Genre fiction dominates the contemporary literary landscape and shapes how people read. Defined by recurring formal conventions-familiar plots, archetypal characters, and established worldbuilding tropes-and sustained by powerful publishing and marketing systems, genre fiction offers distinctive narrative dynamics with rich potential for English Language Arts (ELA) instruction. Drawing on contemporary literary theory and the sociology of the novel, this conceptual article identifies four such dynamics: (1) iterability, the patterned repetition of narrative elements; (2) narrative interest, the strategic use of suspense, curiosity, and surprise; (3) serialization, the unfolding of stories across multiple installments; and (4) spectacle, the amplification of dramatic or maximalist moments. We argue that attending to these dynamics can help educators make the interpretive processes of literary reading more visible to students, fostering deeper engagement, inclusivity, and interpretive flexibility. We also outline how these dynamics can be operationalized in empirical research to investigate interpretive work in real time, examine how readerly practices developed through genre fiction transfer to other literary forms, and analyze how cultural and commercial forces mediate these processes. By integrating genre fiction into both curricular design and literacy research, educators and scholars can better understand and leverage the narrative strategies that define much of contemporary reading culture. In doing so, they can connect literacy pedagogy to the realities of students' reading lives, expand the scope of disciplinary inquiry, and contribute to ongoing conversations about literary interpretation, engagement, and the role of disciplinary practices in a changing textual landscape.

This conceptual article provides an outline of Manuel DeLanda's concept of 'parametrization' and its methodological possibilities for inquiry into emerging platform ecologies in education. Traditionally, education research has treated 'the digital' as separate from the analog. However, transdisciplinary literature has shown how connective technologies blur these distinctions, expanding the scope of education research to include the interplay of social, technical, and political-economic relations within 'the digital.' This complexity presents challenges for researchers in prioritizing aspects of these relations. To address this tension, we turn to DeLanda's 'parametrization' for setting inquiry parameters with 'control knobs' to adjust the focus on relevant actors, activities, and interactions. By examining the influence of digital platforms like Google in educational settings, we illustrate how parametrization allows researchers to navigate scales and relations, offering insights into the nuanced impacts of digital technologies on teaching and learning practices.

This article explores the pedagogical potential of closely reading and writing hardboiled detective fiction in a Canadian secondary English Language Arts classroom. Grounded in narrative theory and co-taught with a local high-school teacher, the unit focused on the cynical narration and stylistic elements of authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Through close readings and creative writing exercises, students engaged with the genre's thematic concerns of societal corruption and urban decay, honing their narrative skills by crafting their own detective stories. Emphasising the genre's relevance amidst contemporary social and political challenges, the study highlights how teaching hardboiled fiction enabled students to critically explore narrative voice, genre conventions, and the expressive potential of literary cynicism. By fostering a nuanced understanding of narrative construction and perspective, the unit aimed to empower students to articulate their own perspectives on societal issues through literary expression.

This essay explores the predominance of plot, character, and theme as core concepts in English Language Arts (ELA) and argues for a renewed focus on literary discourse and the teaching of interpretive procedures. Using Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses as a case study, it illustrates how instructional attention to narrative style, point of view, and form can reveal and nurture the processes of literary meaning making and better align high school ELA with disciplinary practices of reading.

This article explores the potential of narrative interest for secondary literature education. Narrative is a purposeful construction which is organised with the intent of having effects on readers. For rhetorical narratologists, narrative is driven by the production of narrative gaps - suspense, curiosity, and surprise - which in turn drive reader interest in their potential fulfilment. Drawing from rhetorical-functionalist approaches to literature, I rethink contemporary perspectives on reader response to focus on the pedagogical implications of narrative interest, suggesting how English teachers might use narrative interest to explore narrative openings, the power of narrator perspective, and the ethics of storytelling. This reorientation of instruction balances specific reader responses with the textual production of narrative interest through genre forms, narrator voice, and narrative organisation.

Critical approaches to literature in secondary English require greater attention to narrative discourse. In this conceptual article, I provide interpretative tools from contemporary narratology and demonstrate their critical potential for high school English. In particular, I outline critical literacy's vital but overattentive focus on the contents of story (characters, ideas, themes) and argue for more robust instruction as to how a story is told: the techniques and telling functions of narrative. Using the canonical novel The Great Gatsby as an extended example, this article focuses on the power of attention to narrative discourse, the inescapable organization and presentation of narrative events by a teller who organizes a story to affect a reader. I argue that a renewed instructional focus on narrative discourse does not mean abandoning concerns with the storyworld or the characters of literature. Rather, it envisions a critical literacy which helps students see how the mimetic and the synthetic dynamics of narrative work together. Transcending canonical literature, instructional attention to narrative discourse is crucial in an evolving media landscape, where the techniques of disjointed narration and multivalent telling are rapidly extending beyond conventional literature and into television, film, Youtube, and even into the language of business, politics, and marketing. Teaching narrative form, consequently, is vital for the project of critical literacy in our contemporary media environment.

Abstract The arrival of COVID-19 disrupted the everyday life of the classroom. This interactional sociolinguistic research explores a teacher providing directions to students about COVID-19 safety protocols, delivered on the first three days of the students’ return to the classroom in August 2020 after a multi-month hiatus. Using audio-data collected over multiple hours as part of an ongoing long-term study of classroom interaction in a rural Canadian high school, it examines teacher strategies for delivering directives regarding COVID-19 safety policy, with particular attention to linguistic forms aimed at student compliance during the fraught early days of return. The findings outline strategies of delivering unambiguous directives regarding relatively mundane procedures, as well as strategies of avoidance—indirections—which were framed as negotiation and revoicing. This study explores the tenuous balance of risk and the everyday in the classroom, where the teacher attempts to reset the interactional order in light of new restrictions, new requirements, and new threats.

A teacher educator explores rhetorical approaches to teaching literature in two recent books.

In this study, we explore discussions of literature in a high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, examining how students read rhetorically. Reading rhetorically considers the ethical effects of narrative content as it is mediated through character dialogue and action, narrator discourse, and the author's organization: a narrative as a story told to someone for some rhetorical purpose. Drawing from rhetorical narratology, we analyzed data collected in a 12th-Grade ELA classroom during student-driven Socratic seminars to ask: how did students address the ethics of various narrative situations as they talked about literature? We found that youth engaged in interpretive discussions that grappled with the complexities of ethical positioning in narrative. We argue that ELA classrooms are key spaces to help students examine how narratives act on readers, how readers act on narratives, and the ethical dimensions of such interpretive work.

This chapter provides a systematic review of research published between 2006 and 2022 on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms in writing instruction. We theorize writing and platforms as complex ecologies, investigating the interplay of their relations and implications for educational equity. Our findings suggested three functional categories of AI platforms in writing instruction (assistive, assessment, and authentication) and a focus on the technical dimensions of platforms and their intersections with the cognitive dimensions of writing. Finally, we found a focus on equity notably absent from our corpus. Taken together, these findings suggest an agenda for equity-oriented research and pedagogy that confronts aspects of platform and writing environments that have, to date, been omitted from the empirical record.

Purpose In an editorial introduction essay for the special issue on Religion, Literacies, and English Education in Global Dialogue, the editors frame papers in the special issue in dialogue with previous scholarly literature around three central lines of inquiry: How do children, youth and families navigate relationships among religion, spirituality, language and literacy? What challenges are faced by language and literacy teachers and teacher educators around the globe who seek to respond to diverse religious and spiritual perspectives in their work? And what opportunities do teachers seize or create toward this end? How are developments of language and literacy theory, policy, curriculum and ritual entangled with race and religion? Design/methodology/approach Taking an essayist, humanistic approach, this paper summarizes, interprets and comments on previous scholarly works to frame the articles published in the special issue “Religion, Literacies, and English Education in Global Dialogue” in relation to the field and in relation to one another. Findings Denise Dávila, Matthew Deroo and Ilhan Mohamud reveal the relationships young people and families forge and navigate among spiritual literacies and literatures, digital technologies and ethnic identities. Heidi Hadley, Jennifer Wargo and Erin McNeill illuminate how teachers’ vocations, as well as their pedagogical goals and curricular artifacts, can become deeply entangled with religious and spiritual sense-making. Kasun Gajasinghe and Priyanka Jayakodi expand perspectives on both the ritualization and racialization of religion through nationalist policies surrounding national anthem performances in Sri Lanka. Anne Whitney and Suresh Canagarajah discuss how spiritual commitments, communities and experiences interact with their scholarly trajectories. Research limitations/implications The essay concludes with a discussion of scholarly capacity building that may be needed for conducting research on religion and spirituality in relation to languages, literacies and English education on a global scale. Practical implications The second section of the essay discusses challenges faced by language and literacy teachers and teacher educators around the globe who seek to integrate diverse religious and spiritual perspectives into their work. It foregrounds how many teachers and teacher educators work within contexts where ethnoreligious nationalism is on the rise. It highlights the need for language and literacy educators to develop curiosity and basic knowledge about diverse religions. Further it calls for teacher educators to engage with teacher candidates’ religious identities and sense-making. Social implications Because it considers religious and spiritual sense-making in relation to language and literacy education, the social implications of this work are significant and wide-reaching. For examples, the paper questions the conceit of secularism within education, pushing readers to consider their own spiritual and religious identifications and influences when they work across religious differences. Originality/value This paper identifies, interprets and assesses current threads of work on religious and spiritual sense-making within scholarship on languages, literacies and English education.

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[T]he Catholic tradition offers the paradigmatic expression of the relation between the office-holder and the pedagogic office, with the dogma of infallibility… the manifest similarities between th...

Recently, talk of “fake news” – and its relation to wider epistemic crises, from climate denialism to the creep of global ethnonationalism – has renewed attention to media literacy in education. For some, revived discussions of media literacy offer protection (e.g., strategies for identifying and critiquing media bias and misinformation). For others, they offer empowerment (e.g. equipping youth to produce media messages that challenge misinformation or represent marginalized perspectives). In this article, we consider how such approaches, while often generative, retain a focus of media pedagogy that centers the actions of individual humans – namely, “literacies”, or practices associated with the interpretation or creation of media texts.

What resources do students draw on to produce literary theory in the contemporary high school English classroom? This interactional sociolinguistic study traces the production and distribution of Lexical, Structural, and Thematic resources across genre chains in reading, writing, and discussing literary theory during an intensive 3-week short story unit. Drawing from the Bakhtinian concepts intertextuality and heteroglossia, this study shows how students’ engagement with literary theory has impacted the transformation of specific contested resources across genre chains. It concludes by posing some critical questions of literature pedagogy from the standpoint of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic “events”.

AbstractDiscussions about literacy assessment can often be polarizing for teachers, school administrators, and other stakeholders. Given the diverse and often charged perspectives on assessment within both the profession and the broader public discourse, it can be difficult to engage in productive dialogue about the role that literacy assessment plays in promoting or inhibiting effective models of literacy education. This department provides perspectives, questions, and research that enables readers to better advocate for themselves and their students as they develop their own assessment programs and respond to assessment programs that are imposed on them.

This article investigates whole-class discussions of literature in the English classroom and the pragmatics of teacher interpretation in and through the voices of characters. In particular, it focuses on the whole-class oral reading and discussion of the Tennessee Williams' playA Streetcar Named Desirein an ethnically and linguistically diverse rural Canadian classroom, and the teacher's stylized "Southern" oral performances of significant characters as part of her responses to student answers in whole-class talk. Using extensive audio data from a 12th-grade English class and drawing from the analytic tools of the linguistic anthropology of education, this article raises questions of the potential functions of stylized characters' voices in literary critical talk. This research contributes to ongoing conversations regarding the pragmatics of voicing, stylization, and the intersections of teacher talk and literacy learning in classroom discourse, with specific attention to the pedagogic work of enregistering bundles of linguistic features with particular teacher-driven interpretive perspectives on literary characters.

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This article examines teachers and students styling the voices of literary characters during whole-class talk. Drawing on data from a diverse 12 th Grade ELA class in a rural Canadian school and a multi-week unit exploring the play A Streetcar Named Desire, it focuses on the use of stylized speech to index literary features such as character, time, and location: students and their teacher interpreting, hearing, and doing stylized character voices during oral reading and discussion. In particular, this article outlines both the potential indexical valence of teacher literary stylizations-with attention to stereotypical construals of the 'Southern' register and associated character models-and students' divergent uptake and understand-ing of those stylizations with reference to their emergent literary understanding. This article argues that more attention is needed to literary character stylization as an everyday practice in classrooms. (c) 2021 The Author. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )

Young students must become proficient in the new literacies of 21st-century technologies to be considered literate. This department explores how literacy educators can integrate information and communication technologies into the curriculum.