In this groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary book, Rebecca Rogers explores the complexity of family literacy practices through an in-depth case study of one family, the attendant issues of power and identity, and contemporary social debates about the connections between literacy and society. The study focuses on June Treader and her daughter Vicky, urban African Americans labeled as "low income" and "low literate." Using participant-observation, ethnographic interviewing, photography, document collection, and discourse analysis, Rogers describes and explains the complexities of identity, power, and discursive practices that June and Vicky engage with in their daily life as they proficiently, critically, and strategically negotiate language and literacy in their home and community. She explores why, despite their proficiencies, neither June or Vicky sees themselves as literate, and how this and other contradictions prevent them from transforming their literate capital into social profit. This study contributes in multiple ways to extending both theoretically and empirically existing research on literacy, identity, and power:
* "Critical discourse analysis." The analytic technique of critical discourse analysis is brought into the area of family literacy. The detailed explanation, interpretation, and demonstration of critical discourse analysis will be extremely helpful for novices learning to use this technique. This is a timely book, for there are few ethnographic studies exploring the usefulness and limits of critical discourse analysis.
* "Combines critical discourse analysis and ethnography." This new synthesis, which is thoroughly illustrated, offers an explanatory framework for the stronghold of institutional discursive power. Using critical discourse analysis as a methodological tool in order to build critical language awareness in classrooms and schools, educators working toward a critical social democracy may be better armed to recognize sources of inequity.
* "Researcher reflexivity." Unlike most critical discourse analyses, throughout the book the researcher and analyst is clearly visible and complicated into the role of power and language. This practice allows clearer analysis of the ethical, moral, and theoretical implications in conducting ethnographic research concerned with issues of power.
* "A critical perspective on family literacy." Many discussions of family literacy do not acknowledge the raced, classed, and gendered nature of interacting with texts that constitutes a family's literacy practices. This book makes clear how the power relationships that are acquired as children and adults interact with literacy in the many domains of a family's literacy lives.
"A Critical Discourse Analysis of Family Literacy Practices: Power In and Out of Print" will interest researchers and practitioners in the fields of qualitative methodology, discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, literacy education, and adult literacy, and is highly relevant as a text for courses in these areas.

In this 'New Media Age' the screen has replaced the book as the dominant medium of communication. This dramatic change has made image, rather than writing, the centre of communication.
In this groundbreaking new book, Gunther Kress considers the effects of a revolution that has radically altered the relation between writing and the book. Taking into account social, economic, communicational and technological factors, Kress explores how these changes will affect the future of literacy.
Kress considers the likely larger-level social and cultural effects of that future, arguing that the effects of the move to the screen as the dominant medium of communication will produce far-reaching shifts in relations of power - and not just in the sphere of communication. The democratic potentials and effects of the new information and communication technologies will, Kress contends, have the widest imaginable consequences.
Literacy in the New Media Age is essential reading for anyone with an interest in literacy and its wider political and cultural implications.

This popular book addresses literacy leaders' eternal quest to prepare all students for the demands of the 21st century. This updated Sixth Edition will help prospective and current literacy professionals understand how to organize and supervise literacy programs within the context of current state and federal mandates. With a focus on providing instruction at all grade levels and for different types of learners, the book explores specific program elements related to materials selection, teacher evaluation, professional development, student assessment, writing, technology, school- and districtwide evaluation, and parent and community outreach. Expert authors provide new insights about what administrators and teachers should know, and be able to do, given the expanded definition of literacy, a renewed interest in the science of reading, and a deep concern for closing the achievement gap that has become more prevalent across the nation. This user-friendly text includes examples, observations, research, and specific guidelines for improving programs in relation to current requirements and future expectations. Book Features: The most comprehensive resource on the oversight of PreK-12 literacy programs. Guidance to help specialized literacy professionals meet today's mandates for teachers and students. Chapters written by experts with years of experience working with their topic in schools. Real-life examples and vignettes demonstrate how theories can be applied to practice. Reflective questions and project assignments help make ideas relevant to a reader's unique situation. Connections across chapters and directions for future considerations help summarize and synthesize the information across the entire book.

