering,and injustice as they appear in relevant and social justice
reading curriculum.
Kovinthan, T. (2016). Learning and teaching with loss: Meeting the needs of refugee children
through narrative inquiry. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 10, 141–155.

Uses narrative inquiry as a critical tool to examine one student’s refugee experience and how
teachers are prepared to meet the needs of refugee students. Posits that through the power of
narrative and self-relection, teachers themselves can become theory makers.Analyzes personal
history accounts from a student and a beginning teacher to highlight the inadequacies of uncriti-
cal multicultural approaches to authentically acknowledge, include, and serve refugee students.
Identiies key gaps in knowledge that prevent teachers from more mindfully bridging refugee
students’ schooling and lived experiences.
Mart́nez, R. A. (2017). “Are you gonna show this to white people?”: Chicana/o and Latina/o
students’ counter-narratives on race, place, and representation. Race Ethnicity and Education,
20, 101–116.
Uses discourse analysis to explore Chicanx and Latinx middle school students’ presentations
of counter-stories that resist dominant narratives about their racialized and classed identities.
Speciically addresses the way youth participants acknowledge, critique, and challenge their
perception of White people to tell and understand stories about their community. Draws on
critical race theory in analyses of verbal conversations among 5 sixth graders in whichWhiteness
is either explicitly or implicitly named as a driver of these dominant narratives. Part of a larger
study exploring language and ideology in a sixth-grade English language arts classroom in East
Los Angeles. Includes a careful discussion about researcher subjectivity and identiies implica-
tions that center the experiences and self-authorship capabilities of young people.
Ohito, E. O. (2016). Refusing curriculum as a space of death for black female subjects: A black
feminist reparative reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” Curriculum Inquiry, 46, 436–454.
Illuminates the ways in which curriculum (and curriculum theorizing) is designed and perpetu-
ated in ways that dehumanize and terrorize Black students. Through analysis of the work of
Black feminists who theorize what it means to be human, a framework for reparative reading is
constructed that attends to the humanity of Black women and girls. Modeling the framework
with Kincaid’s “Girl,” the article shows how this lens can disrupt and decenter the Western sta-
tus quo of Whiteness while also positioning Black women and girls as powerful, complex, and
agentic.This frame offers an exemplar for educators to examine systems of knowledge and ways
of reading by critically questioning the dehumanizing tendencies of dominant epistemologies.
San Pedro, T., Carlos, E., & Mburu, J. (2016). Critical listening and storying: Fostering respect
for difference and action within and beyond a Native American literature classroom. Urban
Education, 52, 667–693.
Draws from a co-created community discussion group with urban high school youth taking a
Native American literature course. Leaning on Indigenous methods and humanizing research,
analyzes storying and critical listening between the identities of researcher/participant and
student/professor using Projects in Humanization. Relying on the co-construction of knowl-
edge and relection, inds that use of storying as a pedagogical tool enabled the community
discussion group to (1) examine colonization and (2) re-story history and knowledge of Native
Americans. Concludes that humanizing approaches help develop a sense of interconnectedness
that acknowledges and includes all voices.
Tierney, J. D. (2017). The laughing truth: Race and humor in a documentary ilmmaking class.
Knowledge Cultures, 5(3), 38–46.
Explores the work of three young men of different races who engaged together to produce a
documentary ilm about immigration in a high school English classroom. Draws upon Mikhail
Bakhtin’s writing on carnival to explore how these young men used laughter to play with racial
stereotypes in order to transform their meanings. Argues that their abuse rituals, which are
most often considered taboo and profane in classrooms, allowed for a dialogic exchange of
ideas, a possibility for closeness, and deep learning. Suggests that such embodied reactions

to dominant discourses may be central to engaged collaboration and ideological critique in
secondary classrooms.
Tintiangco-Cubales, A., Daus-Magbual, A., Desai, M., Sabac, A., & Von Torres, M. (2016). Into
our hoods: Where critical performance pedagogy births resistance. International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in Education, 29, 1308–1325.
Illustrates how the intersections of critical pedagogy, performance, ethnic studies, and youth
participatory action research provided unique opportunities for youth in a university district
partnership program to become knowledge producers, cultural critics, and activists for their
own neighborhoods. The curriculum of this program empowered students to develop a criti-
cal consciousness, examine systemic oppression, and use theater as a way to engage in critical
dialogue for the purpose of social change. Examines the positive impacts of the program on
both students and teachers,as well as the challenges of implementing such a program.Although
rooted in an ethnic studies curriculum, the article identiies the crucial need for all teachers to
consider the overwhelmingly positive outcomes of a critical performance pedagogy.
Williamson, T. (2017). Listening to many voices: Enacting social justice literacy curriculum.
Teaching and Teacher Education, 61, 104–114.
Analyzes the negotiations one English language arts teacher makes between her personal beliefs,
which are rooted in social justice pedagogy, and an ELA curriculum mired in the politics and
policies of an urban school district. Using critical discourse and Bakhtinian analyses of inter-
views with the ELA teacher participant, the study identiies conlicts rooted in the assumptions
that language is understood universally and that social justice organizations envision justice
universally. Barriers to realizing a social justice pedagogy within ELA included collegial beliefs
in “following the rules” (adhering to the traditional canon), the challenge of accessing diverse
materials representative of students’ lived experiences, authority policy and ideology that con-
licted with a social justice pedagogy, and historical and political beliefs favoring a traditional
approach to ELA.
Burgard, K. L., & Boucher, M. L. (2016). Same story, different history: Students’ racialized un-
derstanding of historic sites. Urban Review, 48, 696–717.
Donaldson, M. L., LeChasseur, K., & Mayer, A. (2017). Tracking instructional quality across
secondary mathematics and English language arts classes. Journal of Educational Change, 18,
183–207.
Fine, M., Greene, C., & Sanchez, S. (2016). Neoliberal blues and prec(ar)ious knowledge. Urban
Review, 48, 499–519.
Helmer, K. (2016). Reading queer counter-narratives in the high-school literature classroom:
Possibilities and challenges. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37, 902–916.
Kleyn, T. (2017). Centering transborder students: Perspectives on identity, languaging and
schooling between the U.S. and Mexico. Multicultural Perspectives, 19, 76–84.
Love, B. L. (2016). Complex personhood of hip hop & the sensibilities of the culture that fosters
knowledge of self & self-determination. Equity & Excellence in Education, 49, 414–427.
Lozenski, B. D. (2017). Beyond mediocrity: The dialectics of crisis in the continuing mis-
education of black youth. Harvard Educational Review, 87, 161–185.
Mason,A. M. (2017). Storying a social drama: How discourse and practice prevent transforma-
tion through culturally relevant pedagogy. Multicultural Perspectives, 19, 26–34.
Meiners, E. R. (2017). The problem child: Provocations toward dismantling the carceral state.
Harvard Educational Review, 87, 122–146.

Price-Dennis, D., Holmes, K., & Smith, E. E. (2016). “I thought we were over this problem”:
Explorations of race in/through literature inquiry.Equity & Excellence in Education,49, 314–335.
Sonu, D. (2016). Forgotten memories of a social justice education: Dificult knowledge and the
impossibilities of school and research. Curriculum Inquiry, 46, 473–490.
Literacy
In selecting our articles, we looked for research that addressed literacy as a whole, rather than studies
specific to reading and writing. We searched for research in a wide range of age groups, including
early childhood, upper elementary, middle school, and adult literacy. Priority was given to studies
of middle and high school–aged students that addressed teaching literacy in the content areas, such
as science and social studies. Trends in literacy research this year included studies in vocabulary,
alphabetic knowledge, and phonological awareness. (Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr, lead contributor)
Apel,K.,& Henbest,V.S.(2016).Afix meaning knowledge in irst through third grade students.
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 47, 148–156.
Examines grade-level differences in irst through third grade on an experimenter-developed afix
meaning task and determines whether afix meaning explains unique variances in word-level
reading and reading comprehension. Forty students at each grade level were given a battery of
assessments that included phonological awareness, reading comprehension, receptive vocabu-
lary, word-level reading, and afix meaning knowledge. First-grade students were signiicantly
less accurate than second- and third-grade students in the afix meaning task. There was no
signiicant difference in the performance of second and third graders on the afix meaning task.
Regression analysis shows that afix meaning accounted for 8% of unique variance in word-level
reading and 6% of unique variance in reading comprehension. Concludes that afix meaning
knowledge contributes to development of reading abilities.
Aram, D., Meidan, I. C., & Deitcher, D. B. (2016). A comparison between homeschooled and
formally schooled kindergartners: Children’s early literacy,mothers’beliefs,and writing media-
tion. Reading Psychology, 37, 995–1024.
Analyzes differences in early literacy and maternal beliefs of 60 kindergartners, half of whom
were homeschooled.Using t-tests,the authors determine that formally schooled kindergartners
outperformed homeschooled kindergartners on letter naming and name writing, and that the
two groups scored similarly on phonological awareness and word writing.Analysis of maternal
beliefs indicates that parents of the formally schooled kindergarten students held higher expecta-
tions for behavior at school and held learning activities in higher regard when compared with
parents of homeschooled kindergartners.
Cassano, C. M., & Steiner, L. (2016). Exploring assessment demands and task supports in early
childhood phonological awareness assessments. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice,
65(1), 217–235.
Examines variations in demands of tasks of the seven commonly used phonological awareness
assessments for young children. Analysis was conducted in two tiers; irst tier: the age, grade
range, subtests, purpose of the assessments; second tier: the linguistic unit, task operation, re-
sponse mode, task support, vocabulary and language demand. Finds that variation in response
format and task support are likely to increase or decrease the complexity of the task; therefore
may not accurately relect students’ phonological skills.
Colwell, J., & Reinking, D. (2016). A formative experiment to align middle-school history in-
struction with literacy goals. Teachers College Record, 118(12), 1–42.
Examines one 8th-grade teacher’s pedagogy aligning history with literacy goals of the Com-

mon Core State Standards by engaging in a formative experiment where 25 students analyzed
primary and secondary sources and wrote blogs that were read and responded to by preservice
social studies teachers. Disciplinary literacy and critical perspectives, such as Questioning the
Author (QtA), framed the study. Researchers follow the teacher’s lead and use teacher and
student interviews, observations, video recordings, focus group discussions, and blog posts to
inform modiications throughout the 10-week intervention. Graphic organizers as intentional
instructional strategies were developed to support students in their critical readings of texts,
particularly source validity,author bias,and making intertextual connections.Finds that,though
the teacher was initially reluctant to depart from established instructional approaches,her belief
in the importance of aligning history and literacy, and her observation of students’engagement
and capabilities, led to successful and integral literacy pedagogy, resulting in deeper discussions
and more purposeful reading and relective blogging by students.
Copeland, S. R., McCord, J.A., & Kruger,A. (2016).A review of literacy interventions for adults
with extensive needs for supports. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 173–184.
Reviewed 17 peer-reviewed studies to determine practices effective for supporting adults with
extensive literacy learning needs. Findings showed that studies typically combined more than
one strategy to design interventions and many of the same strategies effective with children
yielded literacy gains across adulthood, though instructors should realize that interests, prior
experiences and literacy goals will be different for adults.Implications included the need for those
instructing adults to teach for comprehension, include writing instruction, teach for transfer,
and receive training on needs of adult literacy learners.
Delicia, T. G. (2016).“We need more‘US’in schools!!”: Centering black adolescent girls’literacy
and language practices in online school spaces. Journal of Negro Education, 85, 274–289.
Investigates the literacy and language participation of six Black adolescent girls in an out-of-
school online street literature book club. Employs critical discourse analysis to examine how
contexts inluence the way Black girls construct their digital literacy identities through the reading
and discussion of street literature texts.Suggests that online book club discussions around street
literature texts serve as a safe place for Black girls to represent self and construct their identities.
Dobbs, C. L., Ippolito, J., & Charner-Laird, M. (2016). Layering intermediate and disciplinary
literacy work: Lessons learned from a secondary social studies teacher team.Journal of Adolescent
& Adult Literacy, 60, 131–139.
Explores how a team of high school social studies teachers made sense of new disciplinary literacy
instructional practices and how they fostered disciplinary and intermediate literacy in their
students (e.g.,making predictions,asking clarifying questions).Participant-observer researchers
collaborated with the team by providing professional development and research guidance as
they worked through inquiry cycles of administering student assessments, meeting collabora-
tively, and determining and implementing instructional practices. Over two years, researchers
collected data on teachers’practices and their experiences in the professional learning situations
through observations, focus groups, written narratives, and interviews. Finds that disciplinary
literacy instruction alone was inadequate, as students needed a combination of disciplinary
and intermediate literacy instruction, and teachers met students’ evolving needs by lexibly
incorporating both. Concludes that inquiry cycles were essential to successful implementation,
and that professional development should incorporate how teachers can be lexible with literacy
instruction to meet students’ needs.
Goldstein, H., Olszewski,A., Haring, C., Greenwood, C. R., McCune, L., Carta, J., . . . Kelley, E. S.
(2017).Eficacy of a supplemental phonemic awareness curriculum to instruct preschoolers with
delays inearly literacy development. Journal of Speech,LanguageandHearingResearch,60, 89–103.

