Reading Workshop

Visual Literacy             Because the centuries old domination of written language texts is being challenged by the rise in importance of the visual image, a focus on visual literacy has come to the fore in literacy research and instruction. Mitchell (1994) has described a pictorial turn , a complexly related transformation occurring across fields of inquiry, asserting visual images are not fully explicable based on linguistic models of written language. His pictorial turn established the fields of visual culture and visual studies as legitimate academic disciplines concerned with multimodality and other hybrid forms of communication.             Avgerinou (2009) labels the pervasiveness of visual images in the mass media as the Bain d’Images Era , or era of the image bath, referring to the inundation of visual images in contemporary environments. She warns, however, th...

Classroom Discourse The traditional Initiate-Respond-Evaluate (Cazden, 2001) interactional sequence or pattern of classroom interaction is a particular speech genre with historical precedents and instructional trajectories. This discourse pattern is closely associated with transmission approach to teaching, placing the control of classroom interactions squarely in the hands of the teacher. In these interactions, teachers take turns at will, pose questions, decide on the direction of the discussion, decide who talks and for how long, what subjects are worthy of being discussed and serves as the arbiter of meaning and correct interpretations. Bakhtin  delineates between monologic or authoritarian discourse as described previously as a transmission approach, and dialogic or a more democratic discourse (Holmquist, XX). From this perspective, dialogic interactions offers a counter-narrative to the traditional initiate-respond-evaluate (IRE) pattern of interaction or recita...