Noticing is an essential aspect of professional expertise in teaching – a skill that draws on deep professional knowledge in ways that affect how teachers are aware of, respond to and meet the needs of their students. Being a ‘noticing teacher’ in the language and literacy classroom can make a real difference to students’ progress as readers and writers, to their literacy attainment and to their engagement with learning. This international, research-informed book is unique in its focus on literacy and language. The authors explore models and methods to embed both noticing and the development of teacher agency and grounded knowledge into teacher education programs and school practices. To further the professional knowledge and agency of ‘noticing teachers’, the authors argue that research, policy and the professional community need to understand how noticing skills can be woven into the policy and practice contexts of the literacy teacher’s work. Developing Habits of Noticing in Literacy and Language Classrooms: Research and Practice across Professional Cultures is designed to help teachers, researchers and school leaders think in new ways about how ‘noticing’ operates in the context of the literacy classroom and how it can be supported. Each chapter provides a valuable insight into how teachers learn from their students, in the course of teaching activities, to be responsive, analytical and inspirational.

This book provides an accessible, evidence-based account of how teacher noticing, the process of attending to, interpreting and acting on events which occur during engagement with learners, can be examined in contexts of language teacher education and highlights the importance of reflective practice for professional development. Central to the work is an innovative mixed-methods study of task-based interaction which was undertaken with pre-service English language teachers in Japan. Through close analyses of task interaction coupled with recall data, it illustrates the ways in which pre-service teachers noticed their student partners’ use of embodied and linguistic resources. This focus on what teachers attend to, how they interpret it, and their subsequent decisions has multiple implications for language learning and teacher development. It demonstrates the value of teacher noticing for developing rapport, supporting pupils’ language acquisition, enhancing participation, fostering reflection and guiding observation, a central feature of language teachers’ career advancement.

Taking a dialogic approach, this edited book engages in analysis and description of dialogic discourse in a number of different educational contexts, from early childhood to tertiary, with an international team of contributors from Australia, Finland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The chapters focus mostly on dialogic face-to-face discourse, with some examples of online interactions, and feature insights from educational linguistics, particularly the work of Michael Halliday. While the contributors come from a range of theoretical backgrounds, they all share an interest in language in use and engage in close analysis of transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction. Taking inspiration from Alexander and other theorists, they employ a fine-grained and analytic approach to the exploration of their data. The authors make use of the linguistic tools and models of language in society, in order to examine the turn-by-turn unfolding of the interaction. The authors relate their insights from disparate forms of linguistic analysis to elements of Alexander’s (2020) dialogic framework, situating the discourse in its contexts and discussing the pedagogical implications of the linguistic choices at play. In presenting this work from a range of situations and perspectives, the authors strive to demonstrate how dialogic discourse plays out in educational contexts across the world. The book aims to foster further research in this direction and to inspire educators to explore dialogic discourse for themselves. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including literacy researchers, linguists, teachers and teacher educators, as well as graduate students.

This book describes and analyses the organisation, functions and development of national educational authorities and agencies and the influence they have on local schools in 20 countries around the world. It examines the governing chain in the respective countries from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective. It does so against the background of the stability and rigour of the governing chains having been challenged, with some researchers considering the chain to be broken. However, the view that comes to the fore in this book is that the chain is still present and contains both vertical implementation structures and intervening spaces for policy interpretation. How schools become successful is important for the individual students as well as the local community and the national state. A vast quantity of research has looked at what happens in schools and classrooms. At the same time, national governance and politics as well as local prerequisites are known to exert influence on schools and their results to a high degree. Societal priorities, problems and traditions provide variety in how governance is executed. This book provides an international overview of the similarities and differences between educational agencies and how their work influences schools.

What are the principles that every elementary teacher must learn in order to plan and adapt successful literacy instruction? This concise course text and practitioner resource brings together leading experts to explain the guiding ideas that underlie effective instructional practice. Each chapter reviews one or more key principles and highlights ways to apply them flexibly in diverse classrooms and across grade levels and content areas. Chapters cover core instructional topics (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension); high-quality learning environments; major issues such as assessment, differentiation, explicit instruction, equity, and culturally relevant pedagogy; and the importance of teachers’ reflective practice and lifelong learning.

This book reflects on the continuing development of teacher noticing through an exploration of the latest research. The authors and editors seek to clarify the construct of teacher noticing and its related branches and respond to challenges brought forth in earlier research. The authors also investigate teacher noticing in multiple contexts and frameworks, including mathematics, science, international venues, and various age groups.