Sarah J. Mccarthey

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Through a qualitative, collective case study design, the study investigated children’s demonstration of agency in composing writing projects in three elementary classrooms within one school. Researchers conducted interviews with the teachers, observed classroom writing instruction, interviewed children individually or in small focus groups, and col...

Literacy scholars have called for writing instruction to promote civic engagement, student agency, and multimodal composing. This study addressed this call by describing a research‐practice partnership to reimagine writing instruction in a high school English course by incorporating human‐centered design challenges. Using case study methods, we des...

While recent research has examined cross-national curriculum and teacher preparation for second language writing, little research has investigated the influences of the pandemic and other social changes in preparing teachers to teach writing. The purpose of the study was to understand the preparation of teachers to teach writing, the factors that i...

Co-teaching provides opportunities for children that cannot be produced by a solo teacher. However, building relationships between co-teachers, particularly in a cross-cultural setting, can be difficult. This study of early years teachers in a Hong Kong international school aims to consider the elements that facilitate a strong and productive co-te...

The collection of papers represented in the Integrative Research Review responds to the question: How can we study children’s/youth’s out of school experiences to inform classroom practices? Using a variety of lenses to address the question, the authors consider how to understand, respond to, and serve children and youth in a variety of contexts. D...

In this chapter, we outline the historical context, definitions, and the underlying theory of translanguaging before identifying several critiques. The literature review includes studies of translanguaging within formal educational settings and then focuses on research conducted in families and communities (informal settings). We analyze examples f...

Building from the concept ‘sponsors of literacy’, the authors revisit three empirical studies to argue for mobilising notions of sponsorship beyond fixed conceptions of individual sponsors and literacy to lifewide perspectives that take into account sponsoring relations across the broader learning lives of youth. The authors take up the theoretical...

Several recent studies examine social aspects of online peer review writing environments, but little of this work focuses on how resulting social interactions affect student writing over time. Seeking to trace explicit and covert dialogic influences across middle school writers’ work, we analyze classroom texts created online to show how teachers’...

The qualitative study shows how 20 teachers from 4 districts in the same state enacted mandated school-wide writing curricula. Analyses of the observations and interviews revealed that 4 teachers were faithfully following the district-adopted curriculum, 4 rejected it, and 12 teachers adapted the curriculum to meet their students’ needs. The teache...

The study focuses on adolescents’ responses to their 8th grade, language arts/social studies teacher’s attempts to infuse instruction with networked, digital technology. Drawn from third space theory (Bhabha, 1994), we identify three stances that students took up—accepting, leveraging, and repurposing. Students often expressed an accepting stance t...

The study focused on two kindergarten teachers who were observed and interviewed throughout one school year. The contrasting cases demonstrate how two teachers drew upon their experiences with teaching writing and professional development (PD) with differing outcomes for their instruction and underlying beliefs about writing. Dana, an experienced k...

Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prioritize what to revise. Yet, this process can be both daunting and difficult. This study looks at how students used a semantic concept mapping tool to re-present the content and organization of their initial draft of an informational text. We examine the...

Rubrics have become popular tools for assessing student writing both in classroom and standardized testing environments. Rubric construction and efficacy, however, is a topic that has been largely sidestepped in the literature and in teacher professional development. Composing an effective rubric — particularly for instructional or formative contex...

This study of 29 teachers from four states in the US investigated teachers' orientations towards writing and the influences on their beliefs. Through interviews about writing instruction, the researchers found significant differences between teachers in high and low-income schools. While teachers in high-income schools valued rhetorical style, deve...

The editors introduce the articles in this issue and reflect on their editorship.

The editors introduce the four research articles in the issue.

Using Ivanic's (2004) framework, the study of 20 elementary teachers examines the relationships among teachers' beliefs about writing, their instructional practices, and contextual factors. While the district-adopted curriculum reflected specific discourses, teachers' beliefs and practices reflected a combination of discourses. The nature of the pr...

This study of 29 teachers from four states in the US investigated teachers' orientations towards writing and the influences on their beliefs. Through interviews about writing instruction, the researchers found significant differences between teachers in high and low-income schools. While teachers in high-income schools valued rhetorical style, deve...

In this chapter, the authors present a case study of one writer, Tom, to uncover how his writing was mediated by school-level and individual factors. The online writing environment had three major affordances for Tom in this 8th grade classroom: the online writing environment increased Tom's access to peer response, motivated him write to a higher...

The editors introduce this issue of RTE.

This issue coincides with the Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, whose theme, “Reading the Past, Writing the Future,” celebrates NCTE’s 100th anniversary as the Anglophone world’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to the improvement of the teaching of English. The expansion of publications under the NCTE impri...

The study investigated 29 third- and fourth-grade teachers from four US states to understand their approaches to writing instruction and influences on their instruction. Through classroom observations and interviews with teachers, the authors identified four approaches to writing instruction: writer's workshop, traditional skills, genre-based instr...

This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of emerging writing assessment technologies. Instead of providing a comprehensive review of each program, we take a deliberately selective approach using three key understandings about writing as a framework for analysis: writing is a socially situated activity; writing is functionally and formally...

This paper explores developments in technology-mediated writing environments that may support new forms of formative assessment and the closer relation of formative to summative assessment. Not only might these provide more learner-responsive and effective assessment of writing, but they may also support the assessment of disciplinary knowledge emb...

At universities, scholars in English studies manage what Gieryn (1999) called disciplinary boundary work (the rhetorical making and policing of boundaries that construct the discipline and its institutional formations as different from other disciplines and social formations) through categorical contrasts, including: literary criticism vs. writing...

The editors introduce the three research studies and the Standpoints essay in this issue, all of which deal with the relations between digital technology and the development of adolescent literacy.

The study uses Foucault's framework of governmentality to understand the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on teachers' writing instruction and attitudes toward writing in high- and low-income schools. Using interviews and observations of 18 teachers, the study identified four themes: emphasis on testing, curricular effects, awareness of lower-...

We look forward to building on and expanding the role of RTE in shaping and disseminating research on writing, reading, literacy, literary response, and literature education.

The study focused on five elementary Mandarin-speaking students’ development as writers over a two-year period in US classrooms. Mandarin speakers who came to the US in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th grades demonstrated some language loss in their Chinese writing. We found differences in terms of sentence complexity, character complexity, rhetorical features, an...

This study of English language learners, six Mandarin-speaking and five Spanish-speaking elementary students, revealed that students engaged in a variety of writing practices at home and school. A continuum of attitudes, from positive to negative, characterized students’attitudes toward writing in English and their native languages. Students’ writi...

This article explores the writing opportunities provided to Spanish-speaking and Mandarinspeaking English Language Learners at the fourth and fifth-grade level across the various classroom settings in which they participated daily: an all-English speaking classroom, an English-as-a-sccond language (ESL) classroom, and a native-language classroom. T...

In a conversation represented here in print, the authors ask why literacy theorists, researchers, and teachers should care about how readers' identities are constructed, represented, and performed during acts of reading. They share the believe that such questions are central to literacy theory and pedagogy.

As a part of a longitudinal project examining first-grade reading instruction in 4 districts across the state of Texas, this study explored the nature of students' oral narratives and the connections between teachers' instructional practices and students'narratives. Using an adaptation of Hudson & Shapiro's (1991) narrative categories, we examined...

By examining the perspectives of students and others close to them, this study of 12 fifth graders from diverse backgrounds explores the role of literacy and curriculum in identity construction. Data collection included interviews with students, parents, the teacher, and peers; classroom observations; and analyses of student writing. Analyses of th...

The authors discuss their ideas about the affect of diverse learners, classrooms, and societies on literacy teaching and learning.

Examines teacher practices and how they contribute to or deter home-school connections for diverse families. Discusses practices that deter connections; exclusionary curriculum; noninclusive participation structures; the deficit view of diverse students; practices that facilitate connections; student knowledge, background, and cultural contexts; se...

This study demonstrates the ways in which students in a multi-age, literature-based classroom were continually in the process of constructing and reconstructing their subjectivities based on the demands of the particular social setting. Using different theoretical lenses, I offer a critique of essentialist views of individuals by focusing on three...

IF; A longitudinal study of teachers in four districts across the state of Texas, we used a survey, interviews, and observations to examine changes in teacher practices related to the adoption of the new literature-based basal reader programs. Through surveys we collected the views of over 250 teachers statewide and focused on 14 teachers for a mon...

I present the cases of 5 students from diverse backgrounds and conclude that home and school are more connected for some students than for others. Home and school were tightly connected for middle-class European-American students who read at home and school, shared their writing with the class, and brought items from home to show peers. In contrast...

This study followed each of three students in several different social contexts within an elementary classroom, analyzing their discourse from different theoretical perspectives. The social construction and reconstruction of students across different classrooms, tasks, and social contexts was examined, including the influence of constructs pertaini...

Illustrates the benefits and challenges of team-teaching in a multi-age classroom by describing one school's efforts at implementing language arts instruction within an interdisciplinary approach. Discusses initiating multi-age grouping and the advantages and challenges of multi-age classrooms. Offers recommendations. (SR)

Observations of students’ and teachers’ use of metaphors in process writing instruction shed light on the role of talk in writing development.

Using a social constructivist theoretical perspective, the author investigated what students internalized from the dialogue in a process writing classroom. The study focused on four students from culturally diverse backgrounds who participated in a fifth/sixth-grade classroom in New York City. The teacher focused on the qualities of good writing an...

The authors examine the first-grade materials in five new basal programs submitted for the 1993 Texas state adoption.1 These series are compared with program materials currently in use in the state (copyright 1986/1987). The analysis focuses on features of the pupil texts (e.g., total number of words, number of unique words, readability levels, lit...

This article describes ratings and ranking by both researchers and children of the new and old basal text series and then describes categories of students’ responses to the texts. Using the perspective of engagement, the authors found that the 1993 basal reading series received higher ratings than thel986/87 series on scales measuring holistic qual...

Suggests that personal writing poses both opportunities and risks in writing classrooms. Discusses the experiences of two children in a fifth/sixth-grade writing process classroom. Notes that benefits of personal writing are opportunities for authenticity, finding voice, and a therapeutic value; whereas risks include coercion of students who are no...

This study investigated the changing practices of two teachers in conducting writing conferences with elementary students. Drawing from observational data of conferences and interview data with the teachers, the paper presents the cases of Erica, a fifth-grade teacher, and Emily, a first-grade teacher, as they incorporated the Teachers College Writ...

This paper describes three alternative perspectives--information processing, social constructivism, and Piagetian/naturalist--of reading/writing connections and suggests instructional implications influenced by the three perspectives. The paper explores each theory in terms of basic assumptions, related research, and strengths and limitations and t...

A shift in the dominant theory and practice of writing instruction, away from a focus on the written product and form of writing toward a process approach to writing, reflects the increased attention to the social context in which learning occurs and the role of language in developing literacy (Flower, 1989; Freedman, Dyson, Flower, and Chafe, 1987...

The case study describes the application of Bakhtin's theories of dialogism to the language learning of one child. The author traces the development of her son's language development from age 2 and 9 months through the age of 5 and 6 months. The findings focus on the ways in which the preschooler appropri- ated language from books, his parent's sto...

Theoretical Framework A shift in the dominant theory and practice of writing instruction, from a focus on the written product and form of writing towards a process approach to writing, reflects the increased attention given to the social context in which learning occurs and the role of language in developing literacy (Flower, 1989; Freedman, Dyson,...