ABSTRACT
The first step of a literature review is finding the relevant sources on your research topic. We emphasize here that you need to seek relevant sources because we want to underline that your search need not be an exhaustive one that attempts to locate everything on the topic. Because the collaborating teacher researchers in this book did their literature reviews as part of a course, they limited theirs to around four or so resources. (As indicated in Chapter 3, if teacher researchers are not undertaking an inquiry as a course requirement, they might have more time to locate and read more resources; teachers who are doing their inquiries for their theses or dissertations will also want to explore more resources. Extending the number of resources at later stages of your research is discussed in Chapter 7.)
So what are these resources and where should you find them? There is a range of peerreviewed1 literacy journal articles available to explore. These are journals such as Language Arts, English Journal, The Reading Teacher, the Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, Research in the Teaching of English, the Reading Research Quarterly, the Journal of Literacy Research, Linguistics and Education, and Written Communication. You might also find articles on literacy topics in more general educational journals, as well as in online journals.2 There are many books on literacy topics that can be useful as well (publishers such as Heinemann, Routledge, and Stenhouse, and the professional organizations the International Reading Association [IRA] and the National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE] frequently publish books that are helpful to teacher researchers). Also, there are general action research and teacher research journals that can provide additional examples of the types of research projects that teachers undertake. These include Educational Action Research and Networks: An On-line Journal for Teacher Research (https://journals.library.wisc.edu/index.php/networks). Finding relevant articles from journals can be accomplished via a keyword search using ASK ERIC (https:// www.eric.ed.gov). Many of our collaborating teacher researchers employed the search engine Google Scholar (https://www.scholar.google.com) to identify journal articles and books.3