Investigates a supplemental phonological awareness curriculum (PAth to Literacy) with
preschool-age children demonstrating a delay in early literacy skills. A cluster random sample
of 104 students in 39 classrooms was selected to determine the eficacy of PAth to Literacy. A
vocabulary intervention served as the comparison intervention. Children in the experimental
group demonstrated signiicant gains on literacy assessments: Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early
Literacy Skills (DIBELS),First Sound Fluency,and Word Part Fluency measures.Finds that 82%
of students in the experimental group met the kindergarten benchmark for First Sound Flu-
ency, compared with only 34% in the control group. Concludes that the majority of students
demonstrating early literacy delays in preschool may beneit from a supplemental phonological
awareness curriculum.
Howard, C. H. (2016). Creating spaces for literacy, creating spaces for learning. Reading Hori-
zons, 55(2), 26–44.
Explores how and why a sixth-grade social studies teacher in a high-poverty middle school
integrated questioning, reading, and writing to support students’ content-area learning in a
unit on culture. The case study incorporated interviews, observations, and document review.
Regular opportunities for students to engage in literacy included strategically posed questions
to promote discussion and process readings, use of a variety of texts beyond the textbook to
encourage reading lexibility and making connections, and writing throughout the unit to re-
lect upon and apply knowledge. These combined strategies helped students experience deeper,
sustained interactions with texts, develop their thinking and knowledge in social studies, and
practice literacy skills.Recommends professional development to support content-area teachers,
since integrating literacy practices is multifaceted and requires intentional planning.
Justice, L. M., Logan, J.A. R., Işsitan, S., & Saçkes, M. (2016). The home-literacy environment of
young children with disabilities. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 37, 131–139.
Analyzes differences in literacy practices between parents of preschool children with and without
disabilities. Parents of 618 preschool-aged children completed a survey on their home-literacy
environment, and results were compared with early-literacy skills questionnaires completed
by students’ teachers. Children without disabilities showed more interest in print than those
with disabilities, even though parents read and provided teaching opportunities equally often
in both groups.
Kok-Sing, T. (2016). How is disciplinary literacy addressed in the science classroom? A Singa-
porean case study. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 39, 220–232.
Explores the pedagogy of two physics and two chemistry teachers in two Singapore high schools
to better understand current disciplinary literacy practices,compared with anticipated disciplin-
ary literacy goals, as baseline observations in the irst phase of a research project. Finds that the
most frequent literacy event in each of the four classes was whole-class talk, lecture being most
dominant. Though teachers used a variety of interactions in lectures, the initiate-response-
evaluate (I-R-E) pattern was most common and was often used to implicitly teach science
disciplinary language, privileging the teacher’s thinking process over the students’. Teachers
also used conjunctions to establish causal relationships between concepts, which embedded the
logic of the explanations in the teachers’ questions rather than the students’ answers. Because
conjunctions were used implicitly and not explained to students, logical scientiic explanations
were unclear to most students. Suggests that teachers should teach rhetorical explanation, ex-
plicitly teach disciplinary language, and employ instruction beyond the I-R-E pattern, and that
building on their existing implicit teaching of disciplinary literacy is the most practical way to
support teachers in shifting toward a more explicit approach.
Lwin, S. M. (2016). It’s story time! Exploring the potential of multimodality in oral storytelling
to support children’s vocabulary learning. Literacy, 50, 72–82.

Investigates professional storytellers’ oral discourse to support students’ vocabulary learning.
Storytellers’oral discourse was analyzed to examine the vocal and visual features accompanying
words unlikely to be known by the children that were used for representations of events and
characters. Explores how these multimodal features in storytellers’ discourse support students’
inferential skills. Explains that storytellers can strategically use speciic types of voice modula-
tions as important vocal and visual clues for children to make inferences about the meaning of
words while they follow the unfolding storyline.
Sandretto,S.,& Tilson,J.(2016).Complicating understandings of students’multiliterate practices
with practitioner inquiry. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 63–70.
Investigates the effects of practitioner inquiry into the multiliteracies of students aged 11–13
and the ability of teachers to create new knowledge countering the “in school” versus “out of
school” literacy binary. Methods employed in the two-year project were multiliteracy profes-
sional development for 19 teachers from 7 New Zealand schools; pre/post interviews; videos of
multiliteracy lessons; and teachers collaboratively sharing research results. Each teacher studied
one student’s literacies through interviews with students and families, work samples, classroom
observations,and standardized assessment tools.Teachers’preconceived notions about students’
involvement with traditional and nontraditional literacies were found to be incorrect,afirming
that practitioner inquiry is a powerful process to challenge assumptions and deicit thinking.
Deeply researching one student expanded teachers’ concepts of students’ multiliteracies while
broadening their own understandings of literacy.Cautions that although the variety of students’
literacies and text structures could cause teachers to remain within traditional instructional
practices, it is necessary to trouble traditional literacy pedagogy.
Selvaggi,T.(2016).Principal and literacy coach: Collaboration and goal alignment. Delta Kappa
Gamma Bulletin, 82(3), 1–8.
Investigates the collaboration of principals and literacy coaches at the elementary level using a
survey of their attitudes, beliefs, and interactions. Finds that literacy coaches are instrumental
in improving school-wide literacy instruction and work collaboratively in helping to achieve
instructional goals in literacy.Concludes that the work of the literacy coach is important because
it is effective in promoting professional development and strengthening instructional practices
in classrooms.
Wexler, J., Mitchell, M. A., Clancy, E. E., & Silverman, R. D. (2017). An investigation of literacy
practices in high school science classrooms. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33, 258–277.
Explores literacy practices of 10 high school science teachers. Analyzes text, evidence-based
vocabulary, comprehension practices, and grouping practices. Finds that teachers rarely used
expository text or provided vocabulary and comprehension instruction, and mainly utilized
whole-class instruction and independent work.Concludes that science teachers are supportive of
integrating literacy practices into science lessons,but they perceive barriers to accomplishing this.
Alvarez,S.(2017).Brokering literacies: Child language brokering in Mexican immigrant families.
Community Literacy Journal, 11(2), 1–15.
Bernadowski, C. (2016). I can’t evn get why she would make me rite in her class. Middle School
Journal, 47(4), 3–14.
Bernard Hall,H.(2016).“Welcome to The Shop”:Insights and relections from teaching hip-hop-
based spoken word poetry for social justice.EnglishTeaching: Practice & Critique,15(3),394–410.
Ford-Connors, E., & Robertson, D. A. (2017). What do I say next? Using the third turn to build
productive instructional discussions. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61, 131–139.
Gallagher, S. A. (2017). Exploring the eficacy of the word within the word for gifted and typi-
cally developing students. Roeper Review, 39(2), 96–111.

Jones, C. D., Clark, S. K., & Reutzel, D. R. (2016). Teaching text structure: Examining the affor-
dances of children’s informational texts. Elementary School Journal, 117, 143–169.
MacDonald, M. T. (2017). “My little English”: A case study of decolonial perspectives on dis-
course in an after-school program for refugee youth. Community Literacy Journal, 11(2), 16–29.
Neuman, S. B., Kaefer, T., & Pinkham,A. M. (2016). Improving low-income preschoolers’ word
and world knowledge: The effects of content-rich instruction. Elementary School Journal, 116,
652–674.
O’Byrne, I. W., & Pytash, K. E. (2017). Becoming literate digitally in a digitally literate environ-
ment of their own. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 499–504.
Saracho, O. N. (2017). Parents’ shared storybook reading – learning to read. Early Child Devel-
opment and Care, 187, 554–567.
Shaw,D.,Perry,K.H.,Ivanyuk,L.,& Tham,S.(2017).Who researches functional literacy? Com-
munity Literacy Journal, 11(2), 43–64.
Swanson, E., Wanzek, J., McCulley, L., Stillman-Spisak, S., Vaughn, S., Simmons, D., . . . Hair-
rell, A. (2016). Literacy and text reading in middle and high school social studies and English
language arts classrooms. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 32, 199–222.
Tambyraja, S. R., Schmitt, M. B., Farquharson, K., & Justice, L. M. (2017). Home literacy envi-
ronment proiles of children with language impairment: Associations with caregiver and child-
speciic factors. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 52, 238–249.
Xu,Y., & De Arment, S. (2017). The effects of summer school on early literacy skills of children
from low-income families. Early Child Development and Care, 187, 89–98.
Literary Response/Literature/Narrative
Research on literary response and literature published in the past year affirms the field’s commitment
to developing robust and nuanced understandings of the ways in which children’s and young adult
literature depicts the experiences of protagonists from historically underrepresented and marginal-
ized backgrounds. Further, these studies provide useful critiques of the dominance of depiction of the
White, middle-class experiences in such texts. Studies highlighted this year also focus on multimodal
and digital elements of texts (apps,images,graphic elements,maps,etc.),pinpointing the interpretive
affordances of such textual elements. Articles selected for inclusion in this section include a range of
US and international studies with a variety of innovative methodologies for both content analysis
and reader response. (Amanda Haertling Thein, lead contributor)
Aukerman, M., & Schuldt, C. L. (2016).“The pictures can say more things”: Change across time
in young children’s references to images and words during text discussion. Reading Research
Quarterly, 51, 267–287.
Analyzes nine discussion transcripts to examine second graders’ explicit references to images
versus linguistic content during discussions across a school year. Finds that students mostly
referenced images early in the year, shifting across time toward greater referencing of linguistic
content. However, less proicient decoders referenced linguistic content less frequently than did
more proicient decoders. Supports an expanded conception of early literacy pedagogy that
encourages students’ talk with one another about multimodal dimensions of text.
Berchini, C. (2016). Curriculum matters: The Common Core, authors of color, and inclusion
for inclusion’s sake. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 55–62.
Examines the positioning of “The White Umbrella” (a short story about a second-generation
Chinese American experience) within a Prentice Hall Literature ELA textbook. Uses critical
discourse analysis to call forth thematic features of the short story and interpret the story’s

positioning within the textbook. Finds that the textbook emphasizes comprehension questions
and skills associated with close reading.Argues that such positioning does not encourage readers
to meaningfully engage with themes emerging from the story, such as race, culture, stereotypes,
and the“American”experience.Concludes that curricular inclusion of stories that highlight social
and cultural themes is not enough to substantively engage readers in those themes.
Clark, C., & Blackburn, M. (2016). Scenes of violence and sex in recent award-winning LGBT-
themed young adult novels and the ideologies they offer their readers. Discourse: Studies in the
Cultural Politics of Education, 37, 867–886.
Examines LGBT-inclusive and queering discourses in ive recent award-winning LGBT-themed
young adult books, focusing on scenes of violence and sex/love scenes. Finds that violent scenes
either implied that LGBT people are the victims of violence-fueled hatred and fear, or, in some
cases, showed a gay person asserting agency by imposing violence on a violent homophobe. By
contrast, sex and/or love scenes offered more nuanced messages about LGBT people. Argues
that teachers and librarians must understand the discourses that shape LGBT-themed literature
in order to help students navigate such texts. This paper is part of a themed issue of Discourse:
Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education focused on “Queer and trans perspectives on teach-
ing LGBT-themed text in schools.”
Crisp, T., Knezek, S. M., Quinn, M., Bingham, G. E., Girardeau, K., & Starks, F. (2016). What’s
on our bookshelves? The diversity of children’s literature in early childhood classroom libraries.
Journal of Children’s Literature, 42(2), 29–42.
Investigates representations of diversity in all books included in classroom libraries across 11
early childhood sites. Uses a preestablished codebook to examine depictions of multicultural or
diverse cultural identities in the 1,169 books,focusing on categories related to religion,socioeco-
nomic status and class, disabilities and developmental differences, sexual identity, gender, and
parallel cultures, as well as language, format, genre, and type of book. Finds a signiicant lack of
cultural diversity and language diversity across all categories explored. Suggests that educators
carefully consider the diversity of their classroom libraries.
Del Nero, J. R. (2017). Slaying monsters: Students’ aesthetic transactions with Gothic texts.
Reading Teacher, 70, 551–560.
Uses a case study and design-based research approach to examine seventh graders’ aesthetic
transactions with Gothic texts.Draws on ield notes,interview transcripts,and student artifacts.
Categorizes indings in terms of moments of meaningful connection (parallels between text
and real life) and imaginative contrasts (dissimilarities between text and real life). Documents
student reactions to Gothic themes, including death and destruction, powerlessness, normalcy,
rebellion, and lights of fantasy. Argues that students’ aesthetic transactions with texts should
be prioritized in literacy engagements.
Dentith, A. M., Sailors, M., & Sethusha, M. (2016). What does it mean to be a girl? Teachers’
representations of gender in supplementary reading materials for SouthAfrican schools.Journal
of Literacy Research, 48(4), 394–422.
Uses critical content analysis to examine books written by South African teachers for use in
elementary-aged classrooms. Takes up African feminism as a theoretical lens to understand
gender representations of female characters.Finds three themes: female characters are multifac-
eted, relationships matter to females, and females are valued members of society. Contends that
such gender representation is important for addressing signiicant gender inequities in South
Africa. Concludes by arguing for cross-national, cross-cultural dialogue examining how gender
representations emerge out of their larger political and social context.
Fischer, S. (2017). Reading with a crayon: Pre-conventional marginalia as reader response in
early childhood. Children’s Literature in Education, 48, 134–151.

Explores two very young children’s production of pre-conventional scribbles and drawings
in the margins of books using video data as documented evidence of intentionality. Suggests
that the marks made in books represent early forms of reader response, and that toddlers’ and
preschoolers’ earliest aesthetic responses to text are present in marginalia.
Gritter, K.,Van Duinen, D.V., Montgomery, K., Blowers, D., & Bishop, D. (2017). Boy troubles?
Male literacy depictions in Children’s Choice picture books. Reading Teacher, 70, 571–581.
Uses critical content analysis to examine Children’s Choice picture books. Draws on feminist
poststructuralist theory to theorize gender. Focuses on how male characters and their literacy
practices are portrayed. Finds within the data set a propensity for featuring male protagonists
who engage in literacy practices in nonschool environments over school environments; the
circulation of multiple male archetypes; and the tendency to highlight problem-solving through
literacy.Argues that teachers should address gender as a social and cultural construct to encour-
age critical readings in the classroom.
Howard, C. M., & Ryan, C. L. (2017). Black tween girls with black girl power: Reading models
of agency in Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer. Language Arts, 94, 170–179.
Uses descriptive content analysis methods to examine how Williams-Garcia establishes her
protagonist as a “tween” character who enacts agency in the various contexts of her life. Finds
that Williams-Garcia depicts her protagonist navigating two kinds of “betweenness”: her role
as a caretaker positioned between child and adult responsibilities, and her positioning between
two geographic/cultural locations in which she sees different models of Blackness. Argues that
“tween” texts like this one can help youth ind value in their experiences, models for a time of
transition, and empowerment to enact agency in the face of challenges.
Jacobs, K. E. B. (2016). The (untold) drama of the turning page: The role of page breaks in
understanding picture books. Children’s Literature in Education, 47, 357–373.
Analyzes young children’s conversations around page breaks in picture books using audiotaped
discussion from a series of read-aloud sessions held with children ages 5 to 8.Finds that children
in the study viewed page breaks as a purposeful aesthetic choice, and used the breaks to help
understand text and illustration relationships and dificult narrative gaps. Suggests that educa-
tors include explicit talk about page breaks during picture book read-alouds to help children’s
meaning-making.
Martinez, M., Stier, C., & Falcon, L. (2016). Judging a book by its cover: An investigation of
peritextual features in Caldecott award books. Children’s Literature in Education, 47, 225–241.
Examines several peritextual features in Caldecott award–winning books from 1938 to 2013 to
see how they help to develop the narrative. Finds that peritextual (outside of the main body
of text) features contained character and setting information and clues about genre. Recent
winning books often included critical plot elements only in the peritext. Urges educators to
help young readers explore peritextual features in order to develop greater understanding and
engagement with these books.
Rackley,E.D.(2016).Religious youths’motivations for reading complex,religious texts.Teachers
College Record, 118(11), 1–50.
Draws on nine months of ethnographic observation and 59 in-depth interviews to examine
Latter-day Saint and Methodist youths’ personal motivations for reading complex religious
texts.Finds that youth from both religious backgrounds were motivated to engage with complex
religious texts because they provide knowledge about religious traditions, tools for applying
religious knowledge to their lives, strength and comfort, and a connection to God. Argues that
a more robust understanding of youths’ engagement with complex religious texts provides
broader insights into reading motivation and textual engagement, as well as implications for
instruction on complex literary texts.

