English Journal - Volume 97, Issue 1, 2007

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.

High school teacher John Golden provides a variety of literature, film scenes, and classroom activities to introduce literary, cinematic, and theatrical elements. He shows students how to move beyond basic comparisons as students learn to analyze the techniques and changes film directors choose when translating literature to the screen.

Rozema promotes the educational potential of the student-produced podcast—a genre with an authentic audience and out-of-school applicability. Podcasting allows students to cultivate creative, efficient writing when delving into literary works. Students write, revise, collaborate on, and produce book-talk podcasts about young adult novels such as Feed by M. T. Anderson.

High school teacher Cara M. Arver walks teachers through her experience of setting up a virtual world to augment students’ reading of Lord of the Flies. Students interact as additional characters, discuss and solve problems based on the circumstances of the story, and complete classroom assignments within a virtual environment.

How can we prepare and encourage new teachers to take on the challenge of changing traditional views of literacy education? Teacher educator William Kist shares a first-year teacher’s story of incorporating new literacies within an eighth-grade alternative classroom.

Darren Crovitz explains that the explosive growth of Web-based content and communication in recent years compels us to teach students how to examine the “rhetorical nature and ethical dimensions of the online world.” He demonstrates successful approaches to accomplish this goal through his analysis of the selling techniques of two Web sites targeted to a teen audience and his description of a project in which team members devise ways to teach students to consider the language and design elements of a selected site.

High school teacher Cathie English believes online threaded discussions are “an amazing ally to the teacher who cares about giving voice to every student in the classroom.” They offer a forum for quiet students to develop and verbalize ideas; promote in-depth response and reflection; encourage peer affirmation; and provide opportunities for more teacher-student and student-student interaction. English also addresses several issues that accompany online discussion, such as parental concerns, classroom implementation, and technology access and equity.

Dawnene D. Hassett and Melissa B. Schieble contend that literacy instruction must include attention to the multiple ways in which print and visual images work together. They propose ways to update accepted reading strategies “with visual texts and new literacies in mind.” Using examples from picture books and graphic novels, they expand our understanding of how readers extend three cueing systems—graphophonic, semantic, and syntactic—to negotiate multiple levels of meaning in visual texts.

High school teacher Karen E. Moynihan creates a multimodal project inspired by the creative nonfiction style of The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Students choose a collectible item and immerse themselves in the subculture of the collectors. The project includes participation in library and field research, interviews, photography and graphic design, process journals, peer editing and drafting of a final story with integrated research, and PowerPoint presentations.

Jason Ranker argues that struggling students need “opportunities to use print and produce meanings in diverse and multifaceted ways.” His case study of two fifth-grade girls who used digital video production to better understand aspects of the civil rights movement reveals ways in which multimodal literacy practices “can create new possibilities for literacy and inquiry learning.” A detailed description of their inquiry process and the product they created suggests that such work can be applied to learners of many ages and abilities.

When the literature anthologies did not arrive, Allen Webb turned to the Internet, where he found a wealth of classic and contemporary e-texts. Using these online resources opened up possibilities for new ways of teaching and learning traditional skills of close reading and critical analysis. Students created blogs of poems and commentary, compared versions of The Odyssey and a controversial news story, and manipulated the language and structure of texts to question the cultural and historical contexts of the work.

Junior high school teacher Mary Rice designs a consumer research unit that cultivates students’ critical reading and thinking skills. As students learn how to develop and revise criteria for evaluating the reliability of online information, they read customer reviews, research products, and present their findings orally.

This year’s honor list will appeal to everyone. The seven young adult books reviewed reach across genres, subjects, and time. Among them, they have won the Printz and the National Book awards and have been repeatedly listed as “Best Books” of 2006.

“Research Matters” provides teachers with review and application of research that illuminates the daily concerns and activities of English language arts teachers and classrooms.