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In order to understand the culture of the physical, virtual, and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit, we build on Gee's concept of affinity spaces. Drawing on our ethnographic research of adolescent literacies related to The Hunger Games novels, the Neopets online game, and The Sims videogames, this article explores the nature of interest‐driven writing in these spaces. We argue that fan‐based affinity spaces motivate young adults to write because they offer multiple modes of representation, diverse pathways to participation, and an authentic audience. As scholars and educators, we posit that these out‐of‐school spaces can offer youth new purposes, modes, and tools for their written work. FREE author podcast

As researchers seek to make sense of young people's online literacy practices and participation, questions of methodology are important to consider. In our work to understand the culture of physical, virtual and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit, we find it necessary to expand Gee's (2004) notion of affinity spaces. In this article, we draw on our research examining adolescent literacies related to The Sims video games, The Hunger Games novels, and the Neopets online game to explicate nine features of affinity space research that reflect participation in, and research about, online environments. We argue that studying adolescent literacies in affinity spaces affords us access to participants outside our geographic proximity, readily available web-based historical record of the affinity spaces' practices, and a way to trace literacy practices across portals, modes and texts. However, affinity space research poses challenges, including issues of recruiting and maintaining relationships with participants, the instability and impermanence of online environments and artefacts, and the porous boundaries of field sites. This article concludes with recommendations for future literacy research conducted in online spaces and implications for literacy teaching and learning. Our aim is to begin articulating a new methodological framework for studying affinity spaces: affinity space ethnography.

Literacies researchers have long argued that the new literacies made possible by the internet facilitate global connectedness. However, much of the research about digital literacies has centered the experiences of participants and researchers from only certain parts of the world. The field needs to embrace a more inclusive understanding of global, acting intentionally to seek out, include, and learn from people in the Global South to truly realize the role that digital literacies have in the life of a global meaning maker. In calling for a global turn in digital literacies research to inform education, the authors share stories from a study with Indonesian secondary students to spark dialogue about how conceptualizations of digital literacies need to shift as voices from the Global South get invited into the conversation.

Much of the research on youth digital literacies relies on the experiences of exceptional cases, while less is known about more typical youth who share their writing in online spaces. Through the examination of a novice writer in an online space, this article explores the convergence of factors shaping young people's networked writing and addresses recent critique of the New London Group's (1996) Designs of Meaning framework. Data were gathered during a two-year ethnographic investigation of an online affinity space, The Sims Writers' Hangout, and analyzed through a Designs of Meaning lens. Data sources include the writer's posts on the site, responses she received from others, her Sims fanfiction texts, interview responses, and researcher field notes. Findings of this study make visible the multiple factors influencing this writer's choices, revealing how Available Designs from within and outside the site shaped her creations and how she leveraged her online participation to Design products that met the expectations of this audience. This analysis contributes to the field's understanding of how online affinity spaces influence youth digital literacy practices and argues that a Design perspective makes such shaping more visible. The article also argues for a more complicated notion of affinity space audiences as collaborators, rather than just supportive reviewers. These findings suggest the need for continued study of typical participation in online spaces and future research to examine networked writing within classroom contexts.

Despite an increase in research on the effects of cooperative learning (CL) on EFL learning, few studies explore the processes occurring within the use of CL and even fewer depict challenges with CL implementation. To address that gap, this qualitative multi-case study explored the important roles that individual accountability  CL's key principle  play in enhancing EFL learning and was guided by the following question: How does missing the activities that demonstrate individual accountability in CL affect EFL learning? Data were generated by participant observations, in-depth interviews, and document analysis to conduct an empirical examination of what teachers and students experience, namely that while CL was part of teacher participants' instructional practice, the procedures of some selected CL structures were only partially followed by these teachers. When CL was not implemented with fidelity, performances of individual accountability in home groups and peer interactions were missed. With a Cultural-Historical Activity Theory lens, this analysis provides a portrait of tensions in the CL implementation, such as one between EFL learners (subjects) and the EFL classroom (community); it was evidenced by the learners having peer preference, i.e., taking the attitude that not all of their peers could be their resource person.

Research about adolescents sharing creative writing in interest-driven online communities has suggested that teachers can play important roles in helping young writers realize the potential of online spaces. Framed by sociocultural notions of new literacies and a conceptual framework theorizing the rhetorical situation when sharing writing in networked publics, this instrumental case study examined the design and implementation of a high school elective course supporting students to critically analyze and participate in online creative writing spaces. The authors collected observation, interview, and artifactual data and then analyzed them inductively to generate testable assertions about how bringing together the potential audiences in classrooms and networked publics affected writing instruction and the writing act. Findings revealed how controlling the makeup of audiences raised privacy issues, cultivating interactions with audiences required persistence, and conceptualizing audiences affected these students’ writing. Suggestions for designing writing instruction to include networked publics and recommendations for classroom-based research are shared.

Optimally, English language arts research units encourage student researchers to engage with problems they care about--gathering information, checking facts, imagining solutions, and building arguments. Yet in schools under pressure to meet accountability improvement measures, teachers often feel compelled to turn their attention away from socially conscious instruction to prepare students for standardized assessments. This preparation typically involves remedial coursework and focuses disproportionately on students of color, thus widening the opportunity gap by narrowing their curricula. English teachers find that the \"external constraints imposed by the latest testing regime leave them alienated, ambivalent arbiters of a hotly contested and highly ambiguous discipline.\" Here, Marsh et al describe their experimental effort to position students as \"change-makers\" through the Five Steps to Advocacy Research unit.

This qualitative study explored how English Companion Ning (ECN), an online community for English teachers, enhanced the professional learning of university English teachers in Pakistan. Six teachers, selected through purposeful sampling, participated in this study. Drawing on a community of practice framework, the following data were analyzed: in-depth interviews, guided tours of teachers' interactions on the ECN, and ECN observations. The researchers employed grounded theory to analyze the data through initial, focused, and axial coding. Findings indicated that the Pakistani teachers learned with others in the supportive and collaborative environment of the ECN community. The aspect of legitimate peripheral participation in the ECN offered teachers an opportunity to observe, interact, and learn from more knowledgeable community members, which helped these teachers advance from peripheral towards full members of the ECN community. Implications for developing higher education systems are shared.

This article attempts to add to the literature supporting Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) by proposing the use of Cooperative Learning (CL), specifically focusing on the enactment of a key principle of CL, i.e., individual accountability. It illustrates how to train students on CL and its individual accountability work and demonstrates how activities involved in individual accountability, i.e., individual students’ performance(s) and peer interaction, can accommodate the teaching of the four language skills and components. We argue that these activities promote learners’ use of and meaning making in English and thus recommend teachers, especially those new to CL, follow the procedure of CL techniques exactly as described so that language learning in their classrooms goes in the direction of attaining improved communicative competence—the goal of CLT.