English Language and Literature Commons^™

Engaging Students In Writing With Nonfiction Social Justice Texts, Tracy Spurlin-Saravanan

Virginia English Journal

Getting students engaged in writing in a high school setting is usually challenging and often elicits complaints of boredom. However, the utilization of texts that focus on the experiences of marginalized people and that educates about social injustices can get students interested. When students read texts that inform them about such issues that they might otherwise never hear about and when they are invited to share their views through writing, the door to learning to become critical thinkers and global citizens is opened for them.

Write Like The Character: A New Take On Using Mentor Text To Support Writing, Tracy L. Hough

Virginia English Journal

Writing is a complex process that requires the orchestration of cognitive, social, and emotional processes. This analysis explores ways to help our students navigate the complexities of becoming a writer by expanding the use of mentor texts to include an examination of characters who write, modeling the real challenges and rewards associated with becoming a writer. The themes identified within the selected mentor texts focus on finding encouragement and inspiration to write from others, making sense of the world through personal writing, and discovering one's voice and identity as a writer. By extending our use of mentor texts, we help …

Shifting Scaffolds: Building Intellective Capacity Through Student Choice, Amanda Blevins

Virginia English Journal

In an effort to meet the wide-ranging capacities and even wider-ranging levels of student motivation in ELA classrooms, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers are tasked with examining current instructional practices through the lenses of efficacy and engagement. Disengagement, worsened by an over-reliance on prescriptive structures like the five-paragraph essay, hampers students' growth and independence. This essay explores how scaffolding, particularly through student choice, can nurture students' intellective capacity and foster genuine engagement with literacy. By embracing student interests and providing opportunities for authentic analysis, educators can empower students to navigate complex texts and develop nuanced thinking skills essential for …

Introduction From The Editor's Desk: Spring 2024, Cinde Wollenberg

Virginia English Journal

No abstract provided.

Realizing The Sustainability Of Portfolio Assessment In Second-Language Writing, Pauline Mak, Kevin M. Wong

Education Division Scholarship

Portfolio assessment, as an alternative writing assessment approach, has received growing attention in the past few decades. Although the benefits of portfolio assessment are well validated, there is a dearth of empirical research on how portfolio assessment can be sustained over time and the support teachers need to sustain portfolio assessment practice in their teaching contexts. To fill this significant void, the present study examines the influences that contribute to the sustainability of portfolio assessment in second-language writing. Drawing on data from interviews with the principal, English department chair and four English teachers from one elementary school in Hong Kong, …

Book Review: Seen And Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, And Ansel Adams’S Photographs Reveal About The Japanese American Incarceration, Lisa M. Harrison

The Utah English Journal

“Early in the morning on December 7, 1941, Imperial Japan bombed the U.S. Navy Base at Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i.” This is how Elizabeth Partridge sets the stage for her beautifully-presented recounting of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Nurturing Academic Writing: Empowering Students Through Socratic Seminars, Rebekah Crawley

The Utah English Journal

Throughout my eight years as a high school English teacher, I have struggled to know how to expand my students’ abilities to write academically. That struggle has only been exacerbated in recent years with the increasing use of smartphones, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the introduction of Artificial Intelligence programs. With constant resistance from defeated students, it’s easy to get discouraged. However, this resistance is not new and one technique that has consistently helped me encourage even the most reluctant students to overcome writing challenges is the Socratic Seminar or Fishbowl Discussion.

Book Review: Ay, Mija! My Bilingual Summer In Mexico, Robin White

The Utah English Journal

Ay, Mija! is a fun and quirky graphic novel that modernizes the traditional memoir genre. Christine Suggs, who uses the pronouns they/them, heads to Mexico the summer before their junior year in high school with a couple goals in mind: improve their Spanish and reconnect with their family. Through the use of engaging images and text, Christine Suggs explores themes of identity, family, and belonging through heartwarming storytelling.

Book Review: Gallant, Jessica Ashurst

The Utah English Journal

Orphaned and unwanted, Olivia Prior lives at Merilance Academy. Mute, misunderstood, and mistreated by the others, Olivia craves a home, but all she has left of her family is her mother’s journal. Often, Olivia turns back to the journal’s words and paintings as she tries to understand the world around her. Home is a choice, her mother wrote. You will be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant.

Place-Based Multimodal Narratives With Storymap Js, Laurel Phillips, Johnny Allred

The Utah English Journal

At the beginning of a recent cross-country road trip, Johnny pulled open a map app on his phone and entered his final destination—Fort Worth, Texas—into the search bar, along with three other stops: the Maverik in Moab (he had to load up on Dr. Pepper); a hotel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico; and “Cadillac Ranch” in Amarillo (Google it). For the next 1,200 miles, the digital map guided him and his family along the path, setting the stage for experiences and stories that the family will tell and retell for years to come.

