Language Arts - Volume 77, Issue 2, 1999

Describes the attempt to reinitiate conversation and dialogue between teachers and parents through a Book Club called “Parents and Teachers as Readers” in which teachers and parents from one elementary school came together to read and discuss children’s books. Looks at how assumptions regarding teaching, parenting, and reading became topics of the group.

Recounts the author’s family’s summer reading and how she used it as an opportunity to talk with her children about books and, ultimately, about life.

Describes the collaboration in a 5th-grade classroom between the author (a teacher educator) and a former student of hers (the 5th-grade teacher). Complicates notions of equity and empowerment in collaborative research by outlining the cycles and shifts they experienced while constantly renegotiating their positions.

Describes a drama lesson in which a class of grade-one students spent one and a half hours engaged with second-year elementary education student teachers. Illustrates the power of drama to deeply engage students in a range of language arts activities.

Presents the authors’ varying perspectives as teacher researchers reflecting on their first-time implementation of a cross-age, primary-grade literacy project. Identifies several themes as important sites of difference among the teacher-researchers.

Frank Smith argues that systematic phonics is destined to fail as a method of reading instruction and will make learning to read more difficult for many children. Phonics-focused instruction fails to understand or ignores how children actually learn to read; the time to learn phonics, if at all, is during reading; and phonemic awareness is spurious. Smith reveals the ideological and commercial focus of such methods.

Louise Rosenblatt discusses teaching methods, reading processes, application of theory to practice, literature-based curriculum, and what she is working on now in this interview.

Presents brief descriptions of 1999’s list of Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts: 30 children’s trade books published in 1998 chosen for their outstanding potential to enhance language awareness among students in grades K-8.