Literacy最新文献

This article responds to debates about what affects/effects reading in the primary school years, with a focus on tracing examples of matristic ontologies that foster success. We offer matristic ontologies, which are ‘an entirely different concept of life, one based not on domination and hierarchies but on the relational web of life’, as alternative pedagogies for nurturing success in reading in the primary school years. Drawing on decolonial theorising of matriarchal cultures, we attempt to rupture patriarchal ontologies that value individual freedom, competition and growth and underpin children's reading success. Instead, we explore the matristic ontology whereby communal worlds organised around reciprocal relationships support reading success. Using interviews with children who made better-than-expected learning gains in reading during the primary school years, along with their parents and teachers, we highlight their accounts of the criteria for being a successful reader during this period. We consider how aspects of a matristic ontology, grounded in emotioning, reciprocating and (de)growing rupture, challenge the coloniality of literacy and learning to read, thereby nurturing in(ter)dependent reading that is responsive to students, teachers and parents alike.

This paper illustrates educators' facilitation of literacy experiences involving children producing multimodal texts using digital and non-digital resources. Given the increasing attention to multimodality in literacy education and a turn to sociomaterial paradigms in literacy education research, our study contributes to an understanding of how educators teach and create opportunities for children to construct meaning and produce their texts. A key finding in our investigation was the role of the arts in enabling sense-making, multimodality and embodiment during the text production processes. Using theories of sociomateriality, we examined the interactions between bodies and materials within spaces as educators facilitated experiences for multimodal text production in their classrooms. Two cases are presented to demonstrate the possibilities when the arts are used with print and digital resources. Emerging from these cases is the centrality of the arts in text production experiences as the ‘glue’ at the interface of the social and material that draws together human and non-human entities. In response to the findings, a sociomaterial assemblage of text production is presented that shows this essential role of the arts in the assemblage's functioning. As such, we argue for an expanded conceptualisation of text production that elevates the place of the arts in the teaching of early literacy.

Despite the critical role that reading for pleasure (RfP) plays in primary education, there remains a limited understanding of how teachers perceive and implement these practices within their classrooms. Recent data indicate a continuing decline in both young people's desire to read and the enjoyment experienced when reading. While research frequently explores children's perspectives on reading, teachers' viewpoints remain under-represented. To address this gap, the present study aimed to investigate teachers' insights into RfP implementation and the challenges they encounter. Two primary school teachers from the northwest of England were recruited to take part in ethnographic interviews. A reflexive thematic analysis revealed three key themes: barriers to RfP, finding the right text and text interactivity. The barriers included issues with students' reading fluency and stamina issues among students as well as teachers' frustrations at the limited time available to balance exam-focused reading skills with fostering text enjoyment. Additional findings include the importance of teacher's knowledge of children's literature and their ability to have informal text discussions with students. Innovative strategies to enhance text interactivity, including the use of digital resources are also explored. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of teacher-led implementation of RfP and offer practical insights for promoting a reading culture in UK primary schools. This study advocates for a holistic approach that integrates both teaching and classroom practices together with wider school culture.

School library services (SLSs) provide curriculum resources and expertise to schools. Changes in educational policy have affected the resourcing and security of these services. This article reports on a United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA)-funded case study of one SLS co-designed with two librarians from the service. The aims were to investigate the role and impact of the service and to identify priorities for the development of the service. Data were collected using a mixed-methods approach, through an online survey to 226 schools (67 responses representing 43 schools received) and semi-structured interviews with teachers and senior leaders from 3 schools. Two phases of data analysis were conducted: the first was deductive coding to inform a service impact report, and the second was reflexive thematic analysis conducted independently of the partner SLS, the results of which are discussed here. The data showed that the value of SLSs should not be underestimated. The responses evidenced that services were vital to ensuring a sustainable book-rich curriculum and provided a valuable source of curriculum and literacy expertise, which supported teacher's professional development. This study indicates that the loss of SLSs in many parts of England could be of significant detriment to teachers and children and raises concerns about equality of access to books.

Fiction books offer opportunities for readers to gain insight into fictional characters' perspectives, lives, and experiences, and in doing so, have the potential to support their empathy. This article provides novel insights from semi-structured interviews with 37 (27 female, 10 male, aged 12–14 years) regular readers of fiction from two high schools in Scotland. A data-driven inductive thematic analysis approach illustrated the cognitive and affective ways in which adolescents empathise with fictional characters; how feelings of empathy can transfer beyond fiction to real-life others; how feelings of empathy can personally enrich readers and support their social relationships; and how book content and writing style can facilitate readers' empathy. However, while many adolescent readers shared examples of how reading had supported their empathy, others did not, suggesting that adolescent readers' may read for different purposes. Implications for teachers, librarians and others interested in supporting adolescents' literacy practices, experiences and empathy are discussed, in addition to future research directions.

