Literacy最新文献

This paper employs autoethnography in a multilingual indigenous community in the north of Australia to examine the in-practice challenges of both oracy and dialogue in a classroom in which shared language and culture are minimal. Through narrative, this paper examines some dilemmas of dialogue, particularly in regard to the ontological responsiveness needed to create a classroom in which all members are able to participate dialogically. In seeking to crack open the culturally situated nature of oracy and dialogue, doing so through examinations of other “ways of oracy” that occur in the local indigenous context, this paper proposes that the dilemmas around dialogue for CALD students are not just issues of linguistic and cultural access but also an ontological third space. The nature of this challenge requires teachers to first engage with reflective ontological and pedagogical ‘moves’ as a precursor to dialogic possibilities in the classroom. Drawing on intercultural communication, third space theory and the cultural interface, this paper illustrates some possibilities for teacher reflection to ensure greater recognition of all students' repertoires and increased dialogic possibility.

This paper complicates oracy by attending to moments of vibrancy and stillness in a public school classroom, where children were expected to follow particular rules that governed their bodily movement and language use. I argue that children's talk in classrooms cannot be separated from the making of meaning at the intersection of human bodies, materials and immaterial forces, including discourses of schooling and schooled literacy. To do so, I utilise teacher interviews and video-recorded observations from a second grade classroom in the Republic of Cyprus, and analyse those drawing on an understanding of talk as embodied: as occurring through bodies, as part of and in conjunction with bodily movement, regulated and regulating, and yet not fully determining what being a child-learner in a classroom means. I present findings from this analysis in three interrelated moves as I connect talk and silence to local classroom rules, to discourses of literacy and schooling that discipline the (talking) body, and to the contingency of embodied talk in a particular classroom event. Τhis multilayered reading provides insights into the ways in which oracy is part of an assemblage that, among others, brings together and pulls apart teachers' and children's talk, institutional discourses, and always already vibrant bodies.

There is growing evidence that student contributions via classroom talk (oracy) are subject to social judgements premised on cultural evaluation of accent and dialect, with particular varieties often viewed in deficit terms and pathologised, both within and beyond the classroom. We reflect on a university–community project involving researchers working to support Greythorpe Junior School (‘pseudonymised’) to address the linguistic deficit position that a school inspection report had taken in relation to the use of local varieties of English in Greythorpe. The researchers used socio-linguistic frames (repertoire, accommodation and discourse attuning) to develop productive strategies for students and the school to take ownership of how to negotiate perspectives that diminish non-standard accents and dialects. We provide illustrations of the workshop conversations with children and teachers to highlight the sophisticated, lived, metalinguistic understandings of children and teachers in the school, through which this perception of language deficit was ultimately renegotiated. In illustrating this case, we draw into focus the ways in which academic, institutional, socio-linguistic knowledge is (by its descriptive nature) divorced from context and so is only of use if it can be owned by those who are facing linguistic inequalities.

This paper draws on 3 years of ethnographic research with young children and their families in a northern English town, employing a more-than-human lens to pay attention to what, beyond humans, might be involved in the emergence of children's literacies. The paper focuses on the role of the body and place in the emergence of young children's vocalisations and talk. In particular, the paper rethinks the dominant assumption that children's language is primarily for the purpose of transparently conveying meaning. It does this by drawing on posthuman and decolonial scholarship on childhood and language, and particularly on the work of Glissant on opacity and difference, in order to interrogate the relationship between expression, understanding and power. Thus, the paper outlines how an understanding of the relationship between body, place and talk might inform pedagogy by highlighting the need for space to embrace divergent, complicated, irrational, playful and non-functional language practices in early childhood, rather than looking for rapid, straight line development.

Education policy in the Global South often focuses on two areas: learner-centred education (LCE) and language of instruction (LoI). For over a decade, LCE has been promoted throughout sub-Saharan Africa and has been referred to as a ‘policy panacea’. The basic premise of LCE is that it offers learners substantial control over what and how they learn through active engagement. Pair and group work involving talk are key aspects of LCE; however, in contexts where teachers and students are not proficient in the official LoI, the efficacy of this pedagogic approach is brought into question. Drawing on vignettes based on observational data of early years and primary classroom practice in South Africa and Zambia, this paper offers a discursive exploration of how valuing oracy and legitimising multilingualism alter classroom dynamics and interactions between teachers and children. Encouraging translanguaging as a pedagogical approach enables more effective meaning-making through talk and supports pedagogic shifts to more learner-centred classrooms. Exploring the potential of professional development to inspire change, we critically draw out some of the observable shifts in practice, alongside the challenges, for practitioners moving to a more multilingual classroom whilst simultaneously operating within the LoI policy.