Using the concept of multiliteracies and multimodality, this book provides foundation knowledge about the new and continuously changing literacies of the 21st century. It details the five semiotic systems (linguistic, visual, auditory, gestural and spatial) and how they contribute to the reading and writing of increasingly complex and dynamic texts that are delivered by live, paper or digital technologies. One of the main tenets of the book is that social, cultural and technological developments will continue to give rise to changing literate practices around texts and communication, requiring a rethinking of classroom practices that are employed in the teaching of literacy. Therefore, the role of talk, together with traditional lesson structures, is examined and the concept of dialogic talk is introduced as a way of moving towards an effective pedagogy for the teaching and learning of multiliteracies and multimodality. The book also demonstrates that children's literature can provide a bridge between old and new literacies and be an effective vehicle for introducing the five semiotic systems to all age groups. Comprehensive and accessible, this book addresses the issue of translating complex theories, research and concepts into effective practice, by providing the reader with four avenues for reflecting upon and implementing the ideas it contains: Reflection Strategies that enable the reader to gauge their understanding of key concepts; Theory into Practice tasks that enable the trialling of specific theoretical concepts in the classroom; Auditing instruments provide specific tasks related to assessment of student performance and evaluation of teacher pedagogy; QR codes immediately link the reader to multimodal texts and further references that illustrate and enhance the concepts being developed.

In this volume, two notable scholars trace the monumental shifts in theory, research, and practice related to reading education and literacy, with particular attention to what they consider the central goal of literacy-making meaning. Each section describes a specific epoch, including a brief snapshot of how the reader of that period is envisioned and characterized by researchers and teachers, as well as a deep discussion of the ideas and contextual events of that era. These developmental waves are organized in rough historical sequence by a series of shifts in underlying theoretical and scholarly lenses-from the behavioral to the psycholinguistic to the cognitive to the sociocultural to the critical to the multimodal to the global. The book closes with a discussion of the various research frames and methodological approaches that paralleled these developments. Throughout, there is a profound recognition that all research and practice are ultimately directed toward how students make meaning, from sound to letter to word, to ideas and images.Book Features: Animates some of the revolutionary developments related to reading education and literacy in modern times. Each development is accompanied by a discussion of the aspirational reader that sets the stage for contemplating these shifts and their significance. Traces the research and theoretical developments to illustrate the origins of the shifts and their influences. Supported by a website with video lectures and conversations tied to the various waves of development.

This popular text shows how teachers can create partnerships with parents and students that facilitate participation in the schools while also validating home culture and family concerns and aspirations. It reflects current research and theory in several areas related to literacy development, including family literacy, bilingual and multicultural education, critical pedagogy, participatory research, cooperative learning, and feminist perspectives. Teachers of students who are immigrants, non-native speakers of English, and members of marginalized groups will find this book especially pertinent.

Writer Identity and the Teaching and Learning of Writing is a groundbreaking book which addresses what it really means to identify as a writer in educational contexts and the implications for writing pedagogy. It conceptualises writers' identities, and draws upon empirical studies to explore their construction, enactment and performance. Focusing largely on teachers' identities and practices as writers and the writer identities of primary and secondary students, it also encompasses the perspectives of professional writers and highlights promising new directions for research. With four interlinked sections, this book offers: Nuanced understandings of how writer identities are shaped and formed; Insights into how classroom practice changes when teachers position themselves as writers alongside their students; New understandings of what this positioning means for students' identities as writers and writing pedagogy; and Illuminating case studies mapping young people's writing trajectories. With an international team of contributors, the book offers a global perspective on this vital topic, and makes a new and strongly theorised contribution to the field. Viewing writer identity as fluid and multifaceted, this book is important reading for practising teachers, student teachers, educational researchers and practitioners currently undertaking postgraduate studies. Contributors include: Teresa Cremin, Terry Locke, Sally Baker, Josephine Brady, Diane Collier, Nikolaj Elf, Ian Eyres, Theresa Lillis, Marilyn McKinney, Denise Morgan, Debra Myhill, Mary Ryan, Kristin Stang, Chris Street, Anne Whitney and Rebecca Woodard.

Our current "culture wars" have reshaped the politics of secondary literature instruction. Due to a variety of challenges from both the left and the right-to language or subject matter, to potentially triggering content or to authors who have been cancelled-school reading lists are rapidly shrinking. For many teachers, choosing which books to include in their curriculum has become an agonising task with political, professional and ethical dimensions. In Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman calls for a reacknowledgment of the intellectual and affective work that literature can do, and offers ways to continue to teach troubling texts without doing harm. Rather than banishing challenged texts from our classrooms, she writes, we should be confronting and teaching the controversies they invoke. Her book is a timely and eloquent argument for a reasoned approach to determining what literature still deserves to be read and taught and discussed.

