The professional learning framework this book presents is designed to support teachers’ understandings of how language functions in their academic disciplines. This framework—a 4 x 4 metalinguistic toolkit—is informed by systemic functional linguistic theory and international educational research on academic and disciplinary literacies. The book shows and explains how teachers have applied specific 4 x 4 toolkits with students in middle school classrooms across a range of subjects for curriculum literacy instruction, assessment and feedback, resulting in substantial growth for their students in high-stakes national tests of literacy, as well as writing assessments in a number of subjects. In its focus on disciplinary literacies in diverse sociocultural settings, Academic Literacies in the Middle Years responds to contemporary international curricula for English language and literacy and the need for a strong evidence base for professional learning design.

Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning Across Languages and Cultures is a cross-over volume in the literature between first and second language/literacy. This anthology of articles brings together different voices from a range of publications and fields and unites them in pursuit of an understanding of how academic ways of knowing are acquired. The editors preface the collection of readings with a conceptual framework that reconsiders the current debate about the nature of academic literacies. In this volume, the term academic literacies denotes multiple approaches to knowledge, including reading and writing critically. College classrooms have become sites where a number of languages and cultures intersect. This is the case not only for students who are in the process of acquiring English, but for all learners who find themselves in an academic situation that exposes them to a new set of expectations. This book is a contribution to the effort to discover ways of supporting learning across languages and cultures--and to transform views about what it means to teach and learn, to read and write, and to think and know. Unique to this volume is the inclusion of the perspectives of writers as well as those of teachers and researchers. Furthermore, the contributors reveal their own struggles and accomplishments as they themselves have attempted to negotiate academic literacies. The chronological ordering of articles provides a historical perspective, demonstrating ways in which issues related to teaching and learning across cultures have been addressed over time. The readings have consistency in terms of quality, depth, and passion; they raise important philosophical questions even as they consider practical classroom applications. The editors provide a series of questions that enable the reader to engage in a generative and exciting process of reflection and inquiry. This book is both a reference for teachers who work or plan to work with diverse learners, and a text for graduate-level courses, primarily in bilingual and ESL studies, composition studies, English education, and literacy studies.

The Common Core State Standards require schools to include writing in a variety of genres across the disciplines. Engaging Students in Academic Literacies provides specific information to plan and carry out genre-based writing instruction in English for K-5 students within various content areas. Informed by systemic functional linguistics—a theory of language IN USE in particular ways for particular audiences and social purposes—it guides teachers in developing students’ ability to construct texts using structural and linguistic features of the written language. This approach to teaching writing and academic language is effective in addressing the persistent achievement gap between ELLs and "mainstream" students, especially in the context of current reforms in the U.S. Transforming systemic functional linguistics and genre theory into concrete classroom tools for designing, implementing, and reflecting on instruction and providing essential scaffolding for teachers to build their own knowledge of its essential elements applied to teaching, the text includes strategies for apprenticing students to writing in all genres, features of elementary students’ writing, and examples of practice.

This edited book brings together an international cast of contributors to examine how academic literacy is learned and mastered in different tertiary education settings around the world. Bringing to the fore the value of qualitative enquiry through ethnographic methods, the authors illustrate in-depth descriptions of genre knowledge and academic literacy development in first and second language writing. All of the data presented in the chapters are original, as well as innovative in the field in terms of content and scope, and thought-provoking regarding theoretical, methodological and educational approaches. The contributions are also representative of both novice and advanced academic writing experiences, providing further insights into different stages of academic literacy development throughout the career-span of a researcher. Set against the backdrop of internationalisation trends in Higher Education and the pressure on multilingual academics to publish their research outcomes in English, this volume will be of use to academics and practitioners interested in the fields of Languages for Academic Purposes, Applied Linguistics, Literacy Skills, Genre Analysis and Acquisition and Language Education.

This book analyses the development of academic literacy in low-proficiency users of English in the Middle East. It highlights the challenges faced by students entering undergraduate education in the region, and the strategies used by teachers to overcome them. The author focuses on a large-scale undergraduate teacher programme run in Oman by the University of Leeds, providing clear pointers both for future research and effective practice. He also explores the implications of his findings for countries beyond the Gulf Cooperation Council, demonstrating how international participation in UK HE could be much wider. This book will appeal to students and scholars with an interest in academic literacies and English for Academic Purposes.

Shifting the discourse from a focus on academic language to the more dynamic but less researched construct of academic literacies, this volume addresses three key questions: • What constitutes academic literacy? • What does academic literacy development in adolescent multilingual students look like and how can this development be assessed? • What classroom contexts foster the development of academic literacies in multilingual adolescents? The contributing authors provide divergent definitions of academic literacies and use dissimilar theoretical and methodological approaches to study literacy development. Nevertheless, all chapters reflect a shared conceptual framework for examining academic literacies as situated, overlapping, meaning-making practices. This framework foregrounds students’ participation in valued disciplinary literacy practices. Emphasized in the new college and career readiness standards, the notion of disciplinary practices allows the contributing authors to bridge the language/content dichotomy, and take a more holistic as well as nuanced view of the demands that multilingual students face in general education classrooms. The volume also explores the implications of the emphasis on academic literacy practices for classroom instruction, research, and policy.

This book reports on a two-year long, qualitative literacy case study of the academic literacies of first and second-generation immigrant youth in an afterschool tutoring program in South Bronx, New York. Through transcripts of tutoring sessions, interview data, and youths’ written work, each chapter highlights how youth interpreted and navigated various school assignments, and what resources and perspectives they brought to unpacking the meaning and significance of texts and disciplinary discourses. By focusing on the immigrant youth themselves, and not on the teaching that happens (or does not happen) inside classrooms, this volume provides a unique and much-needed vantage point to understanding the academic literacies and engagement of urban immigrant youth.

Adopting 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.

This collection of essays reflects on the ways in which writing centres in South Africa are working in and across disciplines. Institutional constraints and challenges that arise from these collaborations are addressed and opportunities for transforming teaching and learning spaces are explored. The chapters speak to the global move in higher education to reconsider how knowledge is made, who makes it, and how support and development opportunities for students and lecturers should be created and sustained across the disciplines. This volume contributes to the body of knowledge in the growing field of the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education in South Africa. It builds on the work of the first collection of such essays: Changing Spaces: Writing Centres and Access to Higher Education (Eds. A Archer and R Richards, 2011, SUN PReSS) to understand why working within the disciplines is so critical for writing development in a South African context.