Editorial.
Rennie, Jennifer
Welcome to the February edition of AJLL. The issue comprises a
variety of articles that report on national and international literacy
research. In the first article 'Keep taking the tablets: iPads,
story apps and early literacy' Guy Merchant presents a study which
investigated how young children engage with story-app sharing
interactions with adults. The second article 'Feeling the pressure:
Early childhood educators' reported views about learning and
teaching and phonics in Australian prior-to-school settings' by
Stacey Campbell reports on a study which investigated the views of 115
early childhood educators' about how phonics should be taught. The
study found that there were conflicting views about how and whether
phonics should be taught and many participants revealed experiencing
external pressures to engage in literacy practices that may be in
opposition with their own beliefs about how literacy is learnt. The
third article 'Words and stuff: Exploring children's
perspectives of classroom reading in the early school years' by
Pauline Harris reports on a longitudinal study which investigated how
fifteen children talked about their reading experiences during their
first three years of school. The study highlighted and described the
shifts in children's thinking over this period of time. In the
fourth article 'It's complicated: Children learning about
other peoples' lives through a critical digital literacies
project' Jessica Pandya and Consul Pagdilao describe how they
analysed a set of multimodal, digital videos created by nine-year-old
children that were about the day in the life of a worker in honour of
Cesar Chavez Day. In the analysis they focused on the ways in which
children represented other people's work and personal lives and
their learning and the affordances of the multimodal platforms used.
They argue that these kinds of projects foreground the school community
as a source of curricular material positioning children as text
designers of potentially powerful texts. The final paper,
'Expanding conceptions of adolescent literacy research and
practice: Cosmopolitan theory in educational contexts' by Thomas
Bean and Judith Dunkerly-Bean presents a theoretical case for using
cosmopolitan theory to inform and reconceptualise research in adolescent
literacy.
We hope that you enjoy reading these articles and look forward to
receiving contributions from teachers and researchers.