Rainey, E. C. (2017). Disciplinary literacy in English language arts: Exploring the social and
problem-based nature of literary reading and reasoning. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 53–71.
Investigates the disciplinary literacy practices and teaching approaches of 10 university-based
literary scholars who participated in semistructured interviews and verbal protocols with literary
iction. Findings pinpoint a set of six shared literary literacy practices that scholars use in their
work with literature. Suggests that disciplinary literacy instruction in these scholars’ academic
work with literature is fundamentally social and problem-based.
Sulzer, M. A., & Thein, A. H. (2016). Reconsidering the hypothetical adolescent in evaluating
and teaching young adult literature. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 163–171.
Analyzes 13 preservice teachers’ responses to familiar questions used to frame discussions of
young adult literature texts. Finds that these questions invite evaluations of young adult litera-
ture that are based on assumptions about hypothetical adolescent readers. Argues that such
evaluations naturalize a series of myths about the interests, needs, and capabilities of youth.
Concludes that understanding and addressing these myths beneits all involved in selecting
literature for youth readers.
Aliagas,C.,& Margallo,A.M.(2017).Children’s responses to the interactivity of storybook apps
in family shared reading events involving the iPad. Literacy, 51, 44–52.
Azano, A. P., Tackett, M., & Sigmon, M. (2017). Understanding the puzzle behind the pictures:
A content analysis of children’s picture books about autism. AERA Open, 3(2), 1–12.
Barone, D., & Barone, R. (2016).“Really,”“not possible,”“I can’t believe it”: Exploring informa-
tional text in literature circles. Reading Teacher, 70, 69–81.
Boerman-Cornell, W. (2016). The intersection of words and pictures: Second through fourth
graders read graphic novels. Reading Teacher, 70, 327–335.
Butler, R. R. (2016). Motor impairment in children’s literature: Asking the children. Children’s
Literature in Education, 47, 242–256.
Clark, K. F. (2017). Investigating the effects of culturally relevant texts on African American
struggling readers’ progress. Teachers College Record, 119(6), 1–30.
Colabucci, L., & Napoli, M. (2017). Beyond compassion? An analysis of the Jane Addams Chil-
dren’s Book Award. Journal of Children’s Literature, 43(1), 28–36.
Dempster, S., Oliver, A., Sudnerland, J., & Thistlethwaite, J. (2016). What has Harry Potter done
for me? Children’s relections on their “Potter experience.” Children’s Literature in Education,
47, 267–282.
Dunkerly-Bean, J., Bean, T. W., Sunday, K., & Summers, R. (2017). Poverty is two coins: Young
children read and draw social justice issues. Reading Teacher, 70, 679–688.
Gardner,R.P.(2017).Unforgivable Blackness:Visual rhetoric,reader response,and critical racial
literacy. Children’s Literature in Education, 48, 119–133.
Giovanelli, M. (2017). Readers building ictional worlds: Visual representations, poetry and
cognition. Literacy, 51, 26–35.
Keys, W., Marshall, E., & Pini, B. (2017). Representations of rural lesbian lives in young adult
iction. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38, 354–364.
Lemieux, A., & Lacelle, N. (2016). Mobilizing students’ interpretive resources: A novel take on
subjective response in the literature classroom. Language and Literacy, 18(3), 50–68.
McCreary,J.J.,& Marchant,G.J.(2017).Reading and empathy.Reading Psychology, 38, 182–202.
Meunier, C. (2017). The cartographic eye in children’s picturebooks: Between maps and narra-
tives. Children’s Literature in Education, 48, 21–38.

Parlevliet, S. (2016). Is that us? Dealing with the ‘Black’ pages of history in historical iction for
children (1996–2010). Children’s Literature in Education, 47, 343–356.
Parson, L. T. (2016). Storytelling in global children’s literature: Its role in the lives of displaced
child characters. Journal of Children’s Literature, 42(2), 19–27.
Riley, K., & Crawford-Garrett, K. (2016). Critical texts in literacy teacher education: Living
inquiries into racial justice and immigration. Language Arts, 94(2), 94–107.
Santori, D., & Belfatti, M. (2017). Do text-dependent questions need to be teacher-dependent?
Close reading from another angle. Reading Teacher, 70, 649–657.
Torres,H.J.(2016).On the margins: The depiction of Muslims in young children’s picturebooks.
Children’s Literature in Education, 47, 191–208.
Media Literacy
This section focuses on research related to uses of different types of media (television, news, movies,
digital/social media, and games); degrees of access to media; use of instruction in critical media
literacy to analyze media representations; and the effects of media use on people’s attitudes, behav-
ior, and learning processes. Priority was given to studies using large-scale databases to document
people’s particular uses of media and analyses of instructional methods and teacher preparation
programs relevant to developing critical media literacy instruction in English language arts. While
this section focuses on media literacy instruction to foster critical response to media and people’s
media use, and the“Digital/Technology Tools” section focuses on effects and benefits of using digital/
technology tools to support English language arts instruction, there remains some content overlap
between these two sections. (Richard Beach, lead contributor)
Barthel, M., Holcomb, J., Mahone, J., & Mitchell, A. (2016). Civic engagement strongly tied
to local news habits. Retrieved from Pew Research Center website: http://www.journalism.
org/2016/11/03/civic-engagement-strongly-tied-to-local-news-habits/
Describes survey results assessing 4,654 adults’ degree of civic engagement related to interest in
local news,use of alternative sources,and attitudes toward local news.Finds that the one-ifth of
US adults with high civic engagement in their communities have stronger connections to local
news than those with low civic engagement. Six in ten adults with high civic engagement follow
local news closely,compared with 27% of low-civic-engagement adults.High-civic-engagement
adults are also more likely to obtain news from three or more sources and to believe that their
local media keep them informed. Adults who vote in local elections and/or who know their
neighbors are more likely to follow local news than those who do not vote and/or who do not
know their neighbors.The 27% of adults who are actively engaged politically in local groups are
more likely to access local news, but only 22% approve of the work of local media.
Barthel, M., & Mitchell, A. (2017). Americans’ attitudes about the news media deeply divided
along partisan lines. Retrieved from Pew Research Center website: http://www.journalism.
org/2017/05/10/americans-attitudes-about-the-news-media-deeply-divided-along-partisan-
lines/
Reports on a survey of 4,151 US adults conducted in March 2017,inding large disparities based
on political party membership regarding views of the media’s role in covering politics. Demo-
crats were 47 points more likely than Republicans to indicate that the media should assume a
watchdog role to hold politicians accountable, a marked contrast from results of the same poll
in 2016, which found no differences according to party identiication. Of all adults surveyed,
40% followed national news closely, (an increase from 33% in 2016), 45% obtained news via
mobile device (with 65% obtaining news on a mobile device rather than a computer), and 15%
trusted news from family and friends (with 40% indicating that this news relects their family

members’ or friends’ political biases).
Breakstone, J., Fogo, B., McGrew, S., Ortega, T., Smith, M., & Wineburg, S. (2016). Evaluating
information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Retrieved from Stanford University,
Stanford History Education Group website: https://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/
Executive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf
Evaluates students’critical information literacy based on 7,804 responses to 56 assessment tasks
by students in 12 states, inding low levels of critical response to online information. Only 9%
of high school and college students looking for information about minimum wage policy and
employment rates on MinimumWage.com identiied the fact that the site was operated by a
Washington, DC lobbyist front group. More than 80% of middle school students believed that
a “sponsored” news report on a Slate magazine site was an actual news article. Less than 20%
of high school students adopted a critical response to a photo claiming to show lowers with
“nuclear birth defects” from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, with most students
ignoring the source of the photo. College students had dificulty analyzing the inluence of
groups with certain agendas in Twitter posts related to the issue of gun control. Suggests a need
for instruction on critical analysis of social media, particularly in terms of detecting informa-
tion sources and agendas.
Colby, R. S. (2017). Game-based pedagogy in the writing classroom. Computers and Composi-
tion, 43, 55–72.
Reports on interviews with teachers regarding their use of game-based pedagogy to teach writ-
ing. Teachers employ game-based pedagogy to help students learn to think rhetorically about
use of affordances and multimodal design for considering the uptake of texts across different
communities, use of different genres in writing, and fostering critical thinking.
Dubisar, A. M., Lattimer, C., Mayield, R., McGrew, M., Myers, J., Russell, B., & Thomas, J.
(2017). Haul, parody, remix: Mobilizing feminist rhetorical criticism with video. Computers
and Composition, 44, 52–66.
Six video projects created for an undergraduate class on the analysis of popular culture encour-
aged students to communicate their own intersectional identities and values through multimodal
assignments. Videos represented one of two categories: (1) media misrepresentation and rape
culture or (2) anti-capitalist criticism and feminist parody. The projects challenged, subverted,
or critically remixed mainstream power dynamics,and facilitated students’discourse on feminist
rhetorical criticism.
Ehret, C., Hollett, T., & Jocius, R. (2016). The matter of new media making: An intra-action
analysis of adolescents making a digital book trailer. Journal of Literacy Research, 48, 346–377.
Details a poststructural analysis of ive adolescents’ creation of a digital book trailer, exploring
new media production through use of mobile devices across different locations. Finds that por-
trayals of bodies and materiality entailed redeining perceptions of boundaries and exclusions
across different locations,leading to students’development of agency as producers of new media.
Posits a need for researchers to adopt a poststructuralist analysis of new media production.
Gries, L. (2017). Mapping Obama Hope: A data visualization project for visual rhetorics. Kairos,
21(2). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/21.2/topoi/gries/index.html
Employs “iconographic tracking” using data visualization tools such as mapping to determine
rhetorical transformations in uses of the Obama Hope image throughout the world over an
eight-year period. Observes that different versions and remixes of the image have appeared on
2,000,000 websites,sometimes associated with collective political action.Finds that the image was
employed in 200 cities and 50 countries across a range of genres and artwork (e.g., political and

commercial art,posters,and t-shirts).Posits the value of digital visualization research techniques
for analyzing images’ rhetorical uptake associated with progressive political campaigns, as well
as variations in uses of images across different global and cultural contexts.
Hallaq, T. (2016). Evaluating online media literacy in higher education: Validity and reliability
of the digital online media literacy assessment (DOMLA). Journal of Media Literacy Education,
8(1), 62–84.
The digital divide has been deined by socioeconomic status but may be shifting toward a
generational divide, indicating the need for a valid and reliable quantitative survey measuring
digital online media literacy to determine if differences exist between university students and
faculty with the aim of better understanding how and when digital media should be used within
a learning environment.Core media literacy constructs of ethical awareness,media access,media
awareness, media evaluation, and media production guided the creation of the survey, which
contained 50 items and was determined reliable with a .919 overall coeficient.
Hassell, M. D., & Sukalich, M. F. (2017). A deeper look into the complex relationship between
social media use and academic outcomes and attitudes. Information Research, 22(1), 1–17.
Draws on a survey of 234 undergraduate students at a large US university to determine how social
media use affects students’ attitudes and behavior. Finds that social media use, after controlling
for students’ levels of self-regulation, was negatively associated with academic self-eficacy and
academic performance. Academic self-eficacy also mediated a negative relationship between
social media use and satisfaction with life.
Kelly,C.,& Brower,C.(2017).Making meaning through media:Scaffolding academic and critical
media literacy with texts about schooling. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 655–666.
Examines the beneits of critical media literacy instruction for irst-year college students on
representations of schooling in popular culture. Finds that building on students’ prior knowl-
edge,devising scaffolded assignments,and providing personalized feedback enhanced students’
critical analysis and evidence-based argumentative writing.
Lenhart, A., Malato, D., Kantor, L., Benz, J., Thompson, T., Zeng, W., & Swanson, E. (2017).
American teens are taking breaks from social media; some step back deliberately, but other breaks
are involuntary. Retrieved from University of Chicago, Associated Press–NORC Center for
Public Affairs Research website: http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/American-Teens-are-
Taking-Breaks-from-Social-Media%3B-Many-Step-Back-Deliberately,-but-Half-of-Breaks-
are-Involuntary.aspx
Details results of a survey of 790 American teens age 13 to 17 about their social media practices.
Respondents reported that interaction on social media helped them feel close to peers (78%)
and family (40%), while 15% indicated that they needed to project positive images of them-
selves and 10% felt overloaded with information. Most (58%) had taken a break from at least
one type of social media, and 50% took breaks for a week or longer, with males more likely to
take breaks than females. The 65% who voluntarily took breaks felt more positive about their
time ofline, while the 59% who took involuntary breaks felt more disconnected and anxious.
Those who did not take breaks indicated that they needed to be continuously informed about
activities in their lives (56%) or depended on social media to acquire this information (44%).
Magolis, D., & Briggs, A. (2016). A phenomenological investigation of social networking site
privacy awareness through a media literacy lens.Journal of Media Literacy Education,8(2),22–34.
Examines college students’ awareness of degrees of privacy in their use of social networking.
While students were aware of issues of online privacy, they varied in their understanding of
these issues and in their methods for protecting their privacy. Those who were willing to share

