Literacy Books

Book SynopsisThis book proposes to expand multiliteracies frameworks in second language education, by recognizing that learning a new language and culture involves both designs and desires, the affects and emotions that feed our responses to particular ways of making meaning. Over the past two decades, multiliteracies approaches to second language education have brought attention to the diversity of modes, media, language varieties, and discourses involved in what we often shorthand as language learning. A core concept in these discussions is the idea of meaning design, the idea that languages are dynamic, culturally-shaped systems of resources for engaging with and making sense of the world.Building on these discussions and drawing inspiration and practical examples from a variety of modern language classes in higher education in the USA, the book demonstrates how poetic and playful language can be embedded in multiliteracies pedagogy in ways that foster learners' and teachers' awareness of designs, while also making space for desires that are harder to script or plan for. In addition to building a conceptual map around poetics and play for researchers and teachers in language education, the book offers concrete examples of what a multiliteracies approach emphasizing designs and desires can look like in classrooms and curricula.

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Book SynopsisAdopting a social practice' approach to literacy research based on ethnographic methods, this book provides a strong critique of dominant understandings of the role of literacy in the lives of adults in Australia. It explores how groups of working-class adults can manage the literacy practices of their everyday lives by drawing on social networks of support. It is based on research conducted by the author over a forty-year career in adult literacy education, featuring the voices of varied adult groups, including: prisoners, the long-term unemployed, local council workers, manufacturing workers, adult literacy students, marginalised young people, vocational students, and patients living with a chronic illness (type 2 diabetes). Each chapter explains how dominant society views these adult groups in relation to literacy, and provides a qualitative examination at the local level of how members of these groups manage the literacy practices of their everyday lives.

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Book SynopsisThis book sheds light on the array of transformative literacies in the Global South, which English language teachers and educators seek to integrate within their pedagogical practices. In English language teaching (ELT), there is an increasing need for a shift away from dominant literacy thinking, knowledge and practices that originate in the Global North. This collection brings together contemporary research and practice on how literacies are theorized, challenged, embedded and enacted in ELT practice in the Global South. It showcases research that focuses on the intersections of multiple literacies and English language pedagogy, and how these fuse with the social, cultural, historical and political realities of contexts where English is a foreign, second or additional language. The authors provide insightful examples of pedagogical research and practice that reinvigorate a wide range of literacies often invisible or silenced in both the North' and South'. Th

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Book SynopsisThis collection combines scholarship, reflection, and practitioner stories of classroom teaching. It begins by reporting the results of a survey of 86 college faculty and staff regarding breakthroughs in their teaching of reading and proposes three tentative threshold concepts and what the editors call a meta-concept undergirding those threshold concepts. Contributors from writing studies, English, first-year seminar, chemistry, biology, psychology, mathematics and other disciplines describe their strategies for engaging college students in reading in their disciplines, sharing what they have learned from their years of experience using the Reading Apprenticeship framework in the classroom. Chapters that elaborate on that framework and on the tensions of academic apprenticeship round out the collection. The collection is motivated by the question, How do we help college students become independent learners in their disciplines? In it, the editors and contributors argue that we do so by supporting students in learning from texts. In order to do so effectively, college faculty must recognize reading as a problem-solving process, encourage and support students in taking responsibility for the intellectual work in their classes, and create strong classroom communities that help students develop identities as scholars. When we truly engage in a reciprocal academic apprenticeship with our students--valuing what they bring to our disciplines as much as what our disciplines offer them--we transform our classrooms and the academy itself. The authors in this collection illustrate this difficult and rewarding work with stories of and reflections on the practices in their own contexts that begin to make this shift.

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Book SynopsisThis collection combines scholarship, reflection, and practitioner stories of classroom teaching. It begins by reporting the results of a survey of 86 college faculty and staff regarding breakthroughs in their teaching of reading and proposes three tentative threshold concepts and what the editors call a meta-concept undergirding those threshold concepts. Contributors from writing studies, English, first-year seminar, chemistry, biology, psychology, mathematics and other disciplines describe their strategies for engaging college students in reading in their disciplines, sharing what they have learned from their years of experience using the Reading Apprenticeship framework in the classroom. Chapters that elaborate on that framework and on the tensions of academic apprenticeship round out the collection. The collection is motivated by the question, How do we help college students become independent learners in their disciplines? In it, the editors and contributors argue that we do so by supporting students in learning from texts. In order to do so effectively, college faculty must recognize reading as a problem-solving process, encourage and support students in taking responsibility for the intellectual work in their classes, and create strong classroom communities that help students develop identities as scholars. When we truly engage in a reciprocal academic apprenticeship with our students--valuing what they bring to our disciplines as much as what our disciplines offer them--we transform our classrooms and the academy itself. The authors in this collection illustrate this difficult and rewarding work with stories of and reflections on the practices in their own contexts that begin to make this shift.

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Book SynopsisMirjana Pantic is Associate Professor of Digital Journalism in the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences at Pace University, USA.

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