This study examined the relationship between the cost of children's reading apps and their educational quality. We focused on three key indicators: (1) the percentage of new words introduced to children (literacy quality), (2) the percentage of digital features aligned with these new words (multimedia quality) and (3) the percentage of diverse characters represented in the story (diversity quality). To do so, we conducted a content analysis of 70 best-selling preschool storybook apps in the United States and used correlation analyses to explore associations between app cost and these quality indicators. Results showed a positive relationship between cost and all three dimensions of quality. These findings highlight the potential economic barriers to accessing high-quality preschool storybook apps and suggest that these apps may contribute to widening educational quality gaps rather than helping to close them.

Letter knowledge is one of the key components of literacy skills and a predictor of academic success. The present study explores how letter knowledge of preschool children is related to their language group (bilingual vs. monolingual) and socioeconomic status (SES) (mid-high vs. low). Forty-six monolingual Hebrew and 48 bilingual Russian-Hebrew children with a mean age of 5.8 years from mid-high and low SES backgrounds performed a set of Hebrew letter knowledge tasks that differed in their degree of complexity (letter discrimination, letter recognition out of symbols and letter naming). The results demonstrate that language group and SES are important predictors of letter knowledge performance on the higher complexity task (letter naming) but have no impact on performance on the lower complexity tasks (letter discrimination and letter recognition out of symbols). The discussion will focus on the employment of different levels of letter knowledge tasks with respect to children's language group and SES.

In this paper, we delve into the impact of storytelling in a literacy methods course, exploring how it shaped preservice teachers' (PSTs) perceptions, hopes and actions regarding environmental justice. As PSTs collectively engaged with narratives in children's literature, we investigated how stories of environmentalism equipped them with the knowledge and skills essential for addressing the challenges of climate change that their students will inherit. Grounded in relational literacies, this paper examines PSTs' comprehension of diverse children's literature focused on environmentalism in relation to their sense-making, personal climate stories and their conceptualisations and enactments of environmental justice. This study underscores the pivotal role of stories in shaping future educators' environmental literacy and in fostering a sense of agency and responsibility. The findings contribute to the discourse on integrating diverse narratives into teacher education, emphasising the potential of literature to inspire meaningful engagement with both literacy learning and environmental justice issues.

Using data collected during a qualitative study of a book group in an after-school programme at a public, urban elementary school, in this article, I analyse how immigrant- and refugee-background students discursively distanced themselves from the portrayal of refugees in the text Outcasts United. The teacher chose this book because she believed it reflected students' own experiences. Yet they often resisted making personal connections to the refugee stories depicted, instead employing various discursive strategies to distance themselves and their experiences from those in the text. The study uses microethnographic and discourse analytical methods to examine interactions where students redirected conversations away from teacher-proposed connections. Findings underscore how connection-making is not universally straightforward or applicable, especially when assuming shared identities among minoritized students. By analysing instances where students engaged in distancing and disconnection-making, this study emphasizes the value of fostering both connections and disconnections in literacy instruction. Implications for educators include the creation of spaces that encourage diverse, authentic responses to texts, as well as future teacher training and curriculum design that fosters students' ability to push against narratives with which they disagree. This approach could enrich the development of inclusive literacy practices that better serve multilingual students from diverse cultural and linguistic contexts.

This article explores the underpinning assumptions about the changing definition and parameters of early reading that are contained in successive UK Departments for Education (DfE, DfES, DfEE) documentation since 1995 and in Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills) reports and official blogs during the same period. It employs a chronological presentation of key phrases within policy documents and grey literature to identify and track the changing attitudes held by the writers of these documents regarding the skills deemed to be officially important in learning to read. The article acknowledges and explores the contested nature of the field. The exploration of these policy documents demonstrates that although UK National Curricula since 1995, including the current one, have consistently identified that skills of early reading are multifaceted, this contrasts strongly with policy, guidance and inspection frameworks in the same period, which have increasingly sat, and continue to sit, within a view of reading underpinned by rigid and narrow definitions of early reading in which phonics is pre-eminent.