demographic information were less concerned about privacy violations, while those who were
concerned about privacy were still willing to share personal information, but in some cases
altered settings to protect disclosure of certain information.
Robb, M. B. (2017). News and America’s kids: How young people perceive and are impacted by the
news. San Francisco: Common Sense.
Reports on a survey of children’s perceptions about their engagement in accessing news stories.
Finds that respondents believed that accessing news is important and that knowledge about
current events helps them address issues. Survey participants viewed the following issues as
important: education (76%), technology (72%), neighborhoods (67%), and the environment
(64%).Respondents’sources of news included their family,teachers,and/or friends (63%);online
media (49%); and television, print newspapers, and radio (46%). A majority (74%) critiqued
the media as not covering their lives and matters that concern them (particularly in terms of
coverage and fair representations of people of color),and 63% noted that news content can foster
fears, anger, or depression. Less than half (44%) believed they could distinguish fake from real
news stories. Respondents were more likely to trust their families and teachers as news sources,
but still preferred to obtain news from social media,with Facebook andYouTube being the most
popular destination sites; teens were more likely to obtain news from social media than preteens.
Scharber, C., Isaacson, K., Pyscher, T., & Lewis, C. (2016). Participatory culture meets critical
practice:Documentary ilm production in a youth internship program.EnglishTeaching: Practice
& Critique, 15(3), 355–374.
Examines 12 high school students’ documentary ilmmaking (facilitated by 2 youth mentors, 1
adult coordinator, and 1 adult facilitator) as a way to foster engagement in portrayals of social
justice issues. Analysis of students’ decision-making processes and documentaries inds that
students were able to use their documentaries as tools for engaging in critical analysis of social
justice issues associated with civic engagement.
Sekarasih,L.,McDermott,K.W.,O’Malley,D.,Olson,C.,& Scharrer,E.(2016).To guide or to be
the sage: Children’s responses to varying facilitator prompts following a media literacy education
curriculum in the United States. Journal of Children and Media, 10, 369–384.
Analyzes sixth graders’response to instruction on analysis of media violence and gender stereo-
types in media. Students adopted different degrees of critical thinking, particularly in terms of
analysis of media violence.Students who received a critical analysis prompt related to problematic
aspects of media violence were more likely to discuss the effects of violence on audiences and
the industry’s proit-motive for use of violence than students who received a prompt focusing
on both the entertainment and problematic aspects of media violence.
Alexander, P. (2017). KNOWing how to play: Gamer knowledges and knowledge acquisition.
Computers and Composition, 44, 1–12.
Bier, M. C., Zwarun, L., & Sherblom, S. A. (2016). Evidence of the value of the smoking media
literacy framework for middle school students. Journal of School Health, 86(10), 717–725.
Diergarten, A. K., Möckel, T., Nieding, G., & Ohler, P. (2017). The impact of media literacy on
children’s learning from ilms and hypermedia. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology,
48, 33–41.
Grouling,J.,& McKinney,J.G.(2016).Taking stock: Multimodality in writing center users’texts.
Computers and Composition, 41, 56–67.
Mahoney, K. R., & Khwaja, T. (2016). Living and leading in a digital age: A narrative study of
the attitudes and perceptions of school leaders about media literacy. Journal of Media Literacy
Education, 8(2), 77–98.

Miller, S., & Bruce, D. (2017). Welcome to the 21st century: New Literacies stances to support
student learning with digital video composing. English Journal, 106(3), 14–18.
Montgomery, M., & Shen, J. (2017). Direct address and television news-reading: Discourse,
technology and changing cultural form in Chinese and Western TV news. Discourse, Context
& Media, 17, 30–41.
Powers, E. M., Moeller, S. D., & Yuan,Y. (2016). Political engagement during a presidential elec-
tion year:A case study of media literacy students.Journal of Media Literacy Education, 8(1),1–14.
Ranieri, M., & Fabbro, F. (2016). Questioning discrimination through critical media literacy:
Findings from seven European countries. European Educational Research Journal, 15, 462–479.
Rasmussen,E.E.,White,S.R.,King,A.J.,Holiday,S.,& Densley,R.L.(2016).Predicting parental
mediation behaviors: The direct and indirect inluence of parents’critical thinking about media
and attitudes about parent-child interactions. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 8(2), 1–21.
Ross, A. S., & Rivers, D. J. (2017). Digital cultures of political participation: Internet memes
and the discursive delegitimization of the 2016 U.S. presidential candidates. Discourse, Context
& Media, 16, 1–11.
Schilder, E.A., Lockee, B. B., & Saxon, D. P. (2016). The issues and challenges of assessing media
literacy education. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 8(1), 32–48.
Smythe, S., Toohey, K., & Dagenais, D. (2016). Video making, production pedagogies, and
educational policy. Educational Policy, 30, 740–770.
Stavropoulos, V., Kuss, D., Grifiths, M., & Motti-Stefanidi, F. (2016). A longitudinal study of
adolescent Internet addiction: The role of conscientiousness and classroom hostility. Journal of
Adolescent Research, 31, 442–473.
Professional Development/Teacher Education
Themes in inservice and preservice teacher education and professional development literature this
year included a focus on studying the impact of literacy methods courses on preservice teachers’
learning—including their knowledge for literacy, their knowledge for teaching literacy, and their
dispositions for teaching.There was also a focus on development of discipline-specific pedagogies for
teaching literacy.Several studies focused on the affective realm of professional learning in literacy,such
as fostering empathy,negotiating emotions,and transforming beliefs.(Anne Ittner,lead contributor)
Barnes, M. E., & Smagorinsky, P. (2016). What English/language arts teacher candidates learn
during coursework and practica. Journal of Teacher Education, 67, 338–355.
Describes a collaborative study among three university teacher preparation programs for Eng-
lish language arts and literacy in the United States to investigate teacher candidates’ learning in
relation to pedagogical tools, ieldwork settings, and other program sources of learning. Based
on pre/post programmatic interviews and qualitative open-coding methods of analysis, inds
that although the teacher education programs at each university were radically different, the
teacher candidates’reports of learning were similar.The teacher education programs themselves
were only one of several important sources of learning for the teacher candidates. Participants
named sources of learning that reached beyond formal education, including prior schooling
experiences and other life experiences and communities. The authors conclude that teacher
educators should embrace and support teacher candidates in naming and evaluating the variety
of factors that contribute to teacher candidates’ learning.
Carter, H., Crowley, K., Townsend, D. R., & Barone, D. (2016). Secondary teachers’ relections
from a year of professional learning related to academic language. Journal of Adolescent & Adult
Literacy, 60, 325–334.

Reports the indings of a qualitative study exploring questions about aspects of professional
learning that affect teacher knowledge, practice, and beliefs related to academic language. Sug-
gests that professional learning be designed to allow for lexibility based on teacher-identiied
instructional needs. Demonstrates the importance of professional development that provides
teacher relection, planning, and feedback.
Gelfuso,A.(2016).A framework for facilitating video-mediated relection:Supporting preservice
teachers as they create“warranted assertabilities”about literacy teaching and learning. Teaching
and Teacher Education, 58, 68–79.
Describes indings from a self-study of a teacher educator’s “moves” as she facilitated video-
mediated relection with 15 preservice literacy teachers in order to present a framework for
facilitating preservice teacher relection.Argues that although relection is a common skill taught
in teacher education,as a construct,it is loosely deined and misunderstood.Examines the“war-
ranted assertabilities,”or the beliefs and knowledge that resulted from inquiry and relection that
were also“warranted”by a social community—in this case,the literacy education class.Conirms
the existing literature’s view of relection as spontaneous and common, and also suggests that
relection is content-speciic. Concludes that teacher candidates need support as they develop
the content-speciic judgment capacities necessary for productive relection on literacy teaching.
Hardin, B. L., & Koppenhaver, D. A. (2016). Flipped professional development: An innovation
in response to teacher insights. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 45–54.
Shows how one group of researchers and teachers responded to teachers’insights regarding their
professional development. A district-wide survey indicated that teachers needed professional
learning opportunities that included sustained engagement and embedded opportunities to
collaborate. Researchers lipped the learning by reversing the traditional learning environment
and delivering instructional content outside of the classroom and used an online tool (http://
www.schoology.com) to deliver professional development, developing three different courses
that teachers could individually choose to strengthen their literacy practices. To gauge teacher
perception, researchers delivered a survey after the completion of the courses. Results indicated
that teachers considered the lipped modules to be more effective than face-to-face sessions.
Hebard, H. (2016). Finding possibility in pitfalls: The role of permeable methods pedagogy in
preservice teacher learning. Teachers College Record, 118(7), 1–46.
Reports on a comparative case study investigating how learning experiences for teaching writing
in two preservice teacher literacy methods courses compared in terms of teachers’ uptake of
pedagogical tools.One program focused on the development of critical thinking about applica-
tion of pedagogical tools in various contexts, while the other focused on the use of the peda-
gogical tools found in the immediate ieldwork setting. Instructor interviews, methods course
observations, focus groups, and ield placement observations were analyzed using qualitative
analysis methods, including open coding, analytical and theoretical memos, and qualitative
data displays. Conirms that preservice teachers had less uptake of pedagogical tools presented
in the immediate ieldwork setting than in the critical approach setting. Draws conclusions
about the possibilities of contradictions between course work and ield placement pedagogies
for preservice teacher learning.
Hunt,C.S.(2016).Getting to the heart of the matter: Discursive negotiations of emotions within
literacy coaching interactions. Teaching and Teacher Education, 60, 331–343.
Explores how literacy coaches and teachers enact emotions in real-time coaching situations.Uses
a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis to examine several interactions between
study participants engaged in implementing reading and writing workshops,school-embedded
professional development,interventions,and benchmarking assessments over the course of one
year.Draws conclusions from a variety of qualitative analysis tools,demonstrating the ways that

teachers and coaches navigate emotional ways of knowing. Suggests that emotional expressions
could be an entry point for meaningful coaching interactions.
Markussen-Brown, J., Juhl, C. B., Piasta, S. B., Bleses, D., Højen, A., & Justice, L. M. (2017).
The effects of language- and literacy-focused professional development on early educators
and children: A best-evidence meta-analysis. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 38, 97–115.
Describes a meta-analysis of language- and literacy-focused professional development for early
education. Through a quantitative synthesis, the authors name characteristics of the effect of
professional development on process quality,structural quality,and educators’knowledge.They
report that professional development has an effect on process quality and structural quality,but
not educator knowledge. They also set out to document the effects of professional development
on child-related outcomes,inding that professional development had a small- to medium-sized
signiicant effect on student phonological awareness and a small effect on alphabet knowledge.
Paratore, J. R., O’Brien, L. M., Jiménez, L., Salinas, A., & Ly, C. (2016). Engaging preservice
teachers in integrated study and use of educational media and technology in teaching reading.
Reports on a mixed-methods study investigating preservice teachers’ perceptions of the use of
technology during literacy instruction in order to add to existing research showing that methods
courses affect preservice teachers’ knowledge and dispositions for teaching with technology.
Literacy and technology experts used design-based research methods to design, co-teach, and
study a technology-focused literacy methods course, delivering three major indings: increases
in preservice teachers’perceptions of their knowledge,knowledge for teaching,and self-eficacy;
an increase in intent to use technology in future teaching; and teachers’successful integration of
technology into their lesson plans while maintaining sound literacy practices. Implications for
teacher preparation include consideration of the role of disciplinary knowledge for technology
pedagogies, the impact of a co-teaching and course design model, and the fragility of preservice
teachers’ knowledge for teaching.
Parsons,A.W.,Parsons,S.A.,Morewood,A.,&Ankrum,J.W.(2016).Barriers to change:Findings
from three literacy professional learning initiatives.Literacy Research and Instruction,55, 331–352.
Describes common themes from three different professional learning initiatives in literacy. In
each initiative,researchers employed principles of effective professional learning,applied theory
of social constructivism, and utilized design-based research methods. Data collection included
observations, teacher interviews, school leader interviews, and student assessments. Across the
three initiatives, two themes suggested barriers to change: pressure on teachers when district-
level mandates or colleagues’ practices did not align with professional learning initiatives, and
knowledge.Participants who lacked literacy content and pedagogy knowledge were not equipped
to try practices related to the professional learning initiatives. Calls for small-scale studies to
determine how teachers change practice, as well as investment in systematic study of large-scale
projects to better understand how to increase student achievement.
Reyes, C., & Brinegar, K. (2016). Lessons learned: Using the literacy histories of education stu-
dents to foster empathy. Teaching and Teacher Education, 59, 327–337.
Draws on a multicase study of preservice teachers’ understanding of equitable literacy learn-
ing environments through digital, autobiographical storytelling, examining how the use of the
digital storytelling motivated students to relect on issues of difference and equity and to foster
empathy. Longitudinal data analysis methods were employed over six semesters at two college
campuses: one small,rural state college and one urban,public university.Multimodal discourse
analysis methods were used to analyze transcripts of the preservice teachers’ digital stories,
relective writings about the digital story process, and peer responses to the digital stories. The
authors present four vignettes to illuminate equity-related themes within each case,inding that

digital stories“humanize”the concept of difference in literacy education, thus disrupting prior
notions of literacy and learning.
Sharkey, J., Clavijo Olarte, A., & Raḿrez, L. M. (2016). Developing a deeper understanding of
community-based pedagogies with teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 67, 306–319.
Outlines the indings of a research study into community-based pedagogies and the enactment
of these pedagogies by four teachers in urban schools. Describes professional development as
collaborative,context-speciic,and inquiry-based.Reports an impact on student engagement and
motivation,student-teacher relationships,school-family engagement,and teacher understand-
ing of local knowledge as curriculum resource. Suggests that community-based pedagogies can
positively affect teachers and students in urban schools.
Thurlings,M.,& den Brok,P.J.(2017).Learning outcomes of teacher professional development
activities: A meta-study. Educational Review, 12, 1–23.
Explores teacher professional development through peer interaction. Focuses on coaching, col-
laboration,and assessment.Shows outcomes of peer-based professional development for teacher
knowledge, teacher skills, and student learning, but identiies weaknesses in methodology used
in many professional development studies.Recommends more methodologically sound research
of the impact of professional development activities.
Tour, E. (2017). Teachers’ personal learning networks (PLNs): Exploring the nature of self-
initiated professional learning online. Literacy, 51, 11–18.
Reports on the indings of a research study focused on three teachers’ digitally mediated pro-
fessional development through personal learning networks. Argues that new literacy practices
that are collaborative, participatory, distributed, and multimodal lead to self-driven teacher
professional learning.Includes description of personal learning networks as social,personalized,
active and reciprocal, ongoing, and blended.
Wilkinson, I. A. G., Reznitskaya, A., Bourdage, K., Oyler, J., Glina, M., Drewry, R., . . . Nelson,
K. (2017). Toward a more dialogic pedagogy: Changing teachers’ beliefs and practices through
professional development in language arts classrooms. Language and Education, 31, 65–82.
Examines the impact of a three-year professional development project focused on dialogic teach-
ing.Examines teacher use of particular types of talk and the resulting impact on the development
of argument literacy. Captures both teacher beliefs and enactments of text-based discussions.
Reports change in teacher practice,but suggests that teachers continue to view opinions as valid
without concern for argumentation and evidence.
Xu,Y., & Brown, G. T. L. (2016). Teacher assessment literacy in practice: A reconceptualization.
Identiies several components of assessment literacy drawn from two ields: educational as-
sessment and teacher education. Based on a review of over 100 studies, suggests a conceptual
framework of teacher assessment literacy in practice (TALiP). Offers recommendations for
ensuring discipline-speciic assessment literacy knowledge and operationalizing the framework
for teacher education programs and research.
Amir, A., Mandler, D., Hauptman, S., & Gorev, D. (2017). Discomfort as a means of pre-service
teachers’professional development – an action research as part of the“research literacy”course.
European Journal of Teacher Education, 40, 231–245.
Boche, B., & Shoffner, M. (2017). Connecting technology, literacy, and self-study in English
language arts teacher education. In D. Garbett & A. Ovens (Eds.), Being self-study researchers in

