Editorial

Amanda Godley (University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA)
Amanda Haertling Thein (College of Education, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

English Teaching: Practice & Critique

ISSN: 1175-8708

Article publication date: 22 May 2020

Issue publication date: 22 May 2020

188

Citation

Godley, A. and Haertling Thein, A. (2020), "Editorial", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 137-138. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-06-2020-189

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited


Editors’ Introduction – Volume 19, Issue 2

In this issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique, six authors from diverse educational settings share their scholarship and reflections on teaching English. Three articles (Juswik and Antonnuci; Kerkhoff, Broere and Premont; and Diamond) delve into specific aspects of the literate identities of both teachers and students, demonstrating how reflections on one’s own life history can shape one’s identity as a teacher and student. Two articles (Kesson and Há) examine students’ reading practices whereas one article (Jwa) examines university students’ writing practices.

In their teacher narrative, “Dialogic collaging to cultivate shame resilience in writing classrooms,” Juzwik and Antonnuci discuss how writing-related shame limits students’ development of writers and how instructors can use dialogic collaging to develop students’ “shame resilience.” Drawing on the perspectives of both a writing instructor in the USA (Juzwik) and a student (Antonnuci), the authors emphasize the importance of developing a situated sense of self-as-writer and seeing writing development as a continual process rather than a goal that students will either pass or fail. The authors argue that the creativity, dialogism and play inherent in dialogic collaging offer one instruction approach that can develop students’ “shame resilience” surrounding writing.

Kesson’s “Reading digital text: Obstacles to using digital resources” challenges myths about young people’s expertise as “digital natives” by investigating the ways students interact with and respond to hyperlinked Web-based texts. Reporting on a think-aloud study of 21 12th grade students in a high school in the USA, Kesson found that many students ignored the hyperlinks, deeming them “distracting,” untrustworthy, redundant to the information provided by the main text or irrelevant. Other students were unaware that the hyperlinks existed or that they were allowed to use them in an academic writing task. Kesson concludes that in academic contexts, multimedia hyperlinks are considered “risky” by students. Thus, the practice of reading and drawing on such texts must be explicitly taught and valued by teachers, even with students who are typically seen as “digital natives.”

Há’s “Assessing storytelling as a tool for improving reading comprehension in the EFL primary classroom” reports on an experimental study of the effects of storytelling on the English learning of eight year old children who are native speakers of Catalan and Spanish. Há finds that group of students who learned the topic through storytelling demonstrated use of related vocabulary and reading comprehension. Há argues that such inductive, naturalistic approaches to language learning are effective pedagogical techniques for young children’s second language and literacy learning.

In “Average and avid: preservice English teachers’ reading identities,” Kerkhoff, Broere and Premont qualitatively analyze US preservice English teachers’ self-concepts as readers through a variety of data sources: questionnaires, analogies, class discussions and reflections. The authors find that positive reading identities were often linked with positive relationships and people and with reading to learn or reading for pleasure. Similar to Juswik and Antonnuci’s recommendations for developing students’ sense of their growth as writers, the authors argue that teacher educators should help preservice teachers reflect on their own reading identities and histories to convey lifelong reading development and a love of reading to their students.

Jwa’s “Korean EFL students’ argumentative writing in L1 and L2: a comparative move analysis study” examines how Korean college students use different rhetorical organization strategies when writing academic argument essays in Korean and English. Jwa notes that prior scholarship has claimed that argument essays in Korean academic contexts privilege an indirect argument structure in Korean whereas a more direct structure is commonly emphasized in English-dominant cultures with European roots. In her comparison of students’ essays in both languages, Jwa finds that while essays in both languages used a similar macro-organization forefronting a thesis statement, at the micro-level, students used a variety of rhetorical strategies for argument moves in their Korean writing but a more limited set of boilerplate strategies in their English writing. Jwa argues that the differences are not necessarily because of culture-specific rhetorical patterns but because of lack of practice and instruction with a range of rhetorical strategies in English.

Our issue concludes with another teacher narrative, Diamond’s “Cultural memory in English teaching: A critical autobiographical inquiry.” Drawing upon qualitative methods of critical autobiography and cultural narratives, Diamond reflects upon moments in her relationship with the subject of English in her experience as a student, teacher and teacher educator in Australia and contrasts those with current “official stories” about teacher professionalism. Diamond argues that current discourses of teacher professionalism ignore the history of teaching practices that were valued in the past and the ethics and epistemologies that such practices reflect. Diamond concludes that policies and standards surrounding professionalism in the teaching of English would benefit from acknowledging and drawing upon the varied “ways of knowing” represented by the subject of English over the past decades rather than presenting current standards as universal and dehistoricized.

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