Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 59, Issue 4, 2025

In this study, we examine educators’ orientations to the teaching of “standardized English” (SE)—an idealized form often associated with academic and professional contexts. The perceived status of SE is reinforced by normative standard language ideologies and is often oriented as “correct” and necessary for success in education and employment. SE is also a primary focus in English language arts (ELA) classrooms, with educators often positioned as gatekeepers. In this study, we analyze discussion posts from 91 educators enrolled in an online master’s level sociolinguistics course in which they describe how they would define SE for their students. Through iterative, multi-level qualitative collaborative coding of participants’ discussion posts, we interpret six ideological orientations to SE, ranging from standard language ideology to critical language awareness, with varying degrees of acceptance of linguistic diversity and criticality regarding societal sociolinguistic power relations. Importantly, we discuss the messiness of language ideologies, especially as they pertain to ELA. This study highlights the prevalence of hybrid orientations to SE, indicating that educators’ views on SE are complex and often integrate multiple, sometimes conflicting, language ideologies. We argue for the need for teacher preparation and continuing education programs to address language ideologies, promoting strategies that go beyond respecting linguistic diversity to challenging standard language norms as inroads toward dismantling raciolinguistic and colonial legacies in English language education.

The purpose of this qualitative project is to examine the use of a noticing assignment in one fourth-grade dual language arts classroom. We, the authors, consider the texts most interesting to students and how these texts relate to humanizing and responsive writing pedagogies. Learning to write in K–12 schooling contexts is often dictated by state-sanctioned standardized assessments, creating a space in which writing is equated with the rules of grammar rather than with deeper meaning making, inquiry, or joy. For youth from historically marginalized communities, this lack of joyfulness in writing instruction is particularly evident. In this study, we consider the following research questions: (1) How do students in a fourth-grade language arts course interact with texts that are interesting to them? (2) How might the act of noticing support students’ understandings of their own literacies as valued, worthy, and connected to the spaces and places in which they live and learn? and (3) How do students voice their perceptions and experiences of writing and writing instruction through the noticing project? Data include 16 fourth-grade students’ noticing journals, pre-project surveys of youth feelings toward writing, focal group interviews, and researcher field notes. Findings demonstrated that youth held varied perspectives toward writing, that they engaged in multiple LA skills to notice and respond to their and others’ noticings, and that they engaged in discussions of social (in)justice through their noticings. This study has implications for educators and researchers working toward more humanizing writing pedagogies connected to youths’ lived experiences, interests, desires, and curiosities.

Argumentation, one of the foundational pillars of writing instruction in K–12 schools, is consistently framed in literacy policy, curriculum, and assessment as a crucial skill youth need to participate in democratic deliberation. Yet the normative emphases in argument discourse on individual subjectivity, binary analysis, and competitive social scarcity stifle the development of the solidarity and relationality needed to counter rancorous political discord and to build equitable civic futures. In this conceptual essay, the authors offer a reimagined paradigm and practice of argument that fosters empathetic thinking and mutuality, moving away from the conceptualization of argument as solitary edifice and toward a vision of argument as collective architecture. Drawing upon lessons from global communicative traditions and recent turns in literacy scholarship toward participatory design, multimodality, and critical speculation, the authors provide five guiding principles for the Argument Writing as Architecture (AWA) framework, share vignettes from classroom and community learning spaces to illustrate its utility, and propose strategies for its implementation in K–12 classrooms.

This project is an interdisciplinary endeavor to connect research in the teaching of English with Critical Disability Studies, an intersection that is crucial to disrupting ableism and creating more liberatory schooling and societal contexts that embrace broader notions of human differences. Invoking critical content analysis of five young adult novels that depict characters with Tourette syndrome (TS), we asked, how are various models for understanding “disability” invoked in YA fiction that depicts Tourette syndrome? How do these various models function to reinforce, complicate, or reconstruct in a more progressive way notions about human difference in YA fiction that depicts Tourette syndrome? We focused on one of the many pervasive tropes found within all five novels using the psychodynamic construct of splitting. In particular, we call attention to depictions of TS as embodying an animal—most often a dog—that splits off into the bad/dangerous side, usually subsumed within a character’s “normal self.” This trope can be seen as part of broader, historical discourses that have dehumanized disabled people, constructing them as “other” and subsequently rationalizing exclusionary practices. We advocate for and discuss ways for scholars and educators to continue integrating disability from the margins to the center in literacy research.