a digital world (pp. 61–72). New York: Springer.
Colwell,J.,& Gregory,K.(2016).Exploring how secondary pre-service teachers use online social
bookmarking to envision literacy in the disciplines. Reading Horizons, 55(3), 62–97.
Danko-McGhee,K.,& Slutsky,R.(2017).Empowering preservice teachers to design a classroom
environment that serves as a third teacher. In M. J. Narey (Ed.), Multimodal perspectives of lan-
guage, literacy, and learning in early childhood (pp. 257–274). New York: Springer.
Dutro,E.,Cartun,A.,Melnychenko,K.,Haberl,E.,Williams,B.P.,& Zenkov,K.(2017).Partner-
ship literacies in a writing methods course: Practicing, advocating, and feeling together. Journal
of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 585–588.
Grifith, R. (2017). Preservice teachers’ in the moment teaching decisions in reading. Literacy,
51, 3–10.
Haddix,M.M.(2017).Diversifying teaching and teacher education: Beyond rhetoric and toward
real change. Journal of Literacy Research, 49, 141–149.
Hobbs,R.(2017).Approaches to teacher professional development in digital and media literacy
education. In B. S. De Abreu, P. Mihailidis, A.Y. L. Lee, J. Melki, & J. McDougall (Eds.), Interna-
tional handbook of media literacy education (pp. 54–64). New York: Routledge.
Joanou,J.P.(2017).Examining the world around us: Critical media literacy in teacher education.
Multicultural Perspectives, 19, 40–46.
Jukes, M. C., Turner, E. L., Dubeck, M. M., Halliday, K. E., Inyega, H. N., Wolf, S., . . . Brooker,
S. J. (2016). Improving literacy instruction in Kenya through teacher professional development
and text messages support: A cluster randomized trial. Journal of Research on Educational Ef-
fectiveness, 10, 449–481.
Kerry-Moran,K.(2016).Improving preservice teachers’expression in read-alouds.Early Child-
hood Education Journal, 44, 661–670.
Kindall, H. D., Crowe, T., & Elsass, A. (2017). The principal’s inluence on the novice teacher’s
professional development in literacy instruction.Professional Development in Education.Advance
online publication. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjie20/current
Kosnik, C., Menna, L., Dharamshi, P., & Miyata, C. (2017). So how do you teach literacy in
teacher education? Literacy/English teacher educators’goals and pedagogies.Australian Journal
of Language and Literacy, 40, 59–71.
Pomerantz,F.,& Condie,C.(2017).Building bridges from pre-service experiences to elementary
classroom literacy teaching: Challenges and opportunities. Teaching and Teacher Education, 64,
211–221.
Sharp, L. A., Coneway, B., Hindman, J. T., Garcia, B., & Bingham, T. (2016). Arts-integrated
literacy instruction: Promising practices for preservice teaching professionals. Texas Journal of
Literacy Education, 4(2), 78–89.
Vasudevan, L., & Kerr, K. R. (2017). Layered stories of teacher education in lux: A review of On
mutant pedagogies: Seeking justice and drawing change in teacher education. Journal of Adolescent
& Adult Literacy, 60, 723–727.
Voogt,J.,& McKenney,S.(2017).TPACK in teacher education:Are we preparing teachers to use
technology for early literacy? Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 26, 69–83.
Watulak,S.L.(2016).Relection in action: Using inquiry groups to explore critical digital literacy
with pre-service teachers. Educational Action Research, 24, 503–518.
Reading
Articles selected for this section represent a range of methodologies, topics, and grade levels. Final
selection was determined by the significance of the article’s contribution to the field and to the evolving

understanding of the reading process and instruction. For example, articles selected discussed issues
related to oral language, decoding, fluency, comprehension, discourse, and social constructions of
literacy. Trends in reading research this year included an emphasis on bilingual learners, relation-
ships between oral language and reading comprehension, and preparing students for reading at the
undergraduate level. (Kathryn Allen, lead contributor)
Arnesen, A., Braeken, J., Baker, S., Meek-Hansen, W., Ogden, T., & Melby-Lervag, M. (2017).
Growth in oral reading luency in a semi-transparent orthography: Concurrent and predictive
relations with reading proiciency in Norwegian, grades 2–5. Reading Research Quarterly, 52,
177–201.
Examines the adaption of the oral reading luency measure from the Dynamic Indicators of
Basic Early Literacy Skills to Norwegian, which has a more transparent orthography than En-
glish.Uses growth curve modeling to determine growth within and across grades and to identify
the longitudinal effects of oral reading luency on high-stakes national assessments in grades
2–5. Growth rates were highest in grades 2 and 3 and nonlinear in grades 4 and 5. Oral reading
luency had moderate to strong predictive value on national reading tests, suggesting it might
be a reliable and valid measure for identifying students in grades 2–5 for reading interventions.
Boelé, A. L. (2017). Does it say that? Tensions in teacher questions when the text has the inal
say. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33, 20–36.
Investigates how authoritative and dialogic questioning practices of three ifth-grade teachers
differed between small groups of students reading texts on grade level and groups reading below
grade level,and how these questioning practices functioned for students with learning disabilities
in reading. Ethnographic and discourse analytic methods were used to study video and audio
recording of instruction, teacher interviews, and classroom observation data. Findings indicate
that teachers were three times more likely to pose assertive questions that required accurate
knowledge or textual evidence and/or acted as proxies for error correction and authoritative
ideologies to students in the below-grade-level group compared with the on-grade-level group.
Knowledge was assumed to be within the teacher, and the text was over-privileged as a source
of knowledge and positioned as an object from which to lift literal meaning. Suggests that
professional development ought to support teachers in considering how they may privilege the
reader in text-reader interactions.
Cantrell,S.C.,Pennington,J.,Rintamaa,M.,Osborne,M.,Parker,C.,& Rudd,M.(2017).Supple-
mental literacy instruction in high school: What students say matters for reading engagement.
Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33, 54–70.
Uses constant comparative analysis strategies to explore high school students’ perspectives on
which instructional factors in a supplemental reading course were most engaging. The course
used the Kentucky Cognitive Literacy Model (KCLM) and focused on motivation,strategic pro-
cessing,content learning strategies,and communication.Three-interview series were conducted
with ninth-grade students from nine high schools (N = 63). Themes identiied include: access
to a variety of relevant texts; increased sense of self-eficacy and valuing of reading; increased
comprehension proiciency and openness to cognitive strategy instruction; and teachers’ dis-
position, inluence, and classroom relationships.
Cohrssen, C., Niklas, F., & Tayler, C. (2016).“Is that what we do?”Using a conversation-analytic
approach to highlight the contribution of dialogic reading strategies to educator–child inter-
actions during storybook reading in two early childhood settings. Journal of Early Childhood
Literacy, 16, 361–382.
Employs conversational analysis to deconstruct dialogic reading interactions between teach-
ers and young children during storybook reading. Researchers captured naturally occurring
phenomena through video recordings, transcribed these interactions, and categorized data ac-

cording to ive predetermined dialogic reading strategies: completion prompts, recall prompts,
open-ended questions, asking “wh-” questions, and linking pictures and vocabulary with the
child’s lived experience. Suggests that systematic and intentional use of dialogic reading strate-
gies supports the literacy development of emergent readers.
Davis, D., Huang, B., & Yi, T. (2017). Making sense of science texts: A mixed-methods examina-
tion of predictors and processes of multiple-text comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly,
52, 227–252.
Describes amixed-methods study of 83 students in grades5–7(includingmonolingual,emergent,
and proicient bilingual students) assessing expository comprehension, strategic knowledge,
prior content knowledge, English-language proiciency, and readers’ beliefs about learning.
Comprehension was measured by a researcher-designed,untimed assessment in which students
read two passages about Pluto.Items included sentence veriication and inference veriication.A
smaller sample of bilingual students completed a think-aloud protocol on the meaning-making
process.Using multiple regression analysis,researchers determined that English proiciency was
the strongest predictor of comprehension. Strategy knowledge and epistemic beliefs were not
related to multiple-text comprehension.The think-alouds showed that students had an emergent
understanding of metacognitive monitoring and intertextual integration.
Deacon, S. H., Tong, X., & Francis, K. (2017). The relationship of morphological analysis and
morphological decoding to reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 40, 1–16.
Evaluates the degree to which two components of morphological awareness, morphological
decoding and morphological analysis, independently contribute to reading comprehension in
third- and ifth-grade, English-speaking children. Measures of morphological decoding, mor-
phological analysis, morphological structure awareness, matrix reasoning, word identiication,
reading comprehension,and phonological awareness were analyzed using correlational and linear
regression analyses. Hierarchical multiple regression was used to evaluate the unique contribu-
tions of morphological structure awareness,morphological decoding,and morphological analy-
sis, which together accounted for 8% of the variance, suggesting that morphological decoding
and morphological analysis should be considered in further studies of reading comprehension.
Dwyer, J., Kelcey, B., Berebitsky, D., & Carlisle, J. F. (2016). A study of teachers’ discourse moves
that support text-based discussions. Elementary School Journal, 117, 285–399.
Explores teacher discursive moves in response to student discussion of text. Analytic factors
included (1) teacher factors, measured through their knowledge about reading and reading
practices, (2) student achievement, measured through the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and (3)
characteristics of lessons as determined through classroom observations. Video recordings of
lessons were coded for use and effectiveness of teachers’discourse moves. Factor model analysis
indicated that lesson and teacher characteristics were signiicantly related to discourse moves,and
teachers’ use of discourse moves was positively and signiicantly related to students’ vocabulary
and reading achievement.
Holliman,A.J.,Palma,N.G.,Critten,S.,Wood,C.,Cunnane,H.,& Pillinger,C.(2017).Examin-
ing the independent contribution of prosodic sensitivity to word reading and spelling in early
readers. Reading and Writing, 30, 509–521.
Examines the contributions of prosodic sensitivity to word reading and spelling in 5- and
6-year-old, English-speaking children. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to determine
the unique contributions of prosodic sensitivity while controlling for variables of vocabulary,
phonological awareness, and morphological awareness. Prosodic sensitivity explained 3.8% of
the variance in monosyllabic word reading and 13.5% of the variance in multisyllabic word
reading. It was not found to have signiicance with regard to spelling in English. Implications
include a suggestion that prosodic sensitivity be considered in assessment and intervention
techniques for young children.

Kabuto, B. (2016). The social construction of a reading (dis)ability. Reading Research Quarterly,
51, 289–304.
Uses a comparative case study to explore labeling of children in educational settings, and how
families construct sociocultural-historical identities connected to reading ability.Family reading
miscue analysis was used to capture participants’discourses about reading and reading abilities.
Triangulation among miscue analysis,discourse analysis,and observational and relective notes
revealed a socially derived interpretation of reading ability incorporating sociocultural-historical
processes of time, action, emotion, identity, and physical space. Calls for methodological and
theoretical shifts in research exploring impacts of school-based reading ability labels on reading
identities of families.
Lepola, J., Lynch, J., Kiuru, N., Laakkonen, E., & Niemi, P. (2016). Early oral language com-
prehension, task orientation, and foundational reading skills as predictors of grade 3 reading
comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 51, 373–390.
Reports on a ive-year longitudinal study of 90 Finnish-speaking students from preschool to
grade 3, assessing vocabulary knowledge, listening comprehension, inference making, task
orientation, letter knowledge, and phonological awareness. Reading luency was assessed in
grades 2–3. Task orientation was deined as self-eficacy, agency, or a child’s ability to accept
challenging aspects of a learning task. Grade 3 comprehension was measured using two narra-
tive passages that students read silently, followed by a total of 24 multiple-choice questions that
required both literal and inferential text comprehension. Oral language comprehension, task
orientation, and reading luency all contributed uniquely to reading comprehension. Research-
ers found a reciprocal relationship between oral language comprehension and task orientation
from preschool to grade 3.
Rasinski, T.V., Chang, S., Edmondson, E., Nageldinger, J., Nigh, J., Remark, L., . . . Rupley,W. H.
(2017).Reading luency and college readiness. Journal of Adolescent &Adult Literacy,60, 453–460.
Explores what “college and career readiness” means for reading luency, speciically automatic
word recognition. Researchers used an oral reading analysis protocol to determine word recog-
nition automaticity for incoming college irst-year students (N = 81) and analyzed correlations
between measures of luency and ACT scores. Findings suggest that students read at or above
grade level, with word recognition accuracy at instructional or independent levels, and moder-
ate correlation of word recognition accuracy and automaticity with ACT scores. Argues that
word recognition accuracy and automaticity continue to be important factors for reading and
academic success in middle school, high school, and postsecondary grades.
Reed, D., Petscher, Y., & Truckenmiller, A. (2017). The contribution of general reading ability
to science achievement. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 253–266.
Investigates the relationship of reading ability (word recognition, vocabulary, syntactic knowl-
edge,and comprehension) with science knowledge (measured using a state criterion-referenced
assessment) among students in grades 5, 8, and 9. Both assessments of reading comprehension
and science knowledge included inferential items. Researchers used multiple-group structural
equation modeling to determine that reading ability did account for a high percentage of the
variance at each grade level.At grade 9, lower reading ability was more strongly related to lower
science performance.
Rosenzweig,E.Q.,&Wigield,A.(2017).What if reading is easy but unimportant? How students’
patterns of afirming and undermining motivation for reading information texts predict differ-
ent reading outcomes. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 48, 133–148.
Uses cluster analysis to identify patterns in middle school students’ (N = 1,134) self-eficacy,
perceived dificulty, and value and devalue for reading informational school texts. Compares
patterns to reading outcomes,including language arts grades,comprehension,and dedication to

