Kelleen Toohey

Simon Fraser University · Faculty of Education

In this paper we propose that posthuman and decolonizing perspectives on difference might provide a foundation for English as an additional language (EAL) teacher education programs. We briefly examine current outcomes of schooling for EAL students and current teacher education in Canada, showing the necessity and urgency of developing practices fo...

This book mobilizes concepts associated with new materialism, posthumanism, and relational ontologies with respect to languages and literacies education. With accessible and rich stories about pedagogical practice, the book stimulates other educators to engage in similar “experiments,” and assesses how these concepts offer new ways of understanding...

In this article, we explain how recent research on multilingualism, multilingual education, and multimodality informs our thinking about the use of ScribJab, a multilingual iPad application and website (ScribJab.com), which enables users to compose, illustrate, and narrate stories in two languages. Drawing on excerpts from ethnographic observations...

Investment and the material in language-learning situations To illustrate how theories of the material (Barad, 2007; Ingold, 2011; Latour, 2005) inform our more recent research, we provide a brief summary of some results from two video production projects involving bilingual and multilingual children learning English. We propose that the analysis o...

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

In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of children, some of whom were multilingual and others monolingual in English, used iPads to make videos. We discuss the practices, social relations, objects and material conditions that emerged as the children engaged in this production, with special atten...

The promise of “21st century learning” is that digital technologies will transform traditional learning and mobilize skills deemed necessary in an emerging digital culture. In two case studies of video making, one in a Grade 4 classroom, and one in an adult literacy setting, the authors develop the concept of “production pedagogies” as complex mult...

Nous examinons, dans cet article, deux projets de littératie permettant de faire le pont entre les sphères d’activité scolaires, familiales et communautaires. Le premier projet portait sur l’échange international de vidéos produits par des jeunes bilingues et plurilingues du primaire et du secondaire. Le deuxième projet impliquait des apprenants de...

This paper represents preliminary efforts to understand what Actor-Network Theory (ANT) might contribute to our interest in analyzing what we hope are enhanced educational practices for second language (L2) learners. This theory encourages us to examine more closely the things, the tools, the non-human actants that are active in particular educatio...

We describe videomaking projects in Canada, India, and Mexico in which second language learners were asked to show the children in the other countries what their lives were like. We consider how this form of expression might contribute to second language learning and allow children to make use of in and out-of-school resources. We also raise questi...

This article briefly reviews an increasingly large body of research that seeks to understand the relationship between language-learner identities and their sociocultural worlds. Rather than seeing learner identities as developed individually and as expressive of the essence of individuals, current identity theorists have argued that identities are...

In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and posi...

In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators- efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents- stories of life in India...

We describe a collaborative project in which university researchers, teachers and Grade 4–5 English language learners (ELLs) investigated the sociohistorical contexts and practices in which the ELLs participate, through a ‘community scan’. Many observers have argued that schools and teachers have such minimal knowledge of the outside-school lives o...

Patricia Duff's recently published Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics is a welcome addition to the methodological literature in applied linguistics. In this relatively short book (248 pages), Duff provides readers (likely graduate students as well as researchers) with a comprehensive introduction to case study's social-science beginnings, i...

Reporting on the research collaborations of a group of teachers, graduate students and a university professor, this book weaves together their collective insights about how classrooms might be better for students of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, abilities and socio-economic circumstances, and better for teachers as well. It also show...

Cet article débat de l'établissement d'une éducation unilingue anglaise dans les écoles autochtones de l'Ontario nord. Cet établissement a coincidé avec un accroissement du contrôle gouvernemental fédéral sur les écoles autochtones, ainsi que sur une implication accrue du fédéral dans la vie communautaire en général, à partir des années 50. Une éva...

Data from ESL students' records in Vancouver are examined in the light of the BC Ministry of Education's claim that ESL high school students are more successful than students whose first language is English. We argue that the academic achievement of well-to-do students whose parents are skilled workers or entrepreneurs may mask the completion rates...

This article explores definitions of reading comprehension, research on how reading comprehension is assessed, and issues in assessing the reading comprehension of English language learners (ELLs). By way of illustration, I present aspects of the literacy practices of an intermediate-grade ELL in a suburban school of the Lower Mainland of British C...

This article explores definitions of reading comprehension, research on how reading comprehension is assessed, and issues in assessing the reading comprehension of English language learners (ELLs). By way of illustration, I present aspects of the literacy practices of an intermediate-grade ELL in a suburban school of the Lower Mainland of British C...

