In the sixth article, "Islam and the Everyday life literacy practices of newly literate Moroccan women", Reddad Erguig and Laura A. Valdiviezo offer a case study of the everyday practices of six newly-literate Moroccan women who attended literacy classes in Rabat, Morocco. Their theoretical frame draws on New Literacy Studies (NLS) and uses ethnographic methods to explore women’s life history as well as their literacy attitudes in the aim of offering an account of their local literate practices. The authors stress the fact that religion is (i) a strong impetus for the women to acquire literacy and (ii) a significant factor to further developing their literacy practices. Participants use their newly acquired literacy to self-regulate their interpretation of the Koran and praying. In addition to showing how a literacy program may be relevant to the real life needs of students, the study supports findings of recent research on the embedded nature of literacy practice and the influence of religion on literate behavior outside the school setting. Although their findings demonstrate that the six female participants draw on the literacy skills they have acquired in the adult literacy class to serve largely expected functions, several also use literacy in original ways. The spread of literacy functions to other domains corroborates findings of past research conducted in newly literate communities and social groups where new literacy functions are developed creatively to serve unanticipated functions.

    In the seventh article, "Ethnographic encounters with cultural practices of literacy in the state prison of Oaxaca ", Angeles Clemente, Michael J. Higgins, William Sughrua and Mario López-Gopar examine the ways inmates learn to negotiate incarceration and literacy in the state prisons of Oaxaca, Mexico. This ethnographic study of a creative writing class that the authors taught at the Santa María Ixcotel prison in Oaxaca is concerned with the ways in which the inmate-students affectively deal with their imprisonment and with the social consequences of developing literacy; namely learning to encode their lives through poems and short stories. The authors examine the poems and also reflect on the overall experience of the inmates as they took the creative writing course. The authors discovered a co-productive or coeval relationship between themselves as teachers and researchers and the inmates as students and participants. This coevalness enables the inmate-students to relate to imagined communities through which they could challenge assumptions about the production of knowledge as well as contest the hegemony of coloniality and the colonial difference.

    In “Testing /assessing literacies: How do educators build useful knowledge about second language learners’ development?” Theresa Austin and Ekaterina Ites article focus on meeting the needs of responsible teachers in the US and other locations who take a role in defining accountability for learning. They describe an on-going participant observation study that documents how teachers develop inquiries into local testing and assessment practices. Together, they critically analyze how language and content are represented in multimodal assessments to understand the language, literacy and cognitive demands of tests and assessments used in public schools. They collaborate in order for teachers to develop useful practices and policies that address multiple stakeholders’ demands to increase learning. To succeed in testing, teachers need skills for discerning and managing the literacies used in test-making and test-taking. Because L2 learners are often misrepresented in standardized test results, their teachers are particularly vulnerable. As such, the focus of the authors is on both test-making and test-taking literacies, and their implications for the testing of L2 professional literacies.