informational text reading.Finds that students demonstrated four different patterns of afirming
and undermining motivation to read informational school texts, and that reading outcomes
varied across these four patterns. Clusters included: (1) high afirming and low undermining
motivations (highest reading outcome scores); (2) low afirming and high undermining (lowest
reading outcome scores); (3) high self-eficacy, low dificulty, and low value; and (4) moderate
levels of all motivational constructs.Students who demonstrated patterns in the third and fourth
clusters had similar reading outcomes.Researchers also examined differences in patterns between
genders, African American students and White students, and low- and high-socioeconomic-
status students. While males and females were equally represented across all four patterns,
students showed differences by race: African American students were disproportionately less
likely than White students to have the high self-eficacy/low value and the low afirming/high
undermining patterns.
Swanson, E., Wanzek, J.,Vaughn, S., Fall, A., Roberts, G., Hall, C., & Miller,V. L. (2017). Middle
school reading comprehension and content learning intervention for below-average readers.
Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33, 37–53.
Evaluates the eficacy of Promoting Acceleration of Comprehension and Content through Text
(PACT), an intervention consisting of a set of research-based daily instructional practices to
support struggling readers’comprehension in middle school social studies content instruction.
Researchers used a randomized controlled design to determine the effects of PACT on both
reading comprehension and content knowledge outcomes for struggling readers,as determined
by performance on state accountability measures. Students in the treatment condition (n = 45),
who received the PACT intervention, outscored students in the comparison condition (n =
33) on measures of knowledge acquisition (ES = 0.35), content reading comprehension (ES =
0.59),and vocabulary recall (ES = 0.65).There was no statistically signiicant difference between
treatment and control groups on the measure of standardized reading comprehension (ES =
0.10). Findings support the eficacy of the PACT intervention to improve social studies content
acquisition in struggling readers.
van Gorp, K., Segers, E., & Verhoeven, L. (2017). Enhancing decoding eficiency in poor readers
via a word identiication game. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 105–123.
Describes the implementation of a digital word identiication game with 62 Dutch second graders
who had been identiied as poor readers in need of intervention. The game included repeti-
tion of real words and pseudo-words, along with immediate corrective feedback and semantic
training.Words were at three levels of dificulty: consonant-vowel-consonant items, consonant
cluster items, and disyllabic items. Researchers conducted 15-minute interventions four times
per week for ive weeks.Results showed signiicant increases in students’ability to decode words
at all three levels of dificulty, and remained consistent ive weeks following the intervention.
Ahmed, Y., Francis, D. J., York, M., Fletcher, J. M., Barnes, M., & Kulesz, P. (2016). Validation
of the direct and inferential mediation (DIME) model of reading comprehension in grades 7
through 12. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 44, 68–82.
Barnes, E., Grifenhagen, J., & Dickinson, D. (2016). Academic language in early childhood
classrooms. Reading Teacher, 70, 39–48.
Boardman,A. G.,Vaughn, S., Buckley, P., Reutebuch, C., Roberts, G., & Klingner, J. (2016). Col-
laborative strategic reading for students with learning disabilities in upper elementary classrooms.
Exceptional Children, 82, 409–427.
Bråten,I.,Johansen,R.-P.,& Strømsø,H.I.(2017).Effects of different ways of introducing a read-
ing task on intrinsic motivation and comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 40, 17–36.
Brimo, D., Apel, K., & Fountain, T. (2017). Examining the contributions of syntactic awareness

and syntactic knowledge to reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 40, 57–74.
Cheng,Y., Zhang, J., Li, H., Wu, X., Liu, H., Dong, Q., . . . Sun, P. (2017). Growth of compound-
ing awareness predicts reading comprehension in young Chinese students:A longitudinal study
from grade 1 to grade 2. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 91–104.
Conradi,K.,Amendum,S.J.,& Liebfreund,M.D.(2016).Explaining variance in comprehension
for students in a high-poverty setting. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 32, 427–453.
Flynn, E. (2016). Language-rich early childhood classroom: Simple but powerful beginnings.
Reading Teacher, 70, 159–166.
Goldman, S. R., Snow, C., & Vaughn, S. (2016). Common themes in teaching reading for un-
derstanding: Lessons from three projects. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 255–264.
Goodwin,A.P.,Petscher,Y.,Carlisle,J.F.,& Mitchell,A.M.(2017).Exploring the dimensionality
of morphological knowledge for adolescent readers. Journal of Research in Reading, 40, 91–117.
Hamilton,S.,Freed,E.,& Long,D.(2016).Word-decoding skill interacts with working memory
capacity to inluence inference generation during reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 51,
391–402.
Kim,S.J.(2016).The role of peer relationships and interactions in preschool bilingual children’s
responses to picture books. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 16, 311–337.
Li, M., Murphy, P. K., Wang, J., Mason, L. H., Firetto, C. M., Wei, L., & Chung, K. S. (2016).
Promoting reading comprehension and critical–analytic thinking: A comparison of three ap-
proaches with fourth and ifth graders. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 46, 101–115.
MacKay, E. J., Levesque, K., & Deacon, S. H. (2017). Unexpected poor comprehenders: An
investigation of multiple aspects of morphological awareness. Journal of Research in Reading,
40, 125–138.
Martin, N. D., Nguyen, K., & McDaniel, M. A. (2016). Structure building differences inluence
learning from educational text: Effects on encoding, retention, and metacognitive control.
Contemporary Educational Psychology, 46, 52–60.
Michaud, M., Dion, E., Barrette, A., Dupéré, V., & Toste, J. (2017). Does knowing what a word
means inluence how easily its decoding is learned? Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33, 82–96.
Raffaele Mendez,L.M.,Pelzmann,C.A.,& Frank,M.J.(2016).Engaging struggling early readers
to promote reading success: A pilot study of reading by design. Reading & Writing Quarterly,
32, 273–297.
Smith, J. M., Nelson, N. J., Smolkowski, K., Baker, S. K., Fien, H., & Kosty, D. (2016). Examin-
ing the eficacy of a multitiered intervention for at-risk readers in grade 1. Elementary School
Journal, 116, 549–573.
Zhang,J.,& Shulley,L.(2017).Poor comprehenders in English-only and English language learn-
ers: Inluence of morphological analysis during incidental word learning. Journal of Research
in Reading, 40, 169–183.
Second Language Literacy
The research included in this section focuses on multilingual learners’ language use and acquisi-
tion. In determining which research would be abstracted, we attempted to represent a variety of
methodologies, ages, languages, contexts, and modalities, while highlighting prominent projects
and carving out space for theory building. Studies in this section are representative of a continued
interest in the examination of bilingual and biliterate pedagogies, translanguaging, identities and
critical literacies in curricula, and teacher development. Specific trends noted this year include an
emphasis on English learner classification and assessment, academic language instruction in content
areas, the implementation of interventions for students with reading difficulties, and the impact of

the political milieu on lives of immigrant and refugee students and their families. (Amy Frederick,
lead contributor)
Brooks,M.D.(2017).How and when did you learn your languages? Bilingual students’linguistic
experiences and literacy instruction. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 383–393.
Draws on theories of dynamic bilingualism to challenge monolingual assumptions behind
terms like native language and native speaker. Describes the development of a survey intended
to inform educators about the linguistic experiences of their students. The survey’s six ques-
tions are discussed in detail, with explanations of how they are designed to elicit the complex-
ity of multilingual language practices in and out of school contexts. Analyses of one student’s
responses to the survey provide the data from which implications for instruction and assessment
are drawn. Speciically, this survey elicits information missed by oficial school records (e.g.,
English proiciency tests), enables identiication of English-proicient bilingual students who
are struggling with academic literacy, provides opportunities for students to relect on their
language practices and identities, and improves alignment of ELA standards with the speciic
literacy practices of individual students.
Creese,A.,Blackledge,A.,& Hu,R.(2017).Translanguaging and translation: The construction of
social difference across city spaces.International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.
Advance online publication. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rbeb20/current
Considers the construction of social difference in the interactions of a multilingual couple as
they communicated at home and worked with one another,their colleagues,and strangers.Data
come from the irst phase of a four-year sociolinguistic ethnography investigating communi-
cation practices in four superdiverse (deined as including signiicant diversity across a range
of variables) English cities. Researchers used a linguistic ethnographic approach to document
the role of translanguaging and translation, showing how these social practices varied across
the city’s spatial realms as different kinds of relationships were brought into play. Study data
(including extensive ield notes,audio and video recording,photos and interviews) revealed that
interactions drew on widely circulating discourses about social and linguistic difference, that
the construction of difference varied qualitatively by the distance and intimacy of relationships,
and that a translanguaging repertoire was particularly evident as the couple navigated sensitive
cultural activities, attitudes, and beliefs.
Durán,L.(2017).Audience and young bilingual writers:Building on strengths.Journal of Literacy
Research, 49, 92–114.
Explores how an audience-focused writing curriculum mediated the literacy development of
bilingual Latina/o irst-grade students. Describes a yearlong study in one classroom in the irst
year of transition from an ESL model into a bilingual program. Qualitatively documents and
analyzes students’ writing and talk about writing for a variety of audiences, using ield notes,
video recordings,and writing samples.Expands on theories of audience awareness in writing to
include linguistically diverse settings and translingual writing practices.Finds that children both
addressed (or responded to) their intended readers and invoked particular kinds of audiences.
Children’s audience awareness inluenced their use of language (Spanish, English, or both), as
well as rhetorical strategies and design choices.
Gallo, S., & Hornberger, N. H. (2017). Immigration policy as family language policy: Mexican
immigrant children and families in search of biliteracy. International Journal of Bilingualism.
Advance online publication. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ijb
Focuses on the case of 8-year-old Princess to examine complexities of how young Latino children
with a recently deported parent engage with family language policies through stances toward
imagined lives,languages,and schooling in Mexico and the USA.Ethnographic language policy

research is used to highlight how young children can serve as agentive social actors as they negoti-
ate their own self-positioning across institutional settings. Reveals that monoglossic ideologies
undergird families’ imagined educational futures across borders, and how our current school-
ing approaches dichotomize rather than support the familial language and literacy resources
that transnational students bring to classrooms. Argues that educational policy and classroom
practices that are more relective of transnational families’realities are needed to better prepare
children for educational success on both sides of the border.
Garća, G. E., & Godina, H. (2017). A window into bilingual reading: The bilingual reading
practices of fourth-grade, Mexican American children who are emergent bilinguals. Journal of
Literacy Research, 49, 273–301.
Employs qualitative think-alouds to elicit the bilingual reading strategies of six fourth-grade,
Mexican-American emergent bilinguals. Participants had been enrolled in an early-exit tran-
sitional bilingual education program for at least three years, and all were proicient readers in
Spanish (as assessed on a standardized measure),though their English reading proiciency varied
considerably.Students were prompted to think aloud at predetermined points in four texts,two
in Spanish and two in English, and were free to answer in English, Spanish, or both. Finds that
students varied their cognitive and bilingual strategy use according to the demands and genre
of the text and their oral English proiciency, that they utilized both monolingual and bilingual
strategies (though cognates were only used occasionally),and that all of them demonstrated the
ability to talk about a text in a different language than the one in which it was written.Concludes
that monolingual assessments of students’ literacy proiciency miss considerable information
about emergent bilinguals, and demonstrates that even readers with lower English proiciency
lexibly employ a variety of reading strategies in ways that support a translanguaging perspec-
tive on cross-linguistic transfer.
Granados,N.R.(2017).Mobilities of language and literacy ideologies: Dual language graduates’
bilingualism and biliteracy. Journal of Literacy Research, 49, 210–239.
Uses ethnography to investigate how the experience of attending one K–5 dual-language im-
mersion program inluenced the language ideologies and life trajectories of 52 adult graduates
ages 22–28 who were invited via social media to participate in an online discussion board on
past and present experiences related to their language and literacy. Focuses on language and
literacy ideologies and language-as-capital,grounded in a New Literacies theoretical framework.
Develops the notion of mobilities of ideologies to demonstrate how language and literacy prac-
tices of graduates have been both enabled and constrained by the ideological spaces they have
inhabited, and inds that graduates today have managed to take advantage of their bilingualism
and biliteracy,have achieved educational successes,and hold overwhelmingly positive ideologies
with regard to their Spanish language and literacy.
Hopewell,S.,& Butvilofsky,S.(2016).Privileging bilingualism:Using biliterate writing outcomes
to understand emerging bilingual learners’ literacy achievement. Bilingual Research Journal, 39,
324–338.
Building on Richard Ruiz’s notion of language policy orientations, argues that language-as-
resourceorientation requires thatwe use two-languageassessmentstostudyhowprogrammodels
are both developing and conserving the languages that students bring to school. Demonstrates
through a study of students’writing how scholars might use such assessments to present a more
complete understanding of students’ biliteracy development that counters the use of bilingual-
ism in service to the hegemony of English. The quasi-experimental study included two groups
of irst- through ifth-grade emerging bilingual learners from the same elementary school, who
participated in different models of literacy instruction. Examines the extent to which writing
instruction in two languages delayed or advantaged students educated in paired biliteracy
instruction, as compared with those who spent all of their time in English language literacy.