In this chapter, Toohey, Day, and Manyak discuss theoretical perspectives and empirical research that advance our understanding of the complex social processes involved in young children’s acquisition of ESL. In the first two sections, they examine post-structuralist and sociocultural theories of identity and of mediated practice, highlighting cons...

Elsa Auerbach (Chapter 7) points out many of the contradictions that are involved when we say we are committed to increasing learner autonomy in our teaching. As I read the volume, I was alert to the wide diversity in the ways authors used the term autonomy. As predicted by Benson (1997), some of the authors of these chapters see learner autonomy a...

In this paper, we explore the intersection of practice, identity, resources and literacy central to the New Literacy Studies and recent second language research informed by sociocultural theories of learning and language. Drawing on the construct figured worlds of literacy that describe how representations of literacy practices invoked in relation...

Much research on reading and writing in schools continues to focus on individual cognitive skills. In contrast, investigations of literacy-learning in out-of-school settings have often taken a socio-cultural perspective, situating reading and writing in social relations and cultural institutions. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of studi...

This important volume on the critical pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture. Critical pedagogies are instructional approaches aimed at transforming existing social relations in the interest of greater equity in schools and communities. This paperback edition on the...

This important volume on the critical pedagogical approach addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture. Critical pedagogies are instructional approaches aimed at transforming existing social relations in the interest of greater equity in schools and communities. This paperback edition on the...

Second language learning literature (and discourse in other fields) often constructs learners as individuals who act, think, and learn in accordance with innate, specifiable characteristics, independently of the social, historical, cultural and political-economic situations in which they live. From this perspective, these ‘autonomous’ learners have...

This volume brings teaching theory and teaching practice together in a mutually informative way. TESOL Quarterly readers and writers discuss, in the form of written dialogue, the influence each has had on the other. These readers and writers are teacher researchers, teacher educators, and research analysts. Their dialogues demonstrate that practica...

Using Bourdieu’s theory of different types of capital and social “fields,” this paper analyzes one curriculum model, the ESL Co-op program, which is designed to meet the needs of immigrant adolescents who are primarily dependent on their first language. The program couples instruction in English as a second language (ESL) with work experience. ESL...

This article concerns how peer disputes are involved in classroom language learning. Drawing from data collected in a longitudinal study of six young English language learners in Canadian public school classrooms, the article shows how two girls (one of Polish background and one of Punjabi Sikh background) differentially engage in disputes. Dispute...

Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate. The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a...

Researchers followed 2 language minority children through their first 2 years of school, examining the influence of their parents and of school practices. Two cohorts of minority language students were followed from the beginning of kindergarten to the end of first grade. Students were observed once a week in their classrooms. Researchers kept fiel...

This paper examines classroom activities engaged in by more and less experienced speakers of English and discusses how relationships between those speakers are implicated in their speech activities. The pivotal role of social interaction in learning has been well formulated by sociocultural researchers, including Vygotsky (1978) and, more recently,...

This article is based on data derived from a four-year ethnographic study that followed two cohorts of ESL learners enrolled in mainstream Canadian primary classrooms from kindergarten through grade 2. It draws on sociocultural theory, based on the work of the Russian scholars Vygotsky and Bakhtin and developed in North America by Lave and Wenger (...

This article describes a longitudinal ethnographic research project in a Grade 1 classroom enrolling L2 learners and Anglophones. Using a community-of-practice perspective rarely applied in L2 research, the author examines three classroom practices that she argues contribute to the construction of L2 learners as individuals and as such reinforce tr...

The TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, we asked two teacher educators the following question: How has qualitative research informed your work in teacher education?

This paper examines pedagogical responses to the documentation of the features of non-standard dialects in the United States, Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean over about the last 20 years. It is argued that, beyond demonstrating the universal principle that all dialects are structurally equal, rule-governed, and complex, there have been few posit...

In many northern communities in Canada, children begin their schooling speaking mainly or only a Native language. In many of these communities, English or French is rarely used in community contexts and the school is sometimes one of the few places where one of Canada's official languages is spoken. The study reported here concerns an isolated nort...

Providing background information on a dispute between the Holdeman Mennonites and two Alberta farming communities in which the Mennonites established schools, this article seeks to explain the differences in conflict level through analysis of ideological and structural differences in the two communities. (JC)

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Alberta, 1977. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-79). Microfiche of typescript.