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This study aims to understand the supports and challenges to using disciplinary and antiracism lenses when teaching with informational texts in middle grades English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms.

This paper analyzes teacher talk in four virtual sessions with four middle grades ELA teachers in one school district. Teachers had recently completed a voluntary, school-based antiracism professional development. Researchers used thematic analysis of session transcripts and semi-structured interviews.

Teachers’ informational text use was nested in and directed by curriculum and contexts that limited disciplinary and antiracist teaching. The context and texts constrained instruction to basic reading skills. Equity was conceptualized as supporting students’ persistence. Discussions of race were avoided.

This study has implications for ELA teacher preparation, and district and state resources to support merging disciplinarity and antiracism in informational text instruction in ELA. The study is limited by the small sample from one district and access to only teacher self-reports.

Secondary ELA disciplinary literacy has privileged literature, yet there is an increase of informational text use in middle grades ELA. Teachers need support teaching informational texts through disciplinary and antiracism lenses.

Using a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine how genre impacts white readers when reading about historic acts of racial violence. Specifically, this study explores one white high school student’s stance-taking as she read an informational text and an eyewitness narrative about the Tulsa Race Massacre.

This study used discourse analysis (Gee, 1999) and the think-aloud method (Pressley and Afflerbach, 1996) to explore the white student’s interactions with genres of historical texts. The authors coupled iterative coding and memoing with discourse analysis to analyze the stances she adopted while reading.

The findings illustrate that the informational text allowed for a distancing from the racialized violence in the text, whereas the narrative created an opportunity for more connection to those who experienced the violence.

While genre and reader response has long been explored in English Education research, little research has examined the impact of genre on reading historical texts. This study demonstrates the influence that genre may have on white readers’ emotional responses and stance-taking practices when reading about historic acts of racial violence.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the explicit teaching of information text schema with vocabulary instruction to primary-aged students in Hong Kong international education.

Data were collected through three quasi-experimental studies with different age groups and participants. Each study divided participants into two randomly assigned groups, either informational texts (IT) or vocabulary building (VB). Impact was evaluated with gain scores on a standardized reading comprehension test and researcher-designed cloze tests of fiction and nonfiction passages.

The explicit teaching of IT can benefit student reading comprehension from an early age, particularly to first language (L1) English students and possibly second language (L2) English learners. School reading programmes should include opportunities for students to experience IT (nonfiction) and fiction materials, and build their vocabulary through incidental learning and explicit teaching. For IT, they should be exposed to: layout – e.g., headings, sub-headings, glossary, and index; and content – photographs and specific/technical vocabulary. For fiction-based texts and VB, the following themes should be covered by younger aged students: antonyms, synonyms, and affixes.

Several limitations apply to this study which will need to be addressed in future studies. These include: the random sampling of students from the overall student population was not an option, given the necessity of voluntary participation and avoiding disruption to school routines. This study used meta-analysis to aggregate results across multiple comparisons largely because of the extremely small samples available. The data show large standard errors as a consequence of small numbers of participants. Hence, the current results, notwithstanding the power of meta-analysis, need to be validated with much larger samples in future studies.

This paper suggests that greater comprehension and cloze performance among L1 students was found due to the teaching of IT compared to vocabulary training, with the reverse result for L2 English learners.

The purpose of this paper is to design organization message content strategies and analyse their information diffusion on the microblogging website, Twitter.

Using data from 29 brands and 9392 tweets, message strategies on twitter are classified into four strategies. Using content analysis all the tweets are classified into informational strategy, transformational strategy, interactional strategy and promotional strategy. Additionally, the information diffusion for the developed message strategies was explored. Furthermore, message content features such as text readability features, language features, Twitter-specific features, vividness features on information diffusion are analysed across message strategies. Additionally, the interaction between message strategies and message features was carried out.

Finding reveals that informational strategies were the dominant message strategy on Twitter. The influence of text readability features language features, Twitter-specific features, vividness features that influenced information diffusion varied across four message strategies.

This study offers a completely novel way for effectively analysing information diffusion for branded tweets on Twitter and can show a path to both researchers and practitioners for the development of successful social media marketing strategies.

Purpose – The chapter provides the reader with an overview of the major components of informal reading inventories (IRIs) and how they can be administered to answer specific questions about students’ reading behaviors. The focus then shifts to how IRIs can be used to help teachers target instruction to better meet students’ instructional needs.

Methodology/approach – The authors describe how educators can use the results of IRIs to analyze a student's strengths and areas of need, align those findings with research about six types (clusters) of readers (Valencia & Buly, 2004), and select one or more of the strategies recommended in the chapter to provide instruction related to that student's specific areas of need.

Practical implications – In addition to the numerous instructional recommendations provided for the six clusters of readers, the chapter includes a detailed scenario of how one teacher used the results of an IRI to plan instruction for a struggling reader, a process that could be replicated by educators who read the chapter.

Social implications – The chapter suggests how small groups of educators could work together to determine which of their students to assess with an IRI and, after assessing, to discuss how they will use the results to target instruction for those students.

The use of supportive digital technology – the provision of supportive services and self-management health tools using digital platforms – by marketers is increasing alongside research interest in the topic. However, little is known about the motivations to use these tools and which tool features provide different forms of social support (informational, emotional, instrumental, network or esteem). The purpose of this paper is thus to explore consumer perceptions of supportive healthcare self-management and preferences for different levels of interactive features as social support in a health services context.

A qualitative approach involving 30 semi-structured interviews with consumers interested in two common preventative health services that use supportive digital tools (SDTs) (skin-cancer checks and sexually transmitted infection checks) was undertaken. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the verbatim transcripts.

This research identified there is a lack of motivation to initiate the search for SDTs; consumers are motivated by a desire to control and monitor health concerns and avoid overuse of the health system. The findings showed a preference for social support to go beyond informational support, with a need for interactivity that personalised support in a proactive manner.

SDTs are positively perceived by consumers as part of health services. The motivation to use these tools is complex, and the social support needed is multifaceted and preferably interactive.

This research assists service marketers to better design informational and instrumental support for preventative self-managed healthcare services.

This paper extends knowledge about the motivation and social support required from SDTs in a preventative health service context.

State and national initiatives place an increased emphasis on both students’ exposure to diverse texts and teachers’ integration of English/language arts and history/social studies. The intent is for students to critically examine diverse accounts and perspectives of the same historical event or era. Critical examination can be accomplished through teachers’ purposeful juxtaposition of age-appropriate, engaging trade books and relevant informational texts, such as primary source materials. To guide interested elementary and middle level teachers, researchers can evaluate trade books for historical representation and suggest divergent or competing narratives that compel students to scrutinize diverse perspectives. Researchers can locate germane primary sources and modify them in ways that maintain their historicity. As students read, they scrutinize, contextualize, and corroborate sources, which enables them to actively construct historical understandings. We examined children’s literature centered on child labor. We juxtaposed trade books targeting elementary students with those intended for middle level students. While our findings revealed various forms of historical misrepresentation, child labor trade books appear far more historically representative than those centered on slavery.

To facilitate teacher–researcher collaboration in order to implement an informational writing research project using the framework of Browse, Collect, Collate, and Compose embedded within the writing workshop.

This study was conducted using a qualitative (Merriam, 1998) method of inquiry, more specifically, case study research design. A researcher and a practitioner came together to explore problems related to authentic use of expository genre and collaborated to help fourth graders write informational books.

The development of an authentic informational book was in contrast to the inauthentic purposes whereby students studied expository writing as preparation for statewide testing of student writing achievement. The study advocates the usage of authentic literacy contexts where students can enjoy writing for personal purposes.

Collaboration between classroom teachers of writing and researchers contributes to the theoretical and practical knowledge base of the teacher and researcher. Overall literacy development is enhanced when students read and write out of their own interest. Students use trade books as mentor texts to compose and create their informational books. The value of seeing fourth graders as researchers and making an informational book serves the authentic purpose of writing.

This paper investigates how school teachers look for informational texts for their classrooms. Access to current, varied and authentic informational texts improves learning outcomes for K-12 students, but many teachers lack resources to expand and update readings. The Web offers freely available resources, but finding suitable ones is time-consuming. This research lays the groundwork for building tools to ease that burden.

This paper reports qualitative findings from a study in two stages: (1) a set of semistructured interviews, based on the critical incident technique, eliciting teachers' information-seeking practices and challenges; and (2) observations of teachers using a prototype teaching-oriented news search tool under a think-aloud protocol.

Teachers articulated different objectives and ways of using readings in their classrooms, goals and self-reported practices varied by experience level. Teachers struggled to formulate queries that are likely to return readings on specific course topics, instead searching directly for abstract topics. Experience differences did not translate into observable differences in search skill or success in the lab study.

There is limited work on teachers' information-seeking practices, particularly on how teachers look for texts for classroom use. This paper describes how teachers look for information in this context, setting the stage for future development and research on how to support this use case. Understanding and supporting teachers looking for information is a rich area for future research, due to the complexity of the information need and the fact that teachers are not looking for information for themselves.

Since, the middle of the 1990s, UNO has been funding a large‐scale project aimed at designing a family of natural language (NL) processing systems transforming the sentences in various NLs into the expressions of a new language‐intermediary called the Universal Networking Language (UNL) and vice versa. The purpose of the paper is to propose a constructive way of developing a semantic networking language (SNL) of a new generation and, as a consequence, to bridge a gap between UNL‐based studies and Semantic Web projects.

The methodological basis of the paper is a new theory of designing semantic‐syntactic analyzers of NL texts elaborated by the author of the paper and called the theory of K‐representations (knowledge representations). One of its basic components is a mathematical model describing a system of ten partial operations on conceptual structures and determining a new class of formal languages called restricted standard knowledge languages (RSK‐languages).

It is shown that the expressive possibilities of RSK‐languages surpass the expressive possibilities of UNL from the standpoint of representing the meanings of discourses, compound goals, descriptions of sets, definitions of notions. It is proposed to use the definition of the class of RSK‐languages as a model of a SNL of a new generation in comparison with UNL.

It is also proposed to use the definition of RSK‐languages for building semantic annotations of arbitrary web‐documents and web‐services.

The paper describes an original approach to representing conceptual structure of NL texts.