Finds that students in paired literacy became comparably literate in the domain of writing in
Spanish and English (as measured by a biliteracy writing rubric),and that differences in English
language outcomes for the two groups were statistically insigniicant.
Kremin, L.V., Arredondo, M. M., Hsu, L. S. J., Satterield, T., & Kovelman, I. (2017). The effects
of Spanish heritage language literacy on English reading for Spanish–English bilingual children
in the US.International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.Advance online publica-
tion. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rbeb20/current
Examines the contribution of several literacy components to the literacy skills of early-exposure
Spanish-English bilingual readers (n = 37) in comparison with English-only monolingual readers
(n = 33). Seventy participants (mean age 9.8 years) were administered a battery of standardized
measures of phonological awareness, vocabulary, syntactic competence, single-word reading,
naming speed, and nonverbal intelligence in Spanish and English for the bilingual participants
and in English for the monolingual participants.Data were analyzed using t-tests,partial correla-
tions,and stepwise regression models.Results suggest that bilingual readers employed additional
and different components than the monolingual readers. Speciically, syntactic competence
and phonological awareness were signiicant predictors of literacy performance. Suggests that
the transparent orthography of Spanish promotes a strong transfer of Spanish literacy skills to
English reading for early-exposure Spanish-English bilingual readers, and advocates that bilin-
gual and biliteracy instruction should be more widely available, that all educators need to know
how to modify literacy instruction to incorporate the speciic linguistic and prior educational
strengths of emergent bilinguals, and that bilingual parents should be encouraged to provide
early exposure to L1 literacy instruction.
Lucas,M.W.,&Yiakoumetti,A.(2017).Cross-linguistic awareness-raising practices can enhance
written performance in EFL classes in Japanese universities. International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism.Advance online publication.Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.
com/toc/rbeb20/current
Reports on a a quasi-experimental study examining the effectiveness of cross-linguistic instruc-
tion for Japanese university students’(N = 69) usage of articles and plural sufixes for countable
nouns, two forms not present in Japanese and with which Japanese students have consistently
been shown to struggle in their acquisition of English. The control group (n = 34) received
English-only instruction,while the experimental group (n = 35) received instruction that made
explicit comparisons and contrasts to students’L1.Results indicate that the experimental group
outperformed the control group on researcher-created measures of error identiication and
correction as well as plural production, though there was no signiicant difference in article
production between the two groups. Authors suggest that the control groups may have expe-
rienced some negative transfer effects from English words that are loanwords in the Japanese
katakana lexicon on the second assessment. Contributes to a growing international literature
documenting effectiveness of bilingual pedagogies that utilize students’L1 during L2 instruction.
Smith, B. E., Pacheco, M. B., & de Almeida, C. R. (2017). Multimodal codemeshing: Bilingual
adolescents’ processes composing across modes and languages. Journal of Second Language
Writing, 36, 6–22.
Describes a comparative case study examining how three bilingual eighth-grade students from
different language backgrounds composed across multiple languages and modalities when creat-
ing a digital project. Integrates translanguaging and social semiotics theoretical frameworks to
develop the notion of multimodal code-meshing. Analyzes data, including screen capture and
video observations, student design interviews, and multimodal products through the creation
of multimodal code-meshing timescapes. Describes students’ composition processes by exam-
ining how they began their projects, their increasing luency with multilevel iterative design,
and the unique ways that each student used different modes to communicate meaning. Finds

that students used heritage languages strategically both to negotiate various demands of the
composition process (such as accessing new information or composing messages for multiple
audiences) and to transform the language norms of the local classroom ecology.
Stevenson, A., & Beck, S. (2016). Migrant students’ emergent conscientization through critical,
socioculturally responsive literacy pedagogy. Journal of Literacy Research, 49, 240–272.
Presents a portrait of a summer literacy program for Mexican American migrant students. In-
formed by critical and sociocultural theories of literacy and culturally responsive approaches to
instruction, the summer program adapted reader’s and writer’s workshop pedagogies to utilize
students’ cultural and linguistic practices as instructional resources in highly interactive and
collaborative activities. Picture books, young adult novels, and a video that focused on Mexican
protagonists and depicted several facets of migrant texts were used to scaffold migrant students’
creation of texts that relected their awareness of and engagement with their sociopolitical reali-
ties. Illustrates how students developed a sense of community and trust that enabled them to
share their own stories of poverty and hardship, how group discussions and critical analyses of
texts enabled them to better understand and articulate their own perspectives that challenged
dominant discourses about migrants in their school community, and how the students’ stories
helped educators reframe their understandings of these students.
Suk, N. (2017). The effects of extensive reading on reading comprehension, reading rate, and
vocabulary acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 73–89.
Evaluates the effectiveness of extensive reading for improving the reading performance of Korean
university students studying English as a foreign language. Four intact classes were assigned to
two control and two experimental conditions, and the author provided instruction to all four
classes. The experimental condition replaced 30 minutes of vocabulary review and quizzes in
the control condition with 30 minutes of opportunities for extensive reading from a library of
about 350 graded readers in the experimental condition. The other 70 minutes of all the classes
were the same,as was the amount of time students were expected to spend on homework assign-
ments. Repeated MANOVA analyses revealed that students in the extensive reading condition
outperformed students in the control condition on researcher-created measures of comprehen-
sion (Cohen’s d = .30), reading rate (d = .39), and vocabulary (d = .70). Hypothesizes that gains
may be due to the amount of extensive reading, the use of graded readers at appropriate Lexile
ranges for students’ L2 proiciency levels, and a carefully constructed vocabulary measure that
aligned with the reading materials chosen by students.
Symons, C., Palincsar, A. S., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2017). Fourth-grade emergent bilinguals’
uses of functional grammar analysis to talk about text.Learning and Instruction.Advance online
publication. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09594752?sdc=1
Reports on a study that employed think-alouds and semistructured interviews to examine how
10 emergent bilingual fourth graders interacted with and relected on a challenging science
text. Students had been exposed to explicit talk about meaning in the patterns of language they
encounter across genres and disciplines (functional grammar analysis).Finds that students who
consistently attended to the participants, processes, and circumstances of time and place, and
made felicitous inferences, constructed a coherent mental model of the text.Asserts that paying
attention to the language students use while thinking aloud can provide insight into the kinds
of strategic and linguistic knowledge they are drawing upon to make meaning, which can be
leveraged to support text comprehension.
Umansky, I. M. (2016). Leveled and exclusionary tracking: English learners’ access to academic
content in middle school. American Educational Research Journal, 53, 1792–1833.
Uses regression analysis of 10 years of data on middle school (grades 6–8) English learners from
a large urban school district in California to identify two predominant characteristics of their

access to content: (1) leveled tracking, in which ELs are overrepresented in lower-level classes
and underrepresented in upper-level classes; and (2) exclusionary tracking, in which ELs are
excluded from core academic content-area classes, particularly English language arts. English
learners may have inferior access to courses because of lower levels of academic preparation,
institutional constraints due to limited resources,lower English proiciency,and/or the require-
ment of designated English-language development instruction which often removes one or more
periods from students’ schedules. Contends that federal, state, and local education authorities
should limit the conditions under which districts can delay access to academic content and
should provide resources to support these initiatives.
Vaughn,S.,Martinez,L.R.,Wanzek,J.,Roberts,G.,Swanson,E.,& Fall,A.M.(2017).Improving
content knowledge and comprehension for English language learners: Findings from a random-
ized control trial. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109, 22–34.
Describes a study utilizing a within-teacher experimental design to test the effectiveness of a
reading comprehension and social studies content knowledge intervention with eighth-grade
English language learners. Students in 18 social studies classes were randomly assigned to
treatment (n = 845) and control (n = 784) conditions. Treatment classrooms received an ELL-
modiied version of Promoting Adolescents’ Comprehension of Text (PACT). Multiple-level
regression analyses of students nested in classes and classes nested in teachers revealed that ELLs
in the treatment condition outperformed ELLs in the control condition on researcher-created
measures of content knowledge (ES = .40) and content reading comprehension (ES = .20). No
signiicant difference was found on the distal,standardized measure of reading comprehension.
Effects for content knowledge measures (but not the other two measures) were moderated by
the proportion of ELLs in the class, with content knowledge gains decreasing for both ELLs and
non-ELLs when the proportion of ELLs increased above 12%.
Ardasheva,Y., & Tretter, T. R. (2017). Developing science-speciic, technical vocabulary of high
school newcomer English learners. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingual-
ism, 20, 252–271.
Baker,D.L.,Burns,D.,Kame’enui,E.J.,Smolkowski,K.,& Baker,S.K.(2016).Does supplemental
instruction support the transition from Spanish to English reading instruction for irst-grade
English learners at risk of reading dificulties? Learning Disability Quarterly, 39, 226–239.
Bauer,E.B.,Presiado,V.,& Colomer,S.(2016).Writing through partnership: Fostering translan-
guaging in children who are emergent bilinguals. Journal of Literacy Research, 49, 10–37.
Burns, M. K., Frederick, A., Helman, L., Pulles, S. M., McComas, J. J., & Aguilar, L. (2016). Re-
lationship between language proiciency and growth during reading interventions. Journal of
Educational Research, 110, 581–588.
Cole, M. W., David, S., & Jiménez, R. T. (2016). Collaborative translation: Negotiating student
investment in culturally responsive pedagogy. Language Arts, 93, 430–443.
Compton-Lilly, C., Papoi, K., Venegas, P., Hamman, L., & Schwabenbauer, B. (2016). Intersec-
tional identity negotiation: The case of young immigrant children. Journal of Literacy Research,
49, 115–140.
González,N.(2016).Imagining literacy equity:Theorizing lows of community practices.Literacy
Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 65(1), 69–93.
Gorter,D.,& Cenoz,J.(2017).Language education policy and multilingual assessment.Language
and Education, 31, 231–248.
Guerrettaz,A.M.,& Zahler,T.(2016).Black Lives Matter in TESOL: De silencing race in a second
language academic literacy course. TESOL Quarterly, 51, 193–207.

Hopewell, S., Butvilofsky, S., & Escamilla, K. (2016). Complementing the Common Core with
holistic biliteracy. Journal of Education, 196(2), 89–100.
Hsu, L. S. J., Ip, K. I., Arredondo, M. M., Tardif, T., & Kovelman, I. (2016). Simultaneous acqui-
sition of English and Chinese impacts children’s reliance on vocabulary, morphological and
phonological awareness for reading in English. International Journal of Bilingual Education and
Bilingualism. Advance online publication. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/
rbeb20/current
Li,M.,& Zhu,W.(2017).Good or bad collaborative wiki writing: Exploring links between group
interactions and writing products. Journal of Second Language Writing, 35, 38–53.
Ma, S., Anderson, R. C., Lin, T. J., Zhang, J., Morris, J. A., Nguyen-Jahiel, K., Miller, B. W., Jadal-
lah, M., Scott, T., Sun, J., & Grabow, K. (2017). Instructional inluences on English language
learners’ storytelling. Learning and Instruction, 49, 64–80.
MacSwan, J. (2017). A multilingual perspective on translanguaging. American Educational
Research Journal, 54, 167–201.
Pennycook, A. (2017). Translanguaging and semiotic assemblages. International Journal of
Multilingualism, 14, 269–282.
Pyle, D., Pyle, N., Lignugaris/Kraft, B., Duran, L., & Akers, J. (2017). Academic effects of peer-
mediated interventions with English language learners: A research synthesis. Review of Educa-
tional Research, 87, 103–133.
Rowe, D. W., & Miller, M. E. (2016). Designing for diverse classrooms: Using iPads and digital
cameras to compose eBooks with emergent bilingual/biliterate four-year-olds. Journal of Early
Childhood Literacy, 16, 425–472.
Stornaiuolo, A., Smith, A., & Phillips, N. C. (2016). Developing a transliteracies framework for
a connected world. Journal of Literacy Research, 49, 68–91.
Vangsnes, Ø. A., Söderlund, G. B., & Blekesaune, M. (2017). The effect of bidialectal literacy on
school achievement. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 20, 346–361.
Writing
This year, contributors to this section focused on studies of writing instruction and writing assess-
ment primarily in secondary classrooms, with some focus on elementary and college-level writing as
well.Trends in writing research indicate an emphasis on linguistically diverse students, academically
marginalized students, and students identified as struggling writers. The section also includes three
national surveys, one focused on writing methods courses in teacher preparation programs, one
focused on writing tasks in secondary science classrooms, and one large-scale document analysis of
writing assessment. (Jessica Dockter Tierney, lead contributor)
Anderson, K. T., Steward, O. G., & Kachorsky, D. (2017). Seeing academically marginalized
students’multimodal designs from a position of strength.Written Communication, 34, 104–134.
Explores how secondary students, academically marginalized by a “normal technical” track in
Singapore, composed multimodal texts. Draws on data from 14 class sessions held over 9 weeks
to analyze how multimodal texts positioned students as knowers and creators—a departure from
normal technical curriculum guidelines. Discusses three cases that illustrate students’informa-
tive, persuasive, and seditious enactments of authority. Emphasizes that multimodal texts can
help academically marginalized students transform their ways of being in the classroom,at least
temporarily. Calls for further research that foregrounds such students’ successes (rather than
their failures or “surprising exceptions”) while challenging deicit discourses.

Behizadeh,N.,& Pang,M.E.(2016).Awaiting a new wave: The status of state writing assessment
in the United States. Assessing Writing, 29, 25–41.
Investigates the current status of state writing assessment practices across the United States,
focusing on (1) assessment formats and contents and (2) the locations of assessment scoring.
Gathers data from oficial state websites and other credible sources and, when possible, receives
conirmation from state representatives.Through document analysis,inds that the vast majority
of states (92%) were assessing writing through essays without allowing students to access outside
resources. Also inds that all states, except New York, scored assessments externally, through
testing agencies or a central evaluation center. Urges greater use of direct sociological models
of assessment, as well as increased autonomy and support for teachers.
Drew, S. V., Olinghouse, N. G., Faggella-Luby, M., & Welsh, M. E. (2017). Framework for dis-
ciplinary writing in science grades 6–12: A national survey. Journal of Educational Psychology.
Advance online publication.Retrieved from http://psycnet.apa.org/PsycARTICLES/journal/edu
Describes survey results among a random sample (N = 287) of grade 6–12 science teachers to
investigate the state of writing instruction in the United States. Reports on teachers’ purposes
for teaching writing, the types of writing tasks they gave most often, use of evidence-based
writing practices, and accommodations made for struggling writers in science classes. Most
participants included writing as part of the inquiry process, but the writing tasks they gave to
students included little composition. Observes that surveyed teachers rarely (once per year or
once per quarter) included evidence-based practices for teaching writing or modiied writing
instruction and tasks for struggling writers.Examines results against a theoretical framework for
research-based disciplinary writing in science.Recommends four changes to practice to improve
writing instruction in science: considering diverse and distinct purposes aligned with science
education goals, assigning writing tasks to communicate deep learning to authentic audiences,
using evidence-based practices to teach writing in science,and using evidence-based adaptations
to support struggling science writers.
Furey,W.,Marcotte,A.,Wells,C.,& Hintze,J.(2017).The effects of supplemental sentence-level
instruction for fourth-grade students identiied as struggling writers.Reading &Writing Quarter-
ly.Advance online publication.Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/urwl20/current
Examines the impact of a sentence-level intervention (described as a sentence construction
strategy with self-regulation procedures) on the writing skills of fourth-grade students identiied
as struggling writers by determining whether students in the intervention group outperformed
their predicted scores on assessments of writing conventions and story quality. Struggling writ-
ers improved their ability to use accepted orthographic and grammatical conventions during
composition (e.g., including coordinating conjunctions other than and, using introductory
phrases and clauses,excluding fragments and run-on sentences,etc.) but did not improve in the
broader domain of story quality (e.g.,coherent plot,appropriate organizational structure,etc.).
Argues that interventions targeting sentence-level conventions including syntax/grammar and
mechanics, as well as explicit instruction that addresses planning and revision, are necessary to
support more complex writing tasks among struggling writers.
Hsin, L., Snow, C., & Hsin, L. (2017). Social perspective taking: A beneit of bilingualism in
academic writing. Reading and Writing, 30, 1193–1214.
Examines social perspective-taking acts in the argumentative essays of language-minority and
English-only students in grades 4–6.Participants included 41 language-minority students from
19 classrooms, each paired with an English-only student (using variable optimal matching).
Finds that language-minority students’ writing surpassed English-only students’ work on two
measures of perspective-taking: perspective knowledge and perspective articulation.Emphasizes
the role perspective-taking plays in argumentative writing and the advantage bilingual students
have in enacting this cognitive skill.