International studies of talk-intensive (or ‘dialogic’) pedagogies have demonstrated that children who experience academically challenging classroom discussion (‘dialogue’) make greater progress than their peers who have not had this experience. In England, gains in achievement have been greatest for pupils from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds, thus underlining the importance of dialogue to social mobility. However, policy prescriptions on ‘standard English’ run counter to the principles of dialogic teaching by privileging ‘correct’ forms of expression over emerging ideas. In this article, we argue that schools can be coerced by macro-level policy into creating meso-level policies which police nonstandardised forms in the classroom with the assumption that this will improve literacy rates. We draw upon a corpus of Ofsted reports as well as data collected in primary schools – pupil writing and focus groups, video-recorded literacy lessons and teacher interviews – to demonstrate that features of spoken dialect grammar occur infrequently in pupil writing, yet the narrative that spoken dialect is a ‘problem’ within education is driving policy/practice that is detrimental to classroom talk and pupil learning. We argue that this must be addressed urgently if we are to exploit the full potential of talk for learning and for addressing educational inequities.

This paper imagines oracy education as a reaching-out for connection with the irreducible socialities of black study. In the wake of imperialist functions of literacy, classroom talk has been left to defend its value against traditionalist views which rebuke, as one UK education minister put it, “idle chatter in class.” We argue that oracy education risks doubling down on the value system outlined by this rebuke – and the white settler-colonial onto/auto-epistemology mobilised therein – if it measures the value of talk within this purview. We follow the undercommons of black study and the poetics of relation toward revaluations of idle chatter and noise as modes of thought. We explore the abundant participations of noise beyond the colonial errand of abatement, and we elaborate the relational stakes that idle chatter may invent. We reorient the stakes of the learning conversation with its single guiding lesson into the vibrant jazz riff of a learning cacophony that leaves the continuous echo of possible lessons behind it, proposing new ways of valuing oracy education and new possibilities for participation. Our chatty inquiry practices this ethics, overlapping our shared classroom experiences with discussions of theory and our discussions of theory with yet new possible experiences.

This qualitative study aimed to investigate adolescent English learners' multimodal communicative competence. Grounded upon a social semiotic approach with the concepts of affordances and transmediation, this research was carried out in an after-school programme at a secondary school in Korea. Three high school students participated in the multimodal composition project and produced narrative and argumentative multimodal texts. Multiple sources of data were gathered from interviews, video recordings with fieldnotes and student artefacts. The data were analysed using an inductive and deductive approach, along three orientations: modes as social action; modes as framing devices; and modes as agency representation. The students' multimodal texts were analysed based on multimodal text analysis. This study demonstrated that the participants personalised, avoided, modified and orchestrated semiotic modes to engage in multimodal composition. The study also revealed that the students' selection and use of semiotic modes were influenced by their audience awareness, genre knowledge and identities, and vice versa, all of which contributed to developing their multimodal communicative competence. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications for multimodal composition practices and suggestions for future multimodal composition studies.

In England, several developments combine in powerful ways to sustain certain ideas about literacy and research in education. These include the promotion of a specific model of ‘evidence-based practice’, frameworks for initial teacher education and early career professional development, and a strong accountability framework via inspection. However, as we illustrate through examples of activity on Twitter, to suggest that such ideas are all pervasive is to ignore other, less predictable, ways in which research circulates. Teachers, researchers and others working in literacy education, combined with the work of digital actors, assist the movement of ideas in sometimes unpredictable and even exciting ways. We argue that, if we are to understand how teachers encounter research, we need a better understanding of how research moves. We suggest that such movements are produced through shifting assemblages of human and non-human actors that combine to mobilise literacy research evidence differently and to varying degrees. This, we propose, calls for a new focus on what we call ‘research mobilities’ in primary literacy research.