By the co-author of Language Online, this book builds on the earlier work while focusing on multilingualism in the digital world. Drawing on a range of digital media - from email to chatrooms and social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube - Lee demonstrates how online multilingualism is closely linked to people's offline literacy practices and identities, and examines the ways in which people draw on multilingual resources in their internet participation. Bringing together central concepts in sociolinguistics and internet linguistics, the eight chapters cover key issues such as: language choice code-switching identities language ideologies minority languages online translation. Examples in the book are drawn from both all the major languages and many lesser-written ones such as Chinese dialects, Egyptian Arabic, Irish, and Welsh. A chapter on methodology provides practical information for students and researchers interested in researching online multilingualism from a mixed methods and practice-based approach. Multilingualism Online is key reading for all students and researchers in the area of multilingualism and new media, as well as those who want to know more about languages in the digital world.

Today, young people write in their leisure time far more than they did 15 years ago. Most often they use the new media to do their writing. This book explores whether the frequent writing of short messages and e-mails and participation in chats and social networks like Facebook have an influence on writing in school. Are there any similarities and relationships between the texts written in school and the private texts? For the first time, based on comprehensive data from Swiss students, this book provides empirical answers to these questions.

International literacy assessments have provided ample data for ranking nations, charting growth, and casting blame. Summarizing the findings of these assessments, which afford a useful vantage from which to view world literacy as it evolves, this book examines literate behavior worldwide, in terms of both the ability of populations from a wide variety of nations to read and the practice of literate behavior in those nations. Drawing on The World's Most Literate Nations, author Jack Miller's internationally released study, emerging trends in world literacy and their relationships to political, economic, and social factors are explored. Literacy, and in particular the practice of literate behaviors, is used as a lens through which to view countries' economic development, gender equality, resource utilization, and ethnic discrimination. Above all, this book is about trajectories. It begins with historical contexts, described in terms of support for literate cultures. Based on a variety of data sources, these trends are traced to the present and then projected ahead. The literate futures of nations are discussed and how these relate to their economic and sociocultural development. This book is unique in providing a broader perspective on an intractable problem, a vantage point that offers useful insights to inform policy, and in bringing together an array of relevant data sources not typically associated with literacy status.

Academics Writing recounts how academic writing is changing in the contemporary university, transforming what it means to be an academic and how, as a society, we produce academic knowledge. Writing practices are changing as the academic profession itself is reconfigured through new forms of governance and accountability, increasing use of digital resources, and the internationalisation of higher education. Through detailed studies of writing in the daily life of academics in different disciplines and in different institutions, this book explores: the space and time of academic writing; tensions between disciplines and institutions around genres of writing; the diversity of stances adopted towards the tools and technologies of writing, and towards engagement with social media; and the importance of relationships and collaboration with others, in writing and in ongoing learning in a context of constant change. Drawing out implications of the work for academics, university management, professional training, and policy, Academics Writing: The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation is key reading for anyone studying or researching writing, academic support, and development within education and applied linguistics.

For decades early childhood educators in high-quality programs have understood that the transition into reading and writing occurs naturally when young children are surrounded by opportunities to interact with print in ways that are meaningful to them. The original edition of More Than Letters, first published in 2001, showed teachers how to intentionally help children develop literacy skills through hands-on, play-based activities. Like the original edition, the Standards Edition is based on theory and research. It contains new chapters that specifically focus on developing the skills needed to decode literature and informational text. Expanded chapters include activities that target specific concepts included in national literacy standards.

In this book, Hella Eckardt offers new insights into literacy in the Roman world by examining the tools that enabled writing, such as inkwells, styli and tablets. Literacy was an important skill in the ancient world and power could be and often was, exercised through texts. Eckardt explores how writing equipment shaped practices such as posture and handwriting and her careful analysis of burial data shows considerable numbers of women and children interred with writing equipment, notably inkwells, in an effort to display status as well as age and gender. The volume offers a comprehensive review of recent approaches to literacy during Roman antiquity and adds a distinctive material turn to our understanding of this crucial skill and the embodied practices of its use. At the heart of this study lies the nature of the relationship between the material culture of writing and socio-cultural identities in the Roman period.

In a unique study of parent-infant interactions at home, Rhian Jones analyses early reading with picture books and stories. Drawing upon psychology, linguistics and anthropology she provides a wide ranging and highly original account of the conversational 'rules' of reading dialogues, semantic knowledge and picture book reading, the ontogenesis of narrative and the construction and expression of the infant unconscious. This provides an absorbing and valuable account to all academics and practitioners concerned with language acquisition, literacy and early childhood development.

Literacy and Education tells the story of how literacy-starting in the early 1980s-came to be seen not as a mental phenomenon, but as a social and cultural one. In this accessible introductory volume, acclaimed scholar James Paul Gee shows readers how literacy "left the mind and wandered out into the world." He traces the ways a sociocultural view of literacy melded with a social view of the mind and speaks to learning in and out of school in new and powerful ways. Gee concludes by showing how the very idea of "literacy" has broadened into new literacies with words, signs, and deeds in contexts enhanced, augmented, and transformed by new technologies.

This book illustrates the use of ethnography as an analytical approach to investigate academic writing, and provides critical insights into how academic writing research can benefit from the use of ethnographic methods. Throughout its six theoretical and practice-oriented studies, together with the introductory chapter, foreword and afterword, ethnography-related concepts like thick description, deep theorizing, participatory research, research reflexivity or ethics are discussed against the affordances of ethnography for the study of academic writing. The book is key reading for scholars, researchers and instructors in the areas of applied linguistics, academic writing, academic literacies and genre studies. It will also be useful to those lecturers and postgraduate students working in English for Academic Purposes and disciplinary writing. The volume provides ethnographically-oriented researchers with clear pointers about how to incorporate the telling of the inside story into their traditional main role as observers.

'Everything about [this] book, which combines a healthy dose of lucid neuroscience with a dash of sensitive personal narrative, delights ... a beautifully balanced piece of popular-science writing' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 'For people interested in language, this is a must. You'll find yourself focusing on words in new ways. Read it slowly - it will take time to sink in.'William Leith, Sunday Telegraph 'An inspiring celebration of the science of reading.' P.D. Smith, Guardian 'We were never born to read', says Maryanne Wolf. 'No specific genes ever dictated reading's development. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we changed the very organisation of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.' In "Proust and the Squid", Maryanne Wolf explores our brains' near-miraculous ability to arrange and re-arrange themselves in response to external circumstances. She examines how this 'open architecture', the elasticity of our brains, helps and hinders humans in their attempts to learn to read, and to process the written language. She also investigates what happens to people whose brains make it difficult to acquire these skills, such as those with dyslexia. Wolf, a world expert on the reading brain, brings both a personal passion and deft style to this, the story of the reading brain. It is a pop science masterpiece on a subject that anyone who loves reading will be sure to find fascinating.

How do American girls compose and amend their identities? In this text, prominent scholars in their respective fields examine the complex social and cultural constructions that shape girls lives both in and out of school. The book looks at matters ranging from embedded issues of class, race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and sexuality to popular culture and personal histories.

Exploring the scholarly literature on gender and education, the successes and failures of feminist pedagogy, and girls practices with both traditional and non-traditional texts, as well as the primary sources of a material culture, the authors expose the myriad forces that script girls gender, identity, and literacy. The distinctive contribution of this book is to open up new discussions of girls in American classrooms today and to critically examine their experiences as they navigate preconceived notions of who they are while forming their personal and public identities, thereby helping teachers to better understand and create classroom experiences that make girls visible to themselves and to others.

Landmark Essays on Rhetorics of Difference challenges the Eurocentric perspective from which the field of rhetoric is traditionally viewed. Taking a step beyond the creation of alternative rhetorics that maintain the centrality of the European and Greco-Roman tradition, this volume argues on behalf of pluriversal rhetorics that coexist as equally important on their own terms. A timely addition to the respected Landmark Essays series, it will be invaluable to students of history of rhetoric, literacy, composition, and writing studies.

This book offers insights into questions related to mobility, literacy learning and literacy practices of adult and adolescent migrants. The authors address learning and use of literacies among adults and adolescents in both temporary and more permanent post-migration settlements and in various contexts, exploring spatial as well as temporal dimensions of literacies and power. The formal and informal educational settings examined include state-mandated schools, community settings, and libraries, and the chapters offer insights into the complex relations between literacies and mobility, as well as a range of perspectives on language use and language learning. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers in fields including education and literacy, applied linguistics, language education and migration studies.

Gunther Kress argues for a radical reappraisal of the phenomenon of literacy, and hence for a profound shift in educational practice. Through close attention to the plethora of objects which children constantly produce--drawings, cut-outs, writings and collages-- Kress suggests a set of principles which reveal the underlying coherence of children's actions-- actions which allow us to connect them with attempts to make meaning before they acquire language and writing.
This book provides fundamental challenges to commonly held assumptions about both language and literacy and thought and action. It places these challenges within the context of speculation about the abilities which will become essential for children as young adults, and calls for the radical decentering of language in educational theory and practice.

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.