Jafarigohar, M., & Mortazavi, M. (2016). The impact of scaffolding mechanisms on EFL learn-
ers’ individual and socially shared metacognition in writing. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33,
211–225.
Through a process-genre approach, investigates how two scaffolding mechanisms (structur-
ing and problematizing) potentially affect EFL writers’ metacognition. Researchers divided a
cohort of 240 female Iranian EFL learners into eight treatment groups, and collected learners’
think-alouds that were audio-recorded during writing tasks, as well as responses to a pre/
post-test survey on metacognition. After a battery of statistical analyses, they determined that
the two scaffolding mechanisms enhanced learners’ metacognition on both individual and
inter-individual levels. Underlines the instructional value of the two scaffolding mechanisms,
particularly in combination.
Jesson, R., & Rosedale, N. (2016). How teachers might open dialogic spaces in writing instruc-
tion. International Journal of Educational Research, 80, 164–176.
Examines how teachers provide opportunities to incorporate voice and the interanimation of
voices in writing lessons. Researchers analyzed transcripts and videos of writing lessons from
an observational study of 15 classrooms to develop a taxonomy of dialogic sites (instructional
events) and, within those sites, various sources of voice (present or not), inding that few sites
in the lessons offered the possibility of interanimation of voice. The most generative sources
of voice included the voices of texts, social voices, and the voices of students’ textual histories.
Concludes that dialogicality allows teachers to see how the shape of the dialogic space created
in a classroom can invite or constrain potential voices, and thus resources for learning to write.
Lenters, K. (2016). Riding the lines and overwriting in the margins: Affect and multimodal
literacy practices. Journal of Literacy Research, 48, 280–316.
Explores the multimodal literacy practices of one student across his home-school-community
terrain.Uses critical instance case study methodology and assemblage theory to map the practices
of 11-year-old Nigel as he disregards school literacies and engages in other personal creative
practices. Analysis of Nigel’s stick-igure illustrations and online play reveals his complex en-
gagement in multimodality to overwrite “oficial” school documents, opening new trajectories
for his writing life. Calls for a sociomaterial perspective on literacies, emphasizing affect and
the body, to understand students’ dynamic literacy practices.
Myers,J.,Scales,R.Q.,Grisham,D.L.,Wolsey,T.D.,Dismuke,S.,Smetana,L.,Yoder,K.K.,Ikpeze,
C.,Ganske,K.,& Martin,S.(2016).What about writing?A national exploratory study of writing
instruction in teacher preparation programs. Literacy Research and Instruction, 55, 309–330.
Analyzes online survey results from 63 teacher educators in the ield of literacy from 50 uni-
versities across the United States to determine how writing instruction is taught to preservice
teachers in university-based teacher education programs.Finds that stand-alone writing methods
courses are rarely (28%) offered in teacher preparation programs,that writing methods are most
often (72%) embedded in reading methods courses, and that many teacher educators (37%)
lack conidence in teaching writing methods courses. Shares results of qualitative, open-ended
survey questions, including texts, topics and techniques, and technological tools used to teach
writing methods,as well as preservice teachers’own identiications of themselves as writers who
teach.Calls for greater attention to and time for writing methods courses in teacher preparation
programs and highlights the need for continued professional learning.
Nokes, J. D. (2017). Exploring patterns of historical thinking through eighth-grade students’
argumentative writing. Journal of Writing Research, 8, 437–467.
Examines patterns in 427 eighth-grade students’ argumentative writing to assess historical
thinking skills (document sourcing). The author developed a ive-level spectrum indicating the
degree of sophistication of students’ document sourcing in their writing. Scores varied widely,

and many students (41%) did not write about the source of documents at all.However,position
on the spectrum (quality of writing about sources) correlated positively with the frequency of
sourcing in students’ writing. Results suggest a connection between students’ historical think-
ing and their strategy use in argumentative writing. Findings can be used to develop written
assessments of historical thinking.
Oppenheimer, D., Zaromb, F., Pomerantz, J. R., Williams, J. C., & Park, Y. S. (2017). Improve-
ment of writing skills during college: A multi-year cross-sectional and longitudinal study of
undergraduate writing performance. Assessing Writing, 32, 12–27.
Uses nine years of data (2000–2008) from 303 Rice University students to assess whether their
writing improved during their college years. Researchers developed constructs to test perfor-
mance in expository and persuasive writing, and scored student writing using 10 experienced
and certiied raters.Through cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses,inds signiicant growth
in students’ writing performance over time, with no interactions between students’ major, de-
mographics, and writing improvement. Underlines the need for research at other institutions
that includes control groups as well as state-of-the-art measures of higher education outcomes.
Philippakos, Z. A., & MacArthur, C. A. (2016). The effects of giving feedback on the persuasive
writing of fourth- and ifth-grade students. Reading Research Quarterly, 51, 419–433.
Examines the effects of giving feedback on the quality of the reviewer’s own persuasive writing.
Researchers used genre-speciic criteria to train fourth- and ifth-grade students (N = 145) in
evaluation, then randomly assigned them to three groups: reviewer (reads essays, rates them,
and gives written suggestions), reader control (reads the same essay but does not evaluate), and
time control (reads narratives or picture books to control for time and effort). Effects on revi-
sion were assessed by having all students revise two essays written at pretest, and transfer was
assessed by having all students write and revise essays on new topics. In an immediate posttest,
the reviewer-group students better addressed opposing arguments,were more likely to conclude
with a message to the reader, and produced better-quality inal essays than both control groups,
even though they did not receive any feedback. Suggests that practice reviewing papers by un-
known peers may be an effective way to prepare students for peer review.
Regan, K., Evmenova,A. S., Boykin,A., Sacco, D., Good, K.,Ahn, S.Y., MacVittie, N., & Hughes,
M. D. (2016). Supporting struggling writers with class-wide teacher implementation of a
computer-based graphic organizer. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33, 428–448.
Investigates the effects of a computer-based graphic organizer (CBGO) with an embedded
mnemonic related to essay parts and self-regulated learning strategies on both the quantity and
quality of persuasive essays written by sixth- and seventh-grade struggling writers after their own
classroom teachers delivered the intervention. Examines the number of words, sentences, and
transition words, as well as writing-quality scores in three phases: writing without the CBGO
(baseline), writing with the CBGO (intervention), and writing on the computer when the
CBGO had been removed (maintenance). Finds that all students improved the quality of their
writing, and most also increased the quantity of their writing. Calls for more writing research
with teachers as interventionists, while also naming the contextual challenges (i.e., the need
for intensive professional development for teachers to develop comfort with the technology,
instructional materials, and intervention).
Soliday, M., & Trainor, J. S. (2016). Rethinking regulation in the age of the literacy machine.
College Composition and Communication, 68, 125–151.
Examines how audit culture, an inluence on the spread of outcomes-based education, can
regulate college students’ writing. As part of a larger institutional study, researchers analyzed
interviews with 12 professors who taught writing-intensive courses,interviews with 20 university
juniors and seniors, and more than 600 pages of writing assignments and teaching materials.

Highlights how students experienced audit-culture regulation in divergent ways: as a process
of following rules and regulations on the one hand, and as conditions that allow for developing
authorship on the other. Encourages instructors to challenge audit culture by orienting their
teaching around craft and by establishing, along with their students,“artisanal identity.”
Troia, G. A., & Graham, S. (2016). Common Core writing and language standards and aligned
state assessments: A national survey of teacher beliefs and attitudes. Reading and Writing, 29,
1719–1743.
Reports on a survey of 482 teachers in grades 3–8 from across the United States about their views
on their state’s version of the Common Core writing and language standards and adopted writing
assessment, their preparation to teach writing, and their self-eficacy beliefs related to teaching
writing. Most teachers felt that the adopted standards were more rigorous than previous ones,
offered clear expectations that could be easily translated into lessons for students,and had forced
them to focus on writing more frequently. However, one in ive teachers did not know about
the standards, and those who did perceived the new writing and language standards to be too
many to cover,lacking focus on key aspects of writing development,inappropriate for struggling
writers, and dificult to implement without suficient professional development. Results were
similar regarding teachers’ perceptions of their state’s writing test: a third of teachers did not
know about the test,and of those who did,a majority believed that state writing tests were more
rigorous than previous ones, neglected aspects of writing development, did not accommodate
writers with diverse abilities, and required more time and professional development to prepare
students and to understand how to use data to identify students’ writing needs.
Woolpert, D. (2016). Doing more with less: The impact of lexicon on dual-language learners’
writing. Reading and Writing, 29, 1865–1887.
Investigates how a reduced English vocabulary affects writing in English for dual-language learner
(DLL) children. Analyzes results of standardized tests of decoding and vocabulary as well as a
written narrative administered to 100 Spanish-speaking DLLs and 100 of their monolingual
classmates. Finds that DLL and monolingual children performed comparably on measures of
productivity (written output) and complexity (linguistic sophistication),but differed in multiple
measures of accuracy (how well writing followed written conventions) and vocabulary scores.
When controlled for vocabulary differences,results show no difference in accuracy.Suggests that
improving DLL children’s vocabulary could improve their writing in multiple areas.
Anson,I.G.,& Anson,C.M.(2017).Assessing peer and instructor response to writing:A corpus
analysis from an expert survey. Assessing Writing, 33, 12–24.
Aram, D., & Besser-Biron, S. (2017). Parents’ support during different writing tasks: A com-
parison between parents of precocious readers, preschoolers, and school-age children. Reading
and Writing, 30, 363–386.
Arcon, N., Klein, P. D., & Dombroski, J. D. (2017). Effects of dictation, speech to text, and hand-
writing on the written composition of elementary school English language learners. Reading
and Writing Quarterly. Advance online publication. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.
com/toc/urwl20/current
Asaro-Saddler, K., Arcidiacono, M. B., & Morris, D. M. (2017). Instructional practice for stu-
dents with autism spectrum and related disorders: Exploring the teaching of writing in two
self-contained classrooms. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33, 171–186.
Calkin,A.B.(2017).Writingonwriting.InternationalJournalofEducationalResearch.Advanceon-
line publication.Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/08830355?sdc=1
Camacho, A., & Alves, R. A. (2017). Fostering parental involvement in writing: Development
and testing of the program Cultivating Writing. Reading and Writing, 30, 253–277.

Carter-Veale, W. Y., Tull, R. G., Rutledge, J. C., & Joseph, L. N. (2016). The dissertation house
model:Doctoral student experiences coping and writing in a shared knowledge community.CBE
– Life Sciences Education, 15(3). Retrieved from http://www.lifescied.org/content/15/3/ar34.full
Chong, I. (2017). How students’ ability levels inluence the relevance and accuracy of their
feedback to peers: A case study. Assessing Writing, 31, 13–23.
Collins, J. L., Lee, J., Fox, J. D., & Madigan, T. P. (2017). Bringing together reading and writing:
An experimental study of writing intensive reading comprehension in low-performing urban
elementary schools. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 311–332.
Crossley, S. A., Muldner, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2016). Idea generation in student writing:
Computational assessment and links to successful writing.Written Communication,33, 328–354.
Gere, A. R., Hutton, L., Keating, B., Knutson, A. V., Silver, N., & Toth, C. (2017). Mutual adjust-
ments: Learning from and responding to transfer student writers. College English, 79, 333–357.
Green, D. F. (2016). Expanding the dialogue on writing assessment at HBCUs: Foundational
assessment concepts and legacies of historically black colleges and universities. College English,
79, 152–173.
Hart, A. D., & Thompson, R. (2016). Veterans in the writing classroom: Three programmatic
approaches to facilitate the transition from the military to higher education.College Composition
and Communication, 68, 345–371.
Hebert,M.A.,& Powell,S.R.(2016).Examining fourth-grade mathematics writing: Features of
organization,mathematics vocabulary,and mathematical representations.Reading andWriting,
29(7), 1511-1537.
Hyland, K., & Jiang, F. (2016). Change of attitude? A diachronic study of stance. Written Com-
munication, 33, 251–273.
Jesson, R., Fontich, X., & Myhill, D. (2016). Creating dialogic spaces: Talk as a mediational tool
in becoming a writer. International Journal of Educational Research, 80, 155–163.
Kim, Y.-S. G., Schatschneider, C., Wanzek, J., Gatlin, B., & Al, O. S. (2017). Writing evaluation:
Rater and task effects on the reliability of writing scores for children in grades 3 and 4. Reading
and Writing, 30, 1287–1310.
Kirkpatrick, L. C., & Klein, P. D. (2016). High-achieving high school students’ strategies for
writing from Internet-based sources of information. Journal of Writing Research, 8, 1–47.
Kohnen, A. M. (2017). Middle and high school teacher responses to an authentic argument
writing seminar. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60, 433–441.
MacGillivray, L., Sauceda Curwen, M., & Ardell, A. (2016). “No matter how you word it, it’s
for me”: Mandated writing practices in a homeless shelter for mothers in recovery. Journal of
Literacy Research, 48, 192–220.
McGrail, E., & Behizadeh, N. (2017). K–12 multimodal assessment and interactive audiences:
An exploratory analysis of existing frameworks. Assessing Writing, 31, 24–38.
Medimorec,S.,& Risko,E.F.(2017).Pauses in written composition: On the importance of where
writers pause. Reading and Writing, 30, 1267–1285.
Moore,N.S.,& MacArthur,C.A.(2016).Student use of automated essay evaluation technology
during revision. Journal of Writing Research, 8, 149–175.
Olson, C. B., Matuchniak, T., Chung, H. Q., Stumpf, R., & Farkas, G. (2017). Reducing achieve-
ment gaps in academic writing for Latinos and English learners in grades 7–12. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 109, 1–21.
Panero, N. S. (2016). Progressive mastery through deliberate practice: A promising approach
for improving writing. Improving Schools, 19, 229–245.

Perin, D., Lauterbach, M., Raufman, J., & Kalamkarian, H. S. (2017). Text-based writing of low-
skilled postsecondary students: Relation to comprehension,self-eficacy and teacher judgments.
Reading and Writing, 30, 887–915.
Price, J. R., Lacey, E. A., Weaver, V. L., & Ogletree, B. T. (2016). An intervention strategy for
teaching a student with ASD to write sentences in response to prompts. Reading & Writing
Quarterly, 33, 449–464.
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