That example—the use of maps to guide …

Integrating Sentence Combining With Existing Curriculum, Jessica Low

The Utah English Journal

Over the last few years I have been astonished by the noticeable decline in my students’ reading and writing abilities when compared to those in previous years. Every teacher at my school has also noticed the problem, but many of us, burned out from COVID, didn’t have the bandwidth to try something big and new. That changed for me when Kayleigh, a likable, hardworking seventh grader, said “Mrs. Low, I’m glad I have a short book because I can read all the words, but I don’t understand what I’m reading. This gives me more time to try to reread and …

Dreams, Empathy, And Stories: From The Editors, Mandy Luszeck, Jon Ostenson

The Utah English Journal

Teachers often fall victim to having their stories told for them. The local and national news broadcast stories of the negative moments in teacher’s classrooms, or highlight the few who are not really committed to their students. The loud voices of political dissent focus on the few who oppose our teaching practices as we strive to educate our students within the global and cosmopolitan contexts in which they live. Yet, teachers famously “close the door” and continue to teach. But stories matter.

Audience, Kelly Paystrup

The Utah English Journal

The writer–

Chooses rhetoric

(touching hearts and minds and morals)

Legislation And Learning: Navigating Text Selection In The Secondary Classroom, Emmalie Slater, Dawan Coombs

The Utah English Journal

Last year on an August morning the first week of school, Dawan received a frantic text from a first-year English teacher that read:

I’m having students choose a book to read independently this term and I’m doing a book tasting today to help them, but I was talking to the librarian and she said… that a teacher can get sued for having a book in their classroom that’s considered inappropriate, even if we aren’t promoting it or unaware of the content. Do you know anything about that or how I can avoid getting myself into that situation? I haven’t read …

Strategies For Building Reader Identity, Tara Pearce

The Utah English Journal

As English teachers, many of us chose this field due to our own appreciation and enjoyment of reading. We comfortably identify ourselves as “readers,” since we not only enjoy reading but are likely also good at it. Some of us might have overcome reading difficulties in the past, but now securely have the skills and strategies to navigate challenging texts.

That Last Lecture: What If?, Pat Martinez

The Utah English Journal

It began as a tiny What if? –prompted by a Carnegie Mellon tradition and a professor, Randy Pausch, who literally gave his Last Lecture on September 18, 2007. One month before, doctors had told Pausch he only had a few months to live. His lecture Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, led to a book: The Last Lecture. I found his book on a community bookshelf and read it cover to cover. It was peppered with humor, advice, and endearing short stories.

Windows And Mirrors: A Reflection On Building An Inclusive Classroom Library, Carrie Crowe

The Utah English Journal

I remember the sound of excitement in Adia’s voice, her face beaming with a smile from ear to ear. “Ms. Crowe, I love the book you gave me. She’s like me!” Adia, a student in my class, turned the cover of the book toward me, displaying a picture of Sonia Sotomayor. This was my “Freedom Writers’’ movie moment as a teacher. I had made a student feel seen by giving her a book with someone who looked like her. It was not until years later that I realized how little thought I had actually given to placing that book in …

Book Reviews: From The Editor, Justin Scholes

The Utah English Journal

What is the place of books in a world full of diverse, powerful media? With students’ access to and affinity for movies, cartoons, video games, and social media, what can books offer? Of course, you and I have ample responses to these questions, and yet, I wonder if you ever feel the way that I have felt at times—like I am competing with these other media, like many of my students need convincing that books are still relevant.

Book Review: Accountable: The True Story Of A Racist Social Media Account And The Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed, Lisa Jones

The Utah English Journal

In California, a boy named Charles creates an Instagram account with the express purpose of getting a laugh out of his friends, and he does so through shockingly racist content about their own classmates. Just over a dozen boys follow the account, some interacting more than others. Meanwhile, through a mutual friend, word gets out to the girls being targeted, and soon the entire school is caught up in the fallout. What starts as a “simple joke” leads to reconciliation meetings gone wrong, riots, violence, and national headlines. Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the …

Book Review: Next Level Grammar For A Digital Age: Teaching With Social Media And Online Tools For Rhetorical Understanding And Critical Creation, Val O'Bryan

The Utah English Journal

Social media surrounds us. Students don’t often stop and think about the underlying structures and rhetoric that make up social media posts and memes. However, social media is a landscape rich with opportunities to teach critical digital literacy. This forward- thinking book explains how to teach digital language and provides tools for teaching practical grammar in the classroom, focusing on Internet language. Crovitz, Devereaux, and Moran explain how students can practice using language deliberately by applying rhetorical grammar with digital tools. The authors provide numerous original strategies, prompts, and questions that leverage students’ existing skills, not to mention their interest …

Book Review: Button Pusher, Elizabeth Hancock

The Utah English Journal

Tyler Page’s memoir and graphic novel, Button Pusher, chronicles his journey with ADHD from diagnosis through high school graduation. While Tyler struggles with the ups and downs of having ADHD, he also faces the usual social challenges of each school year and struggles with his parents’ fighting. By the time he’s ready to leave for college, he has made peace with his disorder and his family challenges.

Book Review: The Door Of No Return, Krista Thornock

The Utah English Journal

Eleven year old Kofi Offin lives on the banks of the Offin River in Ghana. His Asante village in the fictional region of Upper Kwanta provides a setting for Kofi to explore his imminent manhood as he navigates relationships with family, friends, a schoolmaster, and even the village rivals in Lower Kwanta.

Book Review: The Ogress And The Orphans, Ashlyn Anderson

The Utah English Journal

Unfolding as an allegory, The Ogress and the Orphans analogizes the perils of selfishness and suspicion to the repercussions of a sinister dragon descending upon a credulous town.

Book Review: Iveliz Explains It All, Pamela Fetzer Hawker

The Utah English Journal

The voice of the child becoming a woman played through my head as I read Iveliz Explains It All, Andrea Beatriz Arango’s debut novel. The poetry flows from page to page explaining the world of Iveliz, filled with second chances, 7th grade, a journal, Spanish, sightings of her dead dad, Mami (her mother), and Mimi (her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s). Iveliz is faced with an In School Behavior Intervention (ISBI) because she messed up her second chance. In ISBI, she has time to write her Seventh-Grade Goals: An Official List, which modulates and changes throughout the book.

Book Review: The Girl Who Fell Beneath The Sea, Annika Nielson

The Utah English Journal

When faced with two paths and two destinies, Mina makes a bold, irreversible choice: She will sacrifice herself to be the Sea God’s bride and go below the ocean to the City of Ghosts. By doing so, she takes the fated place of Shim Cheong, the girl that Mina’s brother Joon loves with his whole heart. This decision, born out of a place of sisterly love, sets the tone for the entirety of The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh, since Mina’s mission after she’s pulled under the waves is to find the Sea God and end …

Book Review: All My Rage, Marci Nelson Ozer

The Utah English Journal

Sabaa Tahir, in her National Book Award winning novel All My Rage, weaves a tale that spans from Lahore, Pakistan to the fictional town of Juniper, California as told through the voices of three characters in alternating chapters.

Book Review: I Must Betray You, Rebekah Crawley

The Utah English Journal

Anyone planning to read one of Ruta Sepetys’ historical fiction novels should prepare to have their eyes open to some of the world’s most hushed atrocities. From buried genocides to kidnapped babies, her stories will have you googling the veracity of her words. I Must Betray You is no different. Set in 1989 Romania, this historical fiction will have you captivated by the story of 17-year-old Cristian Florescu as he navigates life under a communist regime.

Book Review: The Life And Crimes Of Hoodie Rosen, Megan Colson

The Utah English Journal

Yehuda Rosen, also known as Hoodie, is a practicing Orthodox Jewish boy living in a new town called Tregaron. His father and others are trying to grow the Jewish community to the dismay of the mayor and other locals. Hoodie doesn’t see this as his problem though, especially after meeting and falling for Anna- Maria Diaz O’Leary, the daughter of the mayor who is trying to keep the Jewish community from moving in.

Book Review: Maizy Chen’S Last Chance, Ashley Hauber

The Utah English Journal

In Lisa Yee’s latest novel, Maizy Chen’s Last Chance, eleven year old Maizy joins her mom for a summer helping at her grandparents’ Chinese restaurant in the tiny little town of Last Chance, Minnesota. While Grandma and Mom run the restaurant, Maizy keeps Grandpa company as he tends to his health and regales her with thrilling stories of their ancestors’ journey from China to a new life in America. When a racist note attempts to blackmail the family restaurant, Maizy leans on the strength and resilience she’s learned from her grandpa’s stories to speak up and fight back against the …

A Lens Shift To Encourage Student Voice In Writing, Camille P. Stewart

The Utah English Journal

The sentence starters I worked so hard to spiral into the year’s curriculum became more than a scaffold– they were a permanent fixture. It was March, and my struggling writers were asking, “What sentence starter comes next?” without understanding why the transition worked. Their writing was organized, but lacked voice and intentionality. Students should know they control and choose their writing, so I decided to give students a new way to see their work and adapt the sentence starters they already knew. To do this, I looked for an allegory that students could connect to while planning their writing.