Creating pretence and sharing friendship: modal expressions in children's play

Friendships and play provide children with opportunities for mutual engagement, which both require and facilitate children's language use. Modality is a semantic system in the language associated with children's learning. One way in which modality is realised is through linguistic expressions which allow speakers to moderate the degree of certainty about the truth of propositions (expressions of possibility) and the degree of necessity with respect to proposals (expressions of obligation). No research has explored the relationship between friendship and children's use of modality. This paper reports on the use of both types of modal expression during play between five- and six-year-old children in two friendship contexts. Results showed that possibility expressions occurred at similar rates in both contexts while obligation expressions occurred significantly more often in play in high-level friendships than in low-level friendships. Findings suggest that in high-level friendships modality was used cohesively to create and extend pretend play, whereas in low-level friendships it was used to regulate behaviour. Because modal expressions are important resources for managing interpersonal relationships, for talking about ideas and situations beyond the here and now and for writing for a non-present audience, our findings provide valuable insights for educators of young children.     

A critical discourse analysis of Gisela's family story: a construal of deportation,illegal immigrants,and literacy

In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze a student's narrative about the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of her mother to Mexico. The student, Gisela, was a fifth grader in my classroom during the 2008/2009 school year, and I encouraged the students to collect family stories from their relatives. Gisela created this story, and she wrote and illustrated this with the help of her father, student peers, and me. I draw on Gloria Anzaldúa's constructs of nepantla and nepantlera, narrative analysis, and systemic functional linguistics to show how Gisela's construed this story to create a powerful and creative narrative that disrupted autonomous forms of literacy along with the excluding and damaging discourses circulating about immigrants in our community.     

Teacher knowledge: a complex tapestry

Teachers need to know a great deal, in many areas and in multiple ways. Teacher knowledge is a complex tapestry, and teachers must successfully weave the multiple threads. In this article, I present a conceptualisation of teacher knowledge that provides a framework for describing the complexity of teacher knowledge. The framework describes three ways of knowing: “knowing how,” “knowing why,” and “knowing what” and then applies these three knowledge discourses across six domains of teacher knowledge. The framework was developed from a study of 14 teachers in their first year of teaching, and in this article the framework is applied to their experiences to illustrate specific gaps in their teacher knowledge. It is proposed that this conceptualisation of teacher knowledge allows those involved in teacher education and induction to more clearly identify professional learning needs and develop their programmes with specificity.     

北舞学子“以舞报国”核心素养培育路径研究

通过对当代大学生所需的核心素养进行探究,并结合“庆祝中国共产党成立100周年”大型情景史诗《伟大征程》文艺演出的实践活动经历,提炼出具有北京舞蹈学院特色的大学生核心素养培育工作路径。围绕教育的本质目标,以立德树人为出发点,结合实践活动中生动鲜明的例子,总结北舞学子“以舞报国”精神的淬炼和养成,以期实现“根植爱国情怀培养,提炼舞蹈核心素养”的教育目标构想,从而培养出能在未来担任民族复兴大业的舞蹈文化使者。     

核心素养培养视域下高职英语教学策略研究

现阶段,我国高职院校在开展英语教学的过程中仍存在学生英语基础薄弱、教师缺乏对学生核心素养培养意识、教学方式过于陈旧等不足,这些都在一定程度上制约和影响了英语课堂教学的实际效果。高职英语教师应树立核心素养的理念并以此为导向实施教学。在解读核心素养内涵的基础上,从强化课堂互动环节、改革教学方式、提高英语教师对核心素养的认识三个角度全面而深入地探究核心素养培养视域下有效提升高职英语教学的可行性策略。     

An interview with Professor Barbara Comber

As part of this special issue on ‘Literacy for social justice’, and at this moment of post-pandemic transitions in education, we invited Professor Barbara Comber to reflect on the needs for and trends in critical literacy education, both in her local context, in Australia, and internationally. In September 2022, we met with Barbara online to discuss her thoughts about what critical literacy educators need, how scholars and educators can work together to produce change, and where we can see hope in critical literacy and social justice education right now, as part of promising anti-racist, decolonizing, and intersectional literacy frameworks and practices.     

Evidence of efficacy of the Integrated Literacy Study Group professional learning program to enhance reading instruction for students with emotional and behavioral disorders

This article reports on a pilot study of the Integrated Literacy Study Group, a digitally delivered professional learning intervention to prepare elementary school teachers to provide evidence-based reading instruction and behavioral strategies to students with or are at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. Using broadcast methods, we recruited 72 teachers across five states in the western United States to participate in the randomized controlled trial. Intervention teachers, relative to controls, made significant gains in self-efficacy and use of the reading and behavioral strategies learned in the professional learning program. Students with or at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders served by participating teachers made significant improvements in academic competence and engagement. Teacher professional learning can improve teacher knowledge of evidence-based reading and behavioral strategies for students with (or at risk for) emotional and behavioral disorders, teacher self-efficacy, and teacher practice, with positive impacts on student early literacy and academic competence.