ABSTRACT
This chapter offers implications for classroom practice and research on academic literacies. The first part of the chapter offers a range of promising programs and approaches that foster youths’ academic literacies. All of the programs included in this chapter integrate 1) opportunities for situated practice or immersion, 2) active and intentional instruction by a teacher who scaffolds learning activities, 3) opportunities for students to critically frame disciplinary knowledge and academic practices, and 4) opportunities for transformed practice where students create new ways of thinking and generating knowledge. The second part of the chapter focuses on approaches to researching academic literacies. It makes a case for the value of interpretive, ethnographic approaches, which rely on documenting and analyzing what youth say, write, make, and do in response to academic tasks and texts. It also identifies areas within academic literacies research that warrant further inquiry, including research on the academic literacies of newly arrived emergent bilingual youth, the complexities of using cultural modeling to foster academic literacies, and the affordances of, and challenges to using multimodality and semiotic resources in academic literacy education.
