Language Arts - Volume 95, Issue 2, 2017

For teachers learning to support emerging bilingual students in literacy classrooms, attending to academic language can encourage students’ disciplinary meaning-making as they learn this new language. Taking a community-focused, language-as-practice perspective, this study examines how two teachers scaffold first-grade emerging bilingual students’ academic language use as they explore cause and effect relationships in Ezra Jack Keats’ text, The Snowy Day. Findings show that scaffolds included modeling, recasting, and highlighting academic language use during disciplinary meaning-making, as well as the use of multiple modalities and responsive scaffolding when exploring academic language. Findings also suggest that a strict attention to prescribed uses of academic language at times constrained students’ participation in classroom meaning-making. Implications from this study include the need for integrating content and language learning, the need for responsive and flexible scaffolds, and the importance of community scaffolding.

This article examines literacy rituals as a form of culturally relevant pedagogy and argues that ritual reading practice may offer some students a culturally resonant engagement with school that draws on community relationships. Using data from a year-long classroom and community literacy ethnography of an urban Catholic school and parish, the author outlines how Greg, a Vietnamese-American student and member of an immigrant community, engaged with literacy rituals in his religious practice as a Catholic and how his teacher drew on literacy rituals in her classroom practice. The article concludes by suggesting teachers consider a wider range of what counts as community knowledge and draw on the ritual literacy practices of children, their families, and their religious associations, many of which are core parts of their immigrant identities.

This interview explores the teaching and scholarly work of Katherine and Randy Bomer, recipients of the 2017 Outstanding Elementary Educators in the English Language Arts Award.

This article features an interview with Marilyn Nelson, the 2017 recipient of the NCTE Excellence in Poetry for Children Award.

Lily Diamond, 2016 winner of the Donald H. Graves Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing, discusses ways in which she integrates issues of social justice during writer’s workshop.

This article highlights an adaptation of Vivian Paley’s storytelling and story acting curriculum to promote collaborative revision and co-authorship.

This children’s literature review column showcases the winners of the 2017 NCTE Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children.

This children’s literature review column showcases the winners of the 2017 NCTE Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children.

Informed by children’s rights scholarship, this essay presents four guidelines for re-imagining formative literacy assessment.