Volume 23, Number 1, 2021

EN:

This study explores how an alternative writing unit with a focus on comics, choice, and publishing supported positive identity development in a fourth-grade classroom. Many traditional literacy practices with an emphasis on skills marginalize students from under-represented populations. This study reports literacy practices that countered the production of previously established unequal relationships and instead supported bilingual students’ negotiation of positive identities. We conducted an analysis of two bilingual case studies to examine the ways in which the shift from traditional literacy skills/practices to multimodal formats provided opportunities for students who were traditionally marginalized to renegotiate identities as experts and authors.

EN:

This case study explores how two 16-year-old newcomer youth in a Canadian secondary school navigated the digital multimodal composition process through role-play in their first digital video production at school. Employing a qualitative, case-study design, the study shows how the youth playfully accentuated collaborative over coercive power relations, as well as repositioned and represented their imagined identities as they played different assigned roles in the filmmaking process. The implications of these findings are discussed for educators and researchers considering digital multimodal composition as a classroom literacy practice.

EN:

Dual-language children’s books—books in which two languages cohabit—are currently gaining traction in the field of language education. Though some studies have zeroed in on the benefits of using them in classrooms, less is known about how learners perceive this tool’s utility for reading and language development. In this paper, we thus aim to explore how elementary students in French immersion perceive the utility of two types of dual-language books: translated, where all passages in French also appear in English, and integrated, where the story is told using an embedded discourse composed of both English and French.

FR:

Les livres bilingues, des livres dans lesquels deux langues cohabitent, gagnent en popularité en didactique des langues. Quoique certaines études se soient penchées sur les bénéfices de leur utilisation en classe, la recherche n’a que peu décrit la perception de l’utilité qu’ils revêtent pour les élèves eu égard à leur apprentissage de la lecture et, plus généralement, des langues. Dans cet article, nous explorons donc la perception de l’utilité de ces livres pour des élèves de l’élémentaire en immersion française, et ce, en mettant l’accent sur deux types de livres bilingues : le livre traduit, dans lequel les passages en français apparaissent aussi en anglais, et le livre intégré, dans lequel l’histoire est racontée à l’aide d’un discours composé organiquement des deux langues.

EN:

As more people turn to documentaries to learn about environmental issues it becomes even more important to consider the ways in which genre and its representational patterns, such as the use of images, affect viewers. Re-examining the multiliteracies framework and grounded in rhetorical genre studies, this paper explores the first two episodes of Our Planet, a Netflix docu-series that catalyzed strong responses based on two jarring image sequences. The purpose of this paper is to examine how our familiar understandings of particular genres impacts our understanding of particular issues and what happens when the familiar patterns of a genre are challenged.

EN:

This article highlights part of my work with ten 16 and 17-year-olds at two Canadian secondary schools. My multiple case study sought to make visible my participants’ stories of place: how did they construe the role of place within their own lives? How did they record their journeys within, through, and between places? I share how my participants articulated their place-identities as dynamic encounters rather than fixed surfaces (Massey, 2005; Ingold, 2016). Employing story-mapping as a research method encouraged my participants to articulate their lives in their own terms, affording me the opportunity to understand how they negotiated their identities.