Language and literacy in educational contexts

1 Why this special issue?

I am pleased and honored to have the opportunity to edit this special issue on language and literacy education. Language and literacy education is a broad field of inquiry concerned primarily with the nature, processes, emergence, development, uses, teaching, and learning of language (and other semiotic systems). The major goal of language and literacy educators is to help students of all ages and backgrounds learn to read and write, both language-based practices, for different purposes and in different contexts. This is a daunting undertaking for at least two reasons. First, the texts that students are expected to read and write become progressively more complex and specialized over the years of schooling. Being able to read and write everyday texts of elementary schooling does not guarantee similar successes in reading and writing academic texts of secondary and tertiary schooling (Fang 2024). This means that students need to develop not only basic literacy, or foundational language skills and literacy strategies, that can be applied across various contexts, but also disciplinary literacy, or advanced language skills and literacy strategies, that enables them to engage productively with complex texts of academic disciplines. Second, the student population in the United States (U.S.) (and perhaps elsewhere) has become much more socially, culturally, and linguistically diverse over the past two decades, with many of them being new immigrants to the country and facing the double challenge of learning English as an additional language while also learning the content of academic subjects (Short and Fitzsimmons 2007). The diversity of students contrasts sharply with a teaching force in the U.S. that is still predominantly White, middle class, and monolingual (Schaffer 2021). These realities make significant demands on teachers and teacher educators, requiring them to deepen their understanding of language/literacy processes and practices, seek and implement pedagogical innovations, and reflect on their own language and literacy ideologies. The seven articles and two book reviews that comprise this special issue present the latest research investigating efforts to tackle these challenges.

2 What’s in this special issue?

The seven articles included here explore a range of significant issues related to language/literacy teaching and learning across the elementary, secondary, and tertiary educational contexts. The first article, by Dianna Townsend, Rachel Knecht, Sarah Lupo, Li-Ting Chen, and Vickie Smith Barrios, explores how third and sixth-grade students navigated dense sentences in academic texts. Recognizing the potential challenge that academic language poses to reading comprehension, the researchers drew on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) seminal work on cohesion to design professional development modules for classroom teachers, who then incorporated explicit cohesion instruction into their lessons. Using a qualitative-dominant mixed methods design, they examined students’ metalinguistic and epilinguistic understanding of cohesive ties (e.g. connectives and anaphoric references) in academic texts, as well as the relationship between this understanding and reading comprehension. They found that both third and sixth graders were able to explain the functions of cohesive ties, make judgments about whether a cohesive tie is used correctly, and use cohesive ties to infer the relationship between linked ideas; and they attributed their knowledge about cohesion to teachers’ explicit instruction. The researchers also found that students’ ability to choose semantically appropriate cohesive ties in connected texts significantly correlates with their performance on measures of reading comprehension. Based on these findings, the researchers suggested that an explicit, functional focus on connectives, anaphora, and other linguistic features may be beneficial to students’ reading comprehension of challenging academic texts.

The second article, by Yuxin Cui and Mark B. Pacheco, reports on a study that investigated how one monolingual English language teacher scaffolded high school emergent bilinguals’ reading comprehension in a collaborative learning context where students worked in small groups to make sense of two literary texts (a story and a poem) and were encouraged to draw from their entire linguistic repertoires in ways that honor and sustain their multilingualism. The researchers videotaped and analyzed 10 consecutive one-hour lessons in which the teacher used a translanguaging pedagogy called TRANSLATE (Teaching Reading and New Strategic Language Approaches to Emergent bilinguals) to foster collaboration and support meaning-making among four bilingual ninth-grade students who were learning English as a second language. They found that the teacher scaffolded students’ text comprehension by suggesting linguistic resources within the text for students to attend to, by promoting individual and collective contributions of meaning around the text, and by setting collaborative ground rules and guiding the use of collaborative strategies. The study offers teachers who work with emergent bilinguals some specific ways of promoting collaborative learning, reading engagement, and meaning making within a translanguaging pedagogy.

While the first two articles focus on developing students’ basic, or generic, literacy, the next three articles are concerned with advanced, or discipline-specific, literacy, which students are expected to develop in secondary and tertiary schooling. The third article, by Yang Qi and Zhihui Fang, focuses on the fundamental sense of science literacy (i.e. the ability to read and write science texts), which is now considered essential to the development of the derived sense of science literacy (i.e. being knowledgeable about the substantive content of science, including its key concepts, core ideas, important relationships, and unifying themes). It reports on a study that examined two middle school science teachers’ perspectives on and practices in teaching writing to English Language Learners (ELLs). The researchers collected and analyzed three sets of data: teacher interviews, classroom observations, and student writing samples. They found that although both teachers recognized the importance of writing to science practice and science learning, they provided few opportunities for extended writing and limited writing instruction to ELLs in their lessons because they lacked the time, preparedness, confidence, and motivation to teach science writing and held lower expectations for ELLs. These findings indicate that the repeated calls over the past few decades by both science and literacy education scholars to make writing/literacy an integral part of science literacy instruction have not been taken to heart by science teachers. The researchers suggested that this lack of serious attention to writing/literacy in science instruction underscores the urgent need to reenvision the relationship between literacy and science such that literacy is no longer seen as merely a handmaiden in service of science but a constitutive part of the substantive content of science.

The fourth paper, by Zhihui Fang, Suzanne Chapman, Geoffrey C. Kellogg, and Michelle Commeret, is premised on the belief that understanding the essence of a discipline and the literate practices of disciplinary experts is key to promoting disciplinary literacy instruction. The researchers examined one mathematician’s literate practice and his view on the nature of mathematics. They interviewed the mathematician, observed his daily work routines, and asked him to do think-alouds while reading an academic text within his area of specialization. Qualitative analysis of these data sources revealed that the mathematician (a) viewed mathematics as a rigorous, demanding discipline that is wide and varied, relatively stable, and rich in connections; and (b) engaged in extensive reading, writing, and peer collaboration as an integral part of his social practice. The analysis also showed that the mathematician valued learning from repeated trials and errors; employed a range of strategies (e.g. close reading, summarizing, questioning, storying, evaluating, and annotating) to help him make sense of what he read; and used both verbal and visual resources in an integrated way to create specialized knowledge, engage in rigorous reasoning, develop logical argument, and construct professional identity. The case study provides important insights into mathematical inquiry and mathematical meaning-making that can help classroom teachers design curriculum and pedagogy that are more authentic to mathematics and more effective for promoting mathematical literacy.

The fifth article, by Ángel Garralda Ortega, Abel Hon Man Cheung, and Michelle Yuen Shan Fong, addresses the challenge of reading complex texts faced by academically less well prepared college students for whom English is a second language. It reports on a design-based study exploring the extent to which these students’ reading comprehension can be improved using an online reading platform that provides both a tooltip glossing device for difficult texts and the option of activating various types of interactive questions aligned with the text. The researchers randomly assigned 46 participants to read one General Reading IELTS (International English Language Testing System) text and one Academic Reading IELTS text, either on an on-screen Word file or on the e-reading platform with the glossing tool. The test sessions were video-recorded, and post-test interviews with the participants were conducted. Statistical analysis of the test scores showed that students who read texts with electronic glosses outperformed those who read the same texts but without electronic glosses. Qualitative analysis of the observation and interview data identified several affordances and shortcomings with the e-reading platform. The researchers concluded that online tools such as electronic glossing and interactive questioning make complex texts more transparent and comprehensible and can thus be used to enhance academic reading instruction for readers with low-intermediate English language proficiency.

The last two articles emphasize the need to equip classroom teachers with the knowledge, understanding, skills, and disposition to work with students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The article by Brittany Adams, Elizabeth Y. Stevens, Tess Dussling, and Sunny C. Li explores novice teachers’ perspectives on immigrant students and English language learners. The researchers asked 21 novice teachers in a graduate literacy education course to select from a range of scripted scenarios related to educational (in)equality and then discuss their responses to the chosen scenarios with a small group of peers via an online forum. Qualitative content analysis of these responses revealed two themes. First, when discussing school-based scenarios about immigrant students and English language learners, novice teachers avoided engaging with scenarios where solutions could be enacted solely within their classroom and focused on short-term solutions without identifying the underlying issues that must be addressed to disrupt inequitable patterns. Second, while novice teachers expressed awareness of their own privileged social positionings, they rarely connected those social identities to the underlying assumptions that informed their reactions to the scenarios. Instead, they used language that exonerated them from the judgment being cast on a scenario character, yet consistently racialized social identities unrelated to race and expressed distrust of students speaking a language they did not understand. These findings suggest that much more work is needed to promote cultural awareness and critical sociocultural knowledge among teacher candidates so that they are willing and able to advocate for the needs of diverse students and their families. The final article, by Xiaodi Zhou, presents one literacy teacher educator’s musings on the relationship between language and culture, shedding light on the nature and significance of translanguaging practices. Utilizing diverse cultural and linguistic contexts, the author links the language/literacy experiences of his preservice teachers with a conveyance of their internal worlds. By establishing, with neuroscientific support, the connection between a culture and its languaging patterns, the author helps language and literacy teacher educators see the imperative to promote plurilingual and translanguaging dispositions in both teacher preparation and classroom literacy instruction.

Complementing these research articles are two book reviews. Qinghua Chen, Amy Hughes, Scott Hughes, and Angel Mei Yi Lin review the edited volume The role of language in content pedagogy: A framework for teachers’ knowledge (Seah et al. 2022) that examines the role of language in the teaching and learning of academic content areas such as science and social studies and describes the language-related knowledge base for content teachers. Kathryn Accurso and Sally Humphrey review the edited volume Language in action: SFL theory across contexts (Brisk and Schleppegrell 2021) that showcases the applications of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) by international scholars working in elementary, secondary, and tertiary educational contexts to explore issues related to the development of reading, writing, translating, and disciplinary literacy skills.

3 Conclusion

Taken together, the seven articles and two book reviews offer readers a glimpse into the wide range of complex and challenging issues that language and literacy education scholars have endeavored to address using diverse yet rigorous research methodologies. What makes this special issue special is that its contributors are teacher educators working in diverse educational contexts across different regions of the globe but sharing a genuine appreciation for the role of language in literacy practices and an unwavering commitment to improving language and literacy teaching for all learners. They draw, in more or less explicit ways, on key SFL concepts (e.g. cohesion, register, genre, context, metafunction, choice, appraisal) and principles (e.g. language is a creative meaning-making resource, language use is both strategic and functional, people use language by making choices from their existing linguistic repertoires according to the situations they participate in, learning is a semiotically mediated activity, language and content/ideology are inseparable, acquisition of a metalanguage facilitates language learning and literacy development) in their conceptualization, operationalization, and/or interpretation of research, demonstrating the unmistakable appliability of SFL in language and literacy education. I hope readers will find this special issue both informative and inspiring.