In our first issue of 2019, we are pleased to continue English Teaching: Practice and Critique’s tradition of publishing critical literacy research that spans the globe, age-levels, educational settings, subject areas and methodologies.
In their article, “Developing critical literacy in science through an SFL-informed pedagogical heuristic,” Fang, Adams, Gresser and Li investigate how middle school science teachers can support critical language awareness and advanced literacy development as part of the scientific inquiry process. Findings from the study support integrating language and literacy instruction into science instruction as central rather than peripheral aspects of science pedagogy.
In “Accommodating linguistic prejudice? Examining English teachers’ language ideologies,” Metz analyzes surveys about language beliefs completed by over 300 English teachers in the USA. Using quantitative methods, Metz demonstrates that even though many teachers believed that all dialects are valid and attitudes toward dialects are often prejudicial, they also believed in more traditional or hegemonic ways of teaching about language and dialects in schools. Metz calls for professional development for teachers that addresses the complexity of teachers’ beliefs about language, building on their counter-hegemonic views about language outside of school to shift beliefs about pedagogy and their role as English teachers.
Reynolds’s study, “The effect of morphological form variation on adult first language incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading,” investigated the effects of word-internal morphological form variation on adult incidental vocabulary instruction through reading. Participants read a novel with pseudo-words placed throughout and then were given vocabulary assessments. The results showed that readers acquired more vocabulary for those words for which there was not morphological form variation and suggested that increasing adults’ morphological awareness may be an important part of effective vocabulary instruction.
In “A critical multimodal framework for reading and analyzing pedagogical materials,” Huang proposes a systematic approach or framework for teaching and researching multimodal literacies from a critical perspective. The author illustrates the usefulness of this framework through analysis of an example from an English-language teaching textbook, shedding light on power relations constructed from the interaction between verbal and visual modes in the text.
In “(Un)Sanctioned: Young adult literature as meaningful sponsor for writing teacher education” by Sams and Cook, the authors examine how youth literacy and writing practices are represented in contemporary young adult literature and sponsored, negotiated or suppressed by teachers and schools. The authors demonstrate how these texts can be used in teacher education to critically reflect on and plan for teachers’ stances on unsanctioned youth literacies and pedagogies that enable meaningful and authentic literate activity.
Gilbert and Pitfield’s article, “Teaching 1984 in the surveillance culture of schools,” considers how curriculum standardization and teacher surveillance in English schools led one new teacher to an instructional approach to Orwell’s 1984 that subverted messages in the novel about the dangers of surveillance and control. Through this paradoxical example, the authors argue that literature pedagogy suffers when teachers must focus on accountability and assessment over the meaning and richness of a text.
Finally, in Ravelli’s teacher narrative, “Pedagogical strategies for developing interpretive language about images: a tertiary experience,” the author shares her experiences teaching strategies for critically analyzing visual and media texts in a college course. Specifically, these strategies focus on developing students’ knowledge of language about images, and students’ ability to differentiate between description and critique. Two examples of student writing illustrate the complexities of teaching students to critically analyze visual and media texts.
Taken together, these articles demonstrate researchers’ and teachers’ commitments to teaching students how to question issues of power and representation in literacy learning broadly construed. Whether in recent Young Adult Literature (Sams and Cook), canonical literature (Gilbert and Pitfield) or visual images (Ravelli and Huang), science texts (Fang, Adams, Gresser and Li) or beliefs about language and dialects (Metz), the authors encourage us and provide us with specific theories and strategies for looking beyond the literal to the ideological and sociocultural underpinnings of twenty-first century literacy practices.
