ABSTRACT This article examines how one second‐grade dual‐language teacher supported translanguaging during interactive read‐alouds and literacy discussions while working in a district that emphasized the use of separate languages. Drawing on classroom observations, interviews, and field notes, we illustrate how the teacher encouraged students to use their bilingual resources to participate, construct meaning, and discuss texts. The findings show how translanguaging, language ideologies, and broader raciolinguistic assumptions intersected during classroom interactions and how intentional teacher responses disrupted language policing while affirming students' bilingualism. We conclude with practical recommendations for literacy educators seeking to create more linguistically just and participatory classrooms.
ABSTRACT In bi‐/multi‐lingual and Two‐Way Immersion (TWI) programs, strict language‐separation policies often inadvertently marginalize the natural, fluid communication of emergent multilinguals, reducing their complex hybrid talk. Bridging the author's lived experience as a multilingual child with qualitative classroom research of first‐grade Korean–English students, this article challenges the monolingual gaze. Utilizing translanguaging as an overarching framework and Hybrid Semiotic Practice (HSP) as an analytical lens, the study documents how children strategically deploy their full linguistic, cultural, and embodied repertoires in peer interactions. The findings reframe these highly metacognitive, audience‐aware, and rule‐governed practices not as errors, but as Kyopomal—an agentive, community‐normed linguistic repertoire. By shifting the paradigm from “Konglish” to Kyopomal, this article offers actionable pedagogical implications for elementary literacy instruction, including cross‐linguistic wordplay. This research demonstrates that affirming these hybrid literacies is not merely an instructional scaffold, but an act of sociolinguistic justice that celebrates what it truly means to be multilingual.
ABSTRACT There is evidence to support that the diverse linguistic repertoire of emergent bilingual students enhances learning and development. Multimodal composing offers a unique opportunity for teachers to design lessons that draw upon emergent bilinguals' knowledge through visual means, without necessarily requiring advanced English proficiency. In the proposed activity, “Living Comics,” emergent bilingual students embody a comic character's physical expression then use visual elements to expand a storytelling frame. This activity leverages multimodal ways of understanding and composing a text, so that students can express their comprehension and ideas more confidently. In the article, we outline the purpose, objective, and benefits of this engaging whole‐group activity. Furthermore, we lay out the steps needed for teachers to reproduce and contextualize “Living Comics” in their own classrooms.
ABSTRACT Centrally developed English lesson plans provide structure and ensure curriculum coverage, yet they can constrain preservice teachers' creativity, responsiveness, and capacity to engage students meaningfully. Although this tension is well documented, there is limited practical guidance for teacher educators in University Teacher Preparation Programs. This article addresses this gap by sharing practical strategies grounded in theory and existing research through a practitioner inquiry. This inquiry examines how coaching, framed by Wassermann's idea of the organic literacy classroom, supports preservice teachers in working within and beyond standardized curriculum materials. Drawing on survey data, alongside observational and reflective data generated from university tutorials and school‐based experiences, the article illustrates how coaching and rehearsal with Year 1 English lesson plans enable preservice teachers to identify pedagogical entry points for responsive, student‐centered teaching. In doing so, the article offers practice‐based insights for teacher educators, demonstrating how prescriptive materials can be worked with—rather than resisted—to create opportunities for meaningful, joyful literacy learning that balances curriculum intent with student voice, agency, and choice. It highlights the critical role of teacher educators in supporting preservice teachers as they navigate, interpret, and adapt these materials.
ABSTRACT This article explores how names, name stories, and naming picturebooks affirm children's identities and foster inclusive classroom environments. Drawing on interviews with seven cultural insiders, educators from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, the study examines real‐life naming experiences alongside representations in multicultural picturebooks. Through grounded theory methods, employing open coding and thematic analysis, the findings highlight the emotional and cultural significance of names and the consequences of mispronunciation or name alteration in educational settings. Picturebooks such as Becoming Vanessa and Say My Name serve as critical tools for identity affirmation, empathy, and teaching students about names. Pedagogical implications for using naming stories in early childhood and elementary classrooms include emphasizing culturally sustaining practices, read‐alouds, and community building to honor every child's name and background.
In this article, I share experiences from my roles as a teacher, researcher, and parent to show how raciolinguistic ideologies take hold in early childhood. Specifically, I illustrate how children come to uphold English superiority, map language to belonging, and make judgments about whose language counts. In sharing these experiences, I call on educators and caregivers to attend to raciolinguistic socialization and work toward disruption so that all children's languages are valued in literacy learning. I suggest centering multiple languages, cultivating curiosity, and questioning curricular assumptions as ways to work alongside children in challenging hierarchies and creating learning spaces that honor the multilingual world in which we live.
Kindergarten multilingual learners (MLs) convey rich meaning through multimodal writing, drawing on a range of linguistic and visual resources that can easily be overlooked when teachers limit their focus to the mechanics of a child's writing. Looking beyond mechanical features of writing helps teachers understand the complexity of how MLs convey meaning, drawing on a range of semiotic tools in their early writing.
ABSTRACT In this article, we examine immigrant families' language and literacy practices against the backdrop of school‐based literacy instruction in two dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs: Vietnamese/English and Portuguese/English. We draw upon raciolinguistics and translanguaging scholarship to analyze interviews, classroom observations, and home visits to five Vietnamese families and five Brazilian families whose children attended the DLBE programs in the same state. Our findings highlight that families' language and literacy practices were often devalued as “inappropriate” and “uneducated” in schools despite serving as rich cultural and linguistic resources in multilingual students' everyday lives. We also document the transnational, translingual, and multimodal literacies that immigrant families cultivated across home, community, and transnational contexts. Although situated within DLBE contexts, these findings have broad implications for educators who serve multilingual learners in both bilingual and English‐medium classrooms. We argue that diversifying literacy instruction requires critical listening and equitable family engagement to honor linguistic sovereignty and account for the complexity and assets existing within each multilingual immigrant community.
Phonics is widely acknowledged in the research literature as an essential element of learning to read, but the effectiveness of various commercial programs for improving reading outcomes remains a subject of ongoing debate in research and the media. This study explores the delicate balance between teacher autonomy and scripted reading programs by surveying Australian elementary teachers' reported practices and perspectives regarding their teaching autonomy amid the use of commercial reading programs in their classrooms. Consideration is given to how teachers can be supported in developing their professional knowledge, judgment, and autonomy alongside the use of evidence-based practices for reading instruction in the early years of schooling.
This article explores how centering Black Language within reading instruction can transform early literacy outcomes and affirm student identity. Written from the perspective of a Black, bidialectal speech-language pathologist (SLP), the piece challenges traditional, corrective models of literacy by highlighting the pedagogical power of Black Language. Drawing on Black Language, linguistic justice, and literacy scholarship, the article presents classroom-ready practices-such as metalinguistic awareness activities, culturally relevant read-alouds, code-meshing awareness, and phonological instruction grounded in students' native language-that affirm linguistic sovereignty and enhance engagement. Through narrative reflection, instructional examples, and student responses, the article illustrates how SLPs and educators can collaboratively implement linguistically affirming practices that reframe dominant language ideologies. Incorporating Black Language is not simply an instructional choice-it is a justice-oriented stance that reimagines literacy as a site of empowerment, belonging, and cultural pride.
This article argues that decades of research provide robust evidence for a sociocultural approach to teaching reading comprehension, yet implementation of this approach has been slow and uneven. The sociocultural approach situates students' cultural, linguistic, and personal knowledge at the heart of their meaning making with texts. The article identifies five core practices that teachers can use to take advantage of these social and cultural resources. These practices include focusing on relevant and authentic reading comprehension tasks; using varied texts; supporting respectful and responsive social interactions; encouraging collaboration to deepen text understanding; and providing strategic reading comprehension support to enhance students' reading practices and develop their independence. Each practice is illustrated with research and getting started tips that show how these approaches can be enacted to transform classrooms into inclusive spaces where all learners can thrive as capable readers and meaning-makers.
Reading is fundamentally a forward-directed act of interpretation-a process driven by anticipating and constructing meaning. Yet our systematic review of 52 studies finds that practices of feedback on early oral reading often focus disproportionately on error correction-a pattern especially pronounced for struggling and multilingual learners. In this study we take a teacher-focused approach to using the Read To Me checklist, a research-based tool for assessing and providing feedback on oral reading that fosters both decoding proficiency and motivation. The Read To Me checklist responds to the common feedback bias toward error correction by guiding teachers to attend to a broad range of reading skills, including decoding, motivation, and comprehension, and to use what is termed "agentic feedback" to foster both a positive reader identity and a sense of student agency. Findings show that teachers using the checklist broadened their focus beyond accuracy, attending also to interpretation and agency. In this resource, we provide practical tips and classroom vignettes that demonstrate how small shifts in feedback can support skill development while strengthening reader identity.
This study explores how bilingual Latinx mothers engage in storytelling as a powerful form of familial and cultural literacy. Drawing from sociocultural theory, community cultural wealth, and translanguaging, the research centers a six-week bilingual summer book club for mothers and their children. Through cuentos and testimonios, the mothers articulated themes of language, love, and luchando (striving), using multimodal and translingual storytelling to affirm cultural identity, resist deficit narratives, and transmit intergenerational knowledge. These narratives positioned mothers not only as caregivers but as pedagogical leaders, challenging narrow definitions of literacy and offering alternative frameworks rooted in emotional labor, cultural memory, and relational teaching. Findings highlight how literacy, when rooted in community and love, becomes a tool for healing, resistance, and reimagining educational spaces. This research affirms the critical role of Latinx mothers as storytellers, educators, and cultural workers, expanding the field's understanding of where and how literacy happens.
In this "Teaching and Learning in Practice" article, we introduce the record of decision-making (RODM), a formative assessment of decoding while reading that measures the frequency of a student's use of backup strategies while reading aloud. We first explain backup strategies and then share validation and reliability evidence for the backup strategies that we include on the RODM. We also describe how to administer and interpret the results. At the end of the article, we provide a link to free, asynchronous training materials.
This qualitative case study examines how six first-year teachers enacted content knowledge from the Texas Reading Academy (TRA) during their classroom teaching. Semi-structured interviews focused on instructional decision-making, perceived supports, and barriers to implementation. Findings indicate structured practices such as phonics and phonemic awareness routines transferred more consistently into classroom instruction, while discourse-oriented and formative assessment practices proved more fragile and highly dependent on time, curriculum alignment, and classroom demands. Mentorship and collaborative supports facilitated enactment, whereas systemic misalignment constrained teachers' use of TRA-aligned practices. Extending an earlier pilot study that documented preservice teachers' confidence and anticipated barriers, this follow-up investigation highlights both the durability and fragility of TRA knowledge in practice and situates Texas within a broader national discussion of the challenges associated with sustaining science of reading reforms during teachers' early careers.
Using a contextualized approach to grammar instruction, with published authors as mentors, contrasts starkly to ineffective methods that use worksheets and isolated grammar instruction. With this contextualized approach, students turn to authors as mentors for using grammar as tools, not rules. Positioning published authors as mentors for students' writing provides authentic models for students to construct knowledge about grammar within meaningful contexts. This article offers a process for using mentor texts as a pathway for teaching grammar and usage. We include both primary grade and middle-school examples of this approach, which offers a research-based alternative to ineffective grammar instruction that is driven by worksheets and decontextualized examples.
Research into the process of becoming literate mainly focuses on the teaching of the alphabetic principle as a starting point upon school entry. However, experiences, knowledge, and skills prior to this point may determine future success. This research examines how musical activities may be used to foster these foundational literacy competencies. Using a micro-ethnographic, qualitative design, this study sought to examine the extent to which a daily literacy-through-music program of 30-40 min duration, implemented in an area of social deprivation over a six-week period, for a group of nine participants aged 3-5 years of age, could be successful in promoting the identified foundational literacy competencies. The findings suggested that such a program could facilitate the acquisition of these competencies and as such have unique implications for the pedagogical practice of early years practitioners in the establishing of secure literacy foundations for further formal literacy learning.
Using an assessment that provides a WCPM score is a necessary, useful, and efficient way to monitor and evaluate students' progress in their reading development. But WCPM does not provide diagnostic information of instructional value to teachers. Adding WR2 to the administration of 1-min fluency probes (OMFP) allows teachers to track and target individual students' specific word recognition skills in real reading settings adding significant instructional value for teachers. The Word Recognition Record (WR2) uses a research-based process to analyze oral reading errors of students' 1-min fluency probes. Based on research reported in 2026, this article describes the development and use of the WR2 in classroom assessment settings. The WR2 can give teachers valuable information from repeated OMFP assessments. For individual students, using the WR2 with each OMFP helps teachers spot patterns in word recognition skills and identify areas needing more support. At the classroom level, it also helps teachers see which students share similar needs and group them for focused small-group instruction.
