As you can see, a set of 15 major research projects together address the broad range of issues facing English language arts educators today. It describes a set of preliminary findings identified by a research team that examined 30 grade one classrooms in five states. As the researchers observed both very effective first-grade literacy teachers and good teachers who were somewhat less effective, they were looking for the features of those teaching practices that were most effective in fostering strong literacy development. Their findings will be further tested and eventually refined into a set of guidelines for other teachers and for those preparing and supporting teachers to create the conditions most conducive to student literacy learning and achievement in the elementary grades. The research described by John Duffy is part of a larger project, Changing Literacy Demands , that is examining how literacy is viewed, controlled, and acquired by a variety of groups across time.
Literacy is context specific.
You and I use different literacies in different situations - one for the English classroom, another when we're at our computer, yet another when we're at the hardware store or organizing a community event. The findings from John's project and those related to it are already being tested in new classroom approaches to help non-native English speakers bridge from their own rhetorics and forms of literacy to the traditional school rhetorics so necessary for success in high school and beyond. All projects continually collect data from their research sites in preparation for a Cross-Site Analysis . The primary purpose of this analysis will be to clarify the strengths and tradeoffs involved in local and state decisions about curriculum, instruction, and assessment related to English and language arts achievement. Although that analysis is still months away, we invite you to stay tuned to our findings all along the way.