Explores & represents through a series of cases & commentaries how & why secondary school teachers & students use literacy (speaking, listening, reading, writing, & performing) in formal & informal settings, & how these literacies are negotiated & used.

Literacy - the ability to produce and interpret written text - has long been viewed as the basis of all school achievement; a measure of success that defines both an 'educated' person, and an educable one. In this volume, a team of leading experts raise questions central to the acquisition of literacy. Why do children with similar classroom experiences show different levels of educational achievement? And why do these differences in literacy, and ultimately employability, persist? By looking critically at the western view of a 'literate' person, the authors present a perspective on literary acquisition, viewing it as a socially constructed skill, whereby children must acquire discourse strategies that are socially 'approved'. This extensively-revised second edition contains an updated introduction and bibliography. This volume will continue to have far-reaching implications for educational theory and practice.

Primary teacher reference book which considers literacy in the primary school. Defines literacy and the influence of educators' decisions and outlines various community and cultural resources which shape what children bring to the classroom. Also looks at how children perceive the possibilities and potentials of literacy and discusses the possibilities for teaching children a critical social literacy. Includes a bibliography.

"Proceedings of the National Conference on Future Directions in Literacy: International Conversations; 3rd to 6th September 2007, Sydney, Australia."--P. 2.

This innovative volume provides a new analytic framework for understanding how meaning-making resources are deployed in images designed for knowledge building in school science. The framework enables analyses of science images from the perspectives of both their complexity and recognizability. Complexity deals with the technical and abstract knowledge of school science (technicality), evaluative dispositions in relation to that knowledge (iconization) and the condensation of the technical and dispositional meanings as ‘synoptic eyefuls’ in discipline-specific infographics (aggregation). Recognizability concerns the relationship between the appearance of phenomena in reality and the reconfiguration of this reality in images (congruence), the perceptibility or discernibility of the features and contexts of phenomena in images (explicitness), and how images engage their viewers (affiliation). The framework is illustrated by more than 100 images in colour in the e-book and black and white in the paper version and will inform research into multimodal literacy pedagogy that incorporates an understanding of the role of images in the teaching and learning of school science. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in multimodality, semiotics, literacy education and science education.

Based on research from the National Reading Research Center (NRRC) at the Universities of Georgia and Maryland, this issue presents the contributors' sythesized work on reading motivation and engagement. Articles are devoted to the following topics: * the general motivation constructs related to reading; * home influences on reading motivation; * readers' responses to different types of text; * influences of classroom contexts; and * types of assessment on children's motivation.

This book enables practitioners to reflect critically upon the choices available to them in assessing and supporting students who experience difficulties in literacy development. Includes analysis of common barriers such as dyslexia and bilingualism.