Research in the Teaching of English - Current Issue

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the need for criticality toward writing assessments that privilege standard language ideologies and correctness-based approaches. However, teachers continue to experience discrepancies between their intentions and actions, struggling to address both content and form in facilitative, constructive commentary. This study uses the activity theory framework of pedagogical tools, composed of conceptual and practical tools, to analyze through interviews and commented-on papers how two college composition graduate instructors responded to student writing. This study finds that while one teacher held and enacted consistent and congruent pedagogical tools grounded in sociocultural theories of writing development, the other experienced entrenched conflict between competing beliefs about evaluative and process-oriented purposes for teaching writing. These contrastive experiences illustrate how instructors’ development of pedagogical tools is mediated by interactions between their epistemological orientations and language ideologies, reinforcing the need to surface tacit beliefs about Standardized English and academic writing. This study concludes with recommendations for productive intervention in novice composition teachers’ development of response practices.

Children’s literature contains shared meanings that not only reflect societal norms, but also reinstate and reconstitute societal norms. This study used critical content analysis methods grounded in place theory to analyze the textual constructions of rurality in 52 contemporary, middle grade, realistic fiction novels set in US rural places. Findings revealed five salient themes, three of which are discussed in this article: systems work to keep rural people in poverty; rural people have deep connections to place; and rural people have diverse, intersectional identities. While some middle grade books in the sample move toward challenging stereotypes of rural places as monolithic (e.g., White-majority, socially conservative) by including nuanced portrayals of some characters of color, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters with disabilities, others rely on simplistic and otherwise problematic representations, using familiar tropes about rural people that suggest racial and cultural homogeneity privileging Whiteness and making invisible BIPOC in rural communities. Given the powerful impact of stories on identity formation and sensemaking, this study analyzes textual representations of rural people and places in books for middle grade readers.

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.