The textual cycle of the English classroom

2004

English in Urban Classrooms English in Urban Classrooms is a groundbreaking text that spans a range of issues central to contemporary school English. It attends not only to the spoken and written language of classrooms, but also to other modes of representation and communication that are important in English teaching. This includes image, gesture, gaze, movement, and spatial organization. The team of experienced and expert authors collectively examine how English is shaped by policy, by institutions, and by the social relations of the classroom. By connecting issues of policy and social context, the book provides a detailed account of factors such as: • the characteristics of urban multicultural schools; • teacher formation and tradition; • the ethos of school English departments; and • the institutional changes that have shaped school English in urban classrooms and students' experiences of learning. This book offers a fascinating and enlightening read, not only to those involved in English teaching, but also to educational researchers, policy makers, linguists, and those interested in semiotics and multimodality.

Visual Communication, 2009

"In this article, the authors provide an empirically based, social semiotic account of changes in textbook design between 1930 and the present day.They look at the multimodal design of textbooks rather than at image or any other mode in isolation.Their review of 23 textbooks for secondary education in English shows that profound changes have taken place not just in the use of image but equally in writing, typography and layout. Design is no longer exclusively organized by the principles of the organization of writing, but also, and increasingly so, by graphic, visual principles. They explore what these semiotic changes mean for the social organization of design and knowledge production, asking:What is ‘English’, a subject that supposedly concerns itself with the modes of writing and speech? What has changed in the environment that is set up by the textbook makers for teachers and students to engage in?"

English Education, 2015

This provocation explores the abjective e/affects of white ideology manifested as school language in the United States. Through recursive engagement and symbolic play with her memory of watching a student eat toilet paper during a College Essay Writing class, the author challenges the institutional grammars that shape a collective sense of “school.” Through a critical analysis of the shared “public transcript” (Scott, 1990) of many urban schools, the author considers the ways in which students and teachers get summoned into particular social existences in relation to whiteness as the dominant culture of power. She uses both written and visual languages to offer poetry as a site of theory towards reinscribing the relationship between language, feeling, and address in the urban English classroom and inciting new, socially just structures of learning. The author’s sketches of this memory drawn with ink on toilet paper intervene throughout the article, giving her provocation an added dimensionality.

International Journal of Bilingual Education and …, 2009

2012

Discrepancies between "home English" and "school English" for urban students have been addressed for decades by a number of scholars in the fields of linguistics, education, and sociology , Alim 2009. Those students who speak prestige varieties of English tend to do better in school settings, in which the teacher's language is that of the mainstream middle class.

2012

This thesis presents an argument for a reconceptualisation of how literature is read in secondary urban English classrooms and of what is accomplished through the activities of reading. In the discourse of policy and in theorised accounts of practice, the reading that is undertaken in classrooms has tended to be construed as either a poor substitute or merely a preparation for other reading, particularly for that paradigmatic literacy event, the absorbed and simultaneously discriminating consumption of the literary text by the independent, private reader. This thesis argues for a broader - historically, ethnographically, psychologically and theoretically informed - understanding of what constitutes reading, for a fully social conception of the sign and of sign-making and for a social model of learning. It draws on data gathered through classroom observation and digital videotape of English lessons taught over the course of a year by two teachers in a secondary comprehensive school i...

Linguistic Landscapes and Educational Spaces, 2022

How do written and other signs shape our educational spaces and practices; and how, in turn, are these written and other signs shaped by the educational spaces and practices they inhabit? Building on inquiries into the linguistic landscapes of public spaces, this volume addresses these questions and thereby further advances the educational turn in linguistic and semiotic landscapes studies. Prompted by social changes associated with migration and superdiversity, as well as imperatives to promote pluri- and multilingualism, the studies collected here speak to the interest of researchers and practitioners in educational linguistics and educational sciences. They confirm the value of combining empirical analyses of linguistic and semiotic educationscapes with action research on mobilising linguistic landscapes as pedagogical resources to promote multilingual equality.

Language Arts Journal of Michigan, 2007

Research in the Teaching of English, 2017

While current research focuses on the marginalization and educational crises of students classified as English language learners-whom we identify as emergent bilinguals )-this article highlights some of the contexts for learning that help these students thrive academically, culturally, and socially in two urban English classrooms. We explore the concept of translanguaging García & Li Wei, 2014) through the writing of two students who took up this practice as a challenge to coloniality in English classrooms. We also outline how two secondary teachers in New York City and Los Angeles adopted a translanguaging pedagogy . Through our analysis of two focal emergent bilingual students, we demonstrate how a translanguaging pedagogy-one that puts students' language practices at the center and makes space for students to draw on their fluid linguistic and cultural resources at all times-is a necessary step forward in twenty-first-century English instruction. Our findings illustrate that the teachers' translanguaging pedagogies disrupted the inherently monolingual and colonial tendencies of English classrooms through curricula that promoted metalinguistic awareness and reflection about their own linguistic and cultural identities, and integrated students' diverse language practices to push back against colonialist ideologies. Our study adds to the nascent body of literature that translates theories of translanguaging into practical pedagogical approaches in secondary English classrooms.