Preparing Teachers to Teach Reading and Writing in Multilingual, Digital, and AI-Mediated Contexts

This Research Topic examines how initial teacher education and professional development build the knowledge, practices, and pedagogical judgment needed to teach reading and writing in multilingual and digital contexts, including interaction with artificial intelligence (AI). It focuses on what teachers learn, how they apply it in practice, and the outcomes this produces for teachers and, where the research design warrants it, for students. The proposal adopts a broad view of literacy encompassing reading, writing, meaning-making, and critical participation in socially situated communicative practices, attending to linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural dimensions without conflating them.Research on reading and writing offers a foundation for instruction, but applying it requires attention to student characteristics, languages involved, educational goals, and available evidence. This Research Topic asks how teachers learn to interpret and apply this knowledge in instructional and assessment decisions, with particular attention to writing and its relationship to reading. Contributions are organized around four lines of inquiry:1. Teacher education for teaching and assessing reading and writing, covering professional knowledge of word recognition, fluency, language, comprehension, and written composition; explicit instruction; and identifying and supporting students at risk of reading difficulties. Contributions should specify the evidence base and implementation conditions for the practices examined.2. Teacher education for literacy in multilingual contexts, examining how teachers are prepared to draw on students' linguistic repertoires and languages of instruction, including pedagogical translanguaging and assessment responsive to students' linguistic trajectories, without assuming universal effectiveness of any single strategy.3. Teacher education for critical reading and writing in digital environments, addressing the interpretation and production of multimodal texts, evaluation of information, and the social and technological conditions shaping its circulation. This includes preparing teachers to understand AI's possibilities and limitations, evaluate its outputs, and address authorship, bias, and responsibility in its educational use. Studies focused primarily on algorithmically driven reading or writing instruction (e.g., adaptive or AI-based tutoring and automated feedback) fall outside the scope unless they explicitly examine teacher education, teachers' pedagogical judgment, or teachers' critical evaluation of such tools.4. Design, implementation, and evaluation of teacher education, bringing together initial teacher education programs, teaching practice, novice-teacher support, and continuing professional development, with evaluation distinguishing outcomes for teacher knowledge, practice, and student learning.We welcome empirical studies, rigorous reviews, and theoretically grounded contributions that explicitly connect teacher education to the teaching of reading and writing. Contributions may address a single line or their intersections and should clearly delimit their concepts, context, and scope. How these four areas relate to one another remains an open question this Research Topic aims to advance. Topic editors: Delfín Ortega-Sánchez, Carlