This book is based on an in-depth ethnographic study of the National Adult Literacy Programme (NALP) in Malawi. It highlights the significance of exploring power and identity in literacy studies. Employing the concept of 'figured worlds' to study literacy as a social practice, the book focuses on understanding power relationships and identities in literacy practices. It illustrates how literacy identities and power relationships of some local community members continuously vary from one context to another and, in some cases, even within the same context. Using notions such as agency, artefact, resistance, shame and positioning, the book demonstrates the potential of the concept of figured worlds to address some of the questions raised within the New Literacy Studies - especially those concerning power and identity. The book also illustrates the value of an ethnographic approach in adult literacy studies, by exploring the challenges faced by the researcher in gaining access to community members' activities, and the opportunity to experience first-hand what instructors go through in facilitating adult literacy lessons.

This book examines everyday literacy in English as a foreign language (EFL). Focusing on the out-of-school literacy practices of teenagers in Athens, Greece, it challenges the notion that classrooms are the only contexts which provide exposure to English for learners. The author demonstrates that English can be a powerful resource for teenagers, as a symbolic tool granting them additional means of communication and self-expression. In doing so, she makes an original contribution to the areas of literacy, language education, and applied linguistics.

Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing process, to destroying the English language itself.
A Better Pencil puts our complex, still-evolving hate-love relationship with computers and the internet into perspective, describing how the digital revolution influences our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies differ from what came before. The book explores our use of computers as writing tools in light of the history of communication technology, a history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing technologies--not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets. Dennis Baron shows that virtually all writing implements--and even writing itself--were greeted at first with anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of handwriting." Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words, until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also explores the new genres that the computer has launched: email, the instant message, the web page, the blog, social-networking pages like MySpace and Facebook, and communally-generated texts like Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, not to mention YouTube.
Here then is a fascinating history of our tangled dealings with a wide range of writing instruments, from ancient papyrus to the modern laptop. With dozens of illustrations and many colorful anecdotes, the book will enthrall anyone interested in language, literacy, or writing.

This book provides scholars, educators, and legislators with a personal, classroom-level tour of daily life at a community college. Readers will accompany the author into the classroom as he goes about his work as an English teacher meeting with classes and corresponding with students on Blackboard and e-mail. Answering the call for "student-centered scholarship," this book blends traditional academic writing with chapters that feature a rich variety of student work, including essays, journal entries, poems, art, and responses to creative assignments. In this volume, Sullivan theorizes the modern community college as a social justice institution. By mission and mandate, the modern community college has democratized America's system of higher education and distributed hope, equity, and opportunity more broadly across the nation.

A volume in Critical Constructions: Studies on Education and Society Series Editor: Curry Stephenson Malott, Queens College/CUNY Students in public schools serving poor and working-class students are inundated by the effects of high-stakes examinations. Teachers are demoralized and students suffer substandard curricular and pedagogical experiences. These effects are articulated by students and teachers in the high school that provided the setting for the critical ethnography on which this text is based. Teachers resent being judged on the basis of students' performance on standardized assessments. They are deprofessionalized as their roles are oriented toward working-class norms. Students feel alienated by content that is meaningless and test-based pedagogies that are disempowering. While these findings are disturbing, critical theory provides a foundation for seeking hope. By incorporating inquiry and dialogue, this theoretical framework opens a space where resistance can be revealed and examined. In this case, the study exposed glimmers of resistance, spaces in the structure of schooling where students and teachers critique the system and suggest ways of subverting the negative effects of the neoliberal reforms through dialogic, empowering, culturally responsive pedagogies. Collective resistance, achieved through dialogic pedagogies that build on understandings of resistance and power, can cultivate theoretical and material spaces where a cycle of praxis can enhance possibilities for social justice. To that end, the conclusion is devoted to the implementation of critical, dialogic approaches to literacies, approaches intended to interrupt the hegemonic influences that perpetuate social reproduction by capitalizing on the potential for solidarity and collective agency among the students and teachers who populate and educate the working classes. This book would interest teacher educators, teachers, and school administrators.

This open access book provides an introduction to multimodality and the role of multimodal texts in today's education. Presenting a comprehensive framework for analysing and working with multimodal texts in disciplinary education, it serves as a tool for researchers and teachers alike. The second part of the book focuses on sample analyses of a variety of educational texts for different age groups and from different disciplines, including games and online resources. The authors also comment on the specific challenges of each text, and how teachers can discuss such texts with their students to enhance both their understanding of the content and their multimodal literacy. The book is intended for researchers in fields like education and multimodal studies, and for teacher educators, regardless of school subject or age group. With the combined perspectives on text analysis and implications for education, the book addresses the needs of teachers who want to work with multimodal aspects of texts in education in informed ways, but lack the right tools for such work.

This book shows connections between oral story listening and unique, enduring educational effects in and outside of the classroom. Using scientific studies and interviews, as well as personal observations from more than thirty years in schools and libraries, the authors examine learning outcomes from frequent story listening. Throughout the book, Schatt and Ryan illustrate that experiencing stories told entirely from memory transforms individuals and builds community, affecting areas such as reading comprehension, visualization, focus, flow states, empathy, attachment, and theory of mind.

This book highlights recent developments in literacy research in science teaching and learning from countries such as Australia, Brazil, China, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United States. It includes multiple topics and perspectives on the role of literacy in enhancing science teaching and learning, such as the struggles faced by students in science literacy learning, case studies and evaluations of classroom-based interventions, and the challenges encountered in the science classrooms. It offers a critical and comprehensive investigation on numerous emerging themes in the area of literacy and science education, including disciplinary literacy, scientific literacy, classroom discourse, multimodality, language and representations of science, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL). The diversity of views and research contexts in this volume presents a useful introductory handbook for academics, researchers, and graduate students working in this specialized niche area. With a wealth of instructional ideas and innovations, it is also highly relevant for teachers and teacher educators seeking to improve science teaching and learning through the use of literacy.

This volume examines the unique characteristics of akshara orthography and how they may affect literacy development and problems along with the implications for assessment and instruction. Even though akshara orthography is used by more than a billion people, there is an urgent need for a systematic attempt to bring the features, research findings, and future directions of akshara together in a coherent volume. We hope that this volume will bridge that gap. Akshara is used in several Indic languages, each calling it by a slightly different name, for example 'aksharamu', in Telugu, 'akshara' in Kannada, and 'akshar' in Hindi. It is the Bhrami-derived orthography used across much of the Indian subcontinent. There is a growing body of research on the psycholinguistic underpinnings of learning to read akshara, and the emerging perspective is that akshara, even though classified as alphasyllabaries, abugida, and semi-syllabic writing systems, is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Rather, akshara orthography is unique and deserves to be a separate classification and needs further investigation relating to literacy acquisition in akshara. The chapters in this volume, written by leading authors in the field, will inform the reader of the current research on akshara in a coherent and systematic way.

This book examines how religion operates as an institution of governance and discipline in society. The authors unravel the ways in which adolescents are socialized into adhering to the dictates of their religious identities, which often translates into practices of micro-aggression enacted in and through their interaction with the 'religious other' in schools and classrooms. Through ethnographic immersion in villages in the Gujarat, the authors identify media as a powerful source through which the dominant ideology of religious discrimination is perpetuated among adolescents. Subsequently, a critical media education framework was developed in order to equip these young people with the critical skills needed to challenge power relations, with the goal being to identify resources for resistance within themselves and their immediate media environments. Using pedagogic techniques such as spatial and cultural mapping, content creation and applied theatre practices to create a reflective yet practical guide, the findings of this book can be applied to a wide range of socio-cultural contexts.

This book asks researchers what uncertainty means for literacy research, and for how literacy plays through uncertain lives. While the book is not focused only on COVID-19, it is significant that it was written in 2020-2021, when our authors' and readers' working and personal lives were thrown into disarray by stay-at-home orders. The book opens up new spaces for examining ways that literacy has come to matter in the world. Drawing on the reflections of international literacy researchers and important new voices, this book presents re-imagined methods and theoretical imperatives. These difficult times have surfaced new communicative practices and opened out spaces for exploration and activism, prompting re-examination of relationships between research, literacy and social justice. The book considers varied and consequential events to explore new ways to think and research literacy and to unsettle what we know and accept as fundamental to literacy research, opening ourselves up for change. It provides direction to the field of literacy studies as pressing global concerns are prompting literacy researchers to re-examine what and how they research in times of precarity.

This book explores the impact of the Lesson Books of the National Board of Education in Ireland in the nineteenth century. The author contextualizes the books used in national schools as well as across the wider British Empire: in doing so, he highlights the influence of the religious, social, political and cultural realms of the time. Firmly grounding the volume in its historical context, the author goes on to explore the contemporary moral climate and social influences, including imperialism, morality, rote-learning and socialization. Through meticulous analysis of each Lesson Book, the author traces the evolution of education in Ireland as a reflection of contemporary society, as it changes and transforms in line with cultural, religious and social changes. This pioneering and comprehensive volume will be of interest and value to students and scholars of education in Ireland as well as education in the British Empire more widely.

This book focuses on what school leaders need to know and understand about leadership for learning, and for learning to read in particular. It brings together theory, research and practice on leadership for literacy. The book reports on the findings from six studies that followed school principals from their involvement in a professional learning program consisting of five modules on leadership and the teaching of reading, to implementation action in their schools. It describes how they applied a range of strategies to create leadership partnerships with their teachers, pursuing eight related dimensions from a Leadership for Learning framework or blueprint. The early chapters of the book feature the use of practical tools as a focus for leadership activity. These chapters consider, for example, how principals and teachers can develop deeper understandings of their schools' contexts; how professional discussions can be conducted with a process called 'disciplined dialogue'; and how principals might encourage approaches to shared leadership with their teachers. The overall findings presented in this book emphasise five positive positions on leadership for learning to read: the importance of an agreed moral purpose; sharing leadership for improvement; understanding what learning to read involves; implementing and evaluating reading interventions; and recognising the need for support for leaders' learning on-the-job.

Why do literary theorists see reading as an act of dispassionate textual analysis and meaning production, when historical evidence shows that readers have often read excessively, obsessively, and for sensory stimulation? Posing these and other questions, this is the first major work to bring insights from book history to bear on literary history and theory. In so doing, the book charts a compelling and innovative history of theories of reading.
While literary theorists have greatly contributed to our understanding of the text-reader relation, they have rarely taken into account that the relation between a book and a reader is also a relation between two bodies: one made of paper and ink, the other flesh and blood. This is why, Karin Littau argues, we need to look beyond the words on the page, and pay attention to the technical innovations in the physical format of the book. Only then is it possible to understand more fully how media technology has changed our experience of reading, and why media history presents a challenge to our conceptions of what reading is.
Each chapter places the reader in specific disciplinary and historical contexts: literature, criticism, philosophy, cultural history, bibliography, film, new media. Overall, the history recounted in this book points to a split between modern literary study which regards reading as a reducibly mental activity, and a tradition reaching back to antiquity which assumed that reading was not only about sense-making but also about sensation.
Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literary theory and history as well as of great interest to students ofthe history of the book and new media.

This open access volume reveals the hidden power of the script we read in and how it shapes and drives our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures. Expanding on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (i.e., the idea that language affects the way we think), this volume proposes the "Script Relativity Hypothesis" (i.e., the idea that the script in which we read affects the way we think) by offering a unique perspective on the effect of script (alphabets, morphosyllabaries, or multi-scripts) on our attention, perception, and problem-solving. Once we become literate, fundamental changes occur in our brain circuitry to accommodate the new demand for resources. The powerful effects of literacy have been demonstrated by research on literate versus illiterate individuals, as well as cross-scriptal transfer, indicating that literate brain networks function differently, depending on the script being read. This book identifies the locus of differences between the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, and between the East and the West, as the neural underpinnings of literacy. To support the "Script Relativity Hypothesis", it reviews a vast corpus of empirical studies, including anthropological accounts of human civilization, social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, applied linguistics, second language studies, and cross-cultural communication. It also discusses the impact of reading from screens in the digital age, as well as the impact of bi-script or multi-script use, which is a growing trend around the globe. As a result, our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures are now growing closer together, not farther apart.

This monograph offers a novel investigation of the Edwardian picture postcard as an innovative form of multimodal communication, revealing much about the creativity, concerns and lives of those who used postcards as an almost instantaneous form of communication. In the early twentieth century, the picture postcard was a revolutionary way of combining short messages with an image, making use of technologies in a way impossible in the decades since, until the advent of the digital revolution. This book offers original insights into the historical and social context in which the Edwardian picture postcard emerged and became a craze. It also expands the field of Literacy Studies by illustrating the combined use of posthuman, multimodal, historic and linguistic methodologies to conduct an in-depth analysis of the communicative, sociolinguistic and relational functions of the postcard. Particular attention is paid to how study of the picture postcard can reveal details of the lives and literacy practices of often overlooked sectors of the population, such as working-class women. The Edwardian era in the United Kingdom was one of extreme inequalities and rapid social change, and picture postcards embodied the dynamism of the times. Grounded in an analysis of a unique, open access, digitized collection of 3,000 picture postcards, this monograph will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of Literacy Studies, sociolinguistics, history of communications and UK social history.

Phraseology is often thought of as an anomaly and a headache for language learners. However, researchers have tended to focus on just one end of the scale: fairly fixed, conventional multi-word units. Here their special status and any divergence from the standard form are clearly evident. What happens at the other end of the scale? How much and what kind of variability does phraseological patterning tolerate? Svetlana Vetchinnikova explores meaning-shift units (MSUs) in second language usage, acquisition and processing. Importantly, she argues for the value of looking at individual languages and tracing MSUs as they are learned from exposure, used in individual language output and processed in the mind - and advocates a shift of focus from groups to individuals. This important study develops a unified view on phraseological patterning in second language acquisition and use and the processes which lead to it.

Classicists have been slow to take advantage of the important advances in the way that literacy is viewed in other disciplines (including in particular cognitive psychology, socio-linguistics, and socio-anthropology). On the other hand, historians of literacy continue to rely on outdated work by classicists (mostly from the 1960's and 1970's) and have little access to the current reexamination of the ancient evidence. This timely volume attempts to formulate new interesting ways of talking about the entire concept of literacy in the ancient world--literacy not in the sense of whether 10% or 30% of people in the ancient world could read or write, but in the sense of text-oriented events embedded in a particular socio-cultural context. The volume is intended as a forum in which selected leading scholars rethink from the ground up how students of classical antiquity might best approach the question of literacy in the past, and how that investigation might materially intersect with changes in the way that literacy is now viewed in other disciplines. The result will give readers new ways of thinking about specific elements of "literacy" in antiquity, such as the nature of personal libraries, or what it means to be a bookseller in antiquity; new constructionist questions, such as what constitutes reading communities and how they fashion themselves; new takes on the public sphere, such as how literacy intersects with commercialism, or with the use of public spaces, or with the construction of civic identity; new essentialist questions, such as what "book" and "reading" signify in antiquity, why literate cultures develop, or why literate cultures matter. The book derives from a conference (a Semple Symposium held in Cincinnati in April 2006) and includes new work from the most outstanding scholars of literacy in antiquity (e.g., Simon Goldhill, Joseph Farrell, Peter White, and Rosalind Thomas).

A practical and innovative guide to emphasizing literacies development when teaching world languages Literacies in Language Education introduces multiliteracies pedagogy, which focuses on critical engagement with texts, intercultural understanding, and language proficiency development. Kate Paesani and Mandy Menke, seasoned workshop leaders and multiliteracies scholars, define what the approach is, its benefits, and how to create curricula grounded in it. In addition, they explain how to use the approach at all levels of language education and offer ideas for teacher professional development-each key components of pedagogical change. Melding text- and language-oriented learning goals, the authors embrace an expanded understanding of literacy to capture the dynamism of language and its contexts of use; the importance of preparing students to interact with the range of texts they will encounter in their academic, workplace, and personal lives; and the multicultural and multilingual landscape of secondary and postsecondary language classrooms. Literacies in Language Education presents teachers with a tested approach for increasing learners' proficiency and cultural awareness, along with practical implementation methods. This book provides teachers and program administrators with immediate steps to take toward designing and implementing a literacies approach in any language class and curriculum. Published in partnership with CARLA.

This open access book discusses how cultural literacy can be taught and learned through creative practices. It approaches cultural literacy as a dialogic social process based on learning and gaining knowledge through emphatic, tolerant, and inclusive interaction. The book focuses on meaning-making in children and young people's visual and multimodal artefacts created by students aged 5-15 as an outcome of the Cultural Literacy Learning Programme implemented in schools in Cyprus, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, and the UK. The lessons in the program address different social and cultural themes, ranging from one's cultural attachments to being part of a community and engaging more broadly in society. The artefacts are explored through data-driven content analysis and self-reflexive and collaborative interpretation and discussed through multimodality and a sociocultural approach to children's visual expression. This interdisciplinary volume draws on cultural studies, communication studies, art education, and educational sciences.

More effectively meet the diverse literacy needs of the growing Latino population by learning how to evaluate and select quality Latino children's literature. Latinos are the fastest growing and largest ethnic minority in the United States. The number of Latino children is at a historic high. As a result, librarians and teachers in the United States must know how to meet the informational, cultural, and traditional literacy needs of this student demographic group. An ideal way to overcome this challenge is by providing culturally accurate and authentic children's literature that represents the diversity of the Latino cultures. Much more than simply a topical bibliography, this book details both historical and current practices in educating Latino children; explains why having quality Latino children's literature in classrooms and libraries is necessary for the ethnic identity development of Latino children; and offers a historical overview of Latino children's literature in America. Web resources of interest to educators working with Latino children are also included. Figures relating to Latino population growth, home language of Latinos, and stressors of recently arrived Latinos Extensive bibliography of print and web resources for developing collections of quality materials about Latino cultures, professional publications related relating to evaluating Latino children's literature and integrating the literature into classrooms and libraries, and recommended English, Spanish, and bilingual children's and young adult books about Latinos Contains useful resources such as reproducible bookmarks of recommended Latino children's books, evaluation sheets for analyzing Latino children's books for stereotypes, and a bingo sheet for professional development related to library services for Latinos and Latino children

This book unpacks recent changes in the landscape of literature and language teaching, and aims to find new explanations for the altered relationships between readers and writers, the democratisation of authorship, and the emergence of new ways of using language. By examining topics as various as literature and technology, multimodality, and new Englishes, the authors take a fresh look at the use of literature as a tool in the teaching of English to second-language speakers. More than simply a way of teaching aesthetic and ethical values and rhetorical skills, they argue that literature can also be used to help students to critically evaluate assumptions about society, culture and power which underpin the production and reception of texts. The book relates theories of language acquisition and literary criticism to examples of literary texts from a wide range of global literature in English, and discusses new ways of engaging with it, such as transmedia story telling, book blogs and slam poetry. It will be of interest to language teachers and teacher trainers, and to students and scholars of applied linguistics, TESOL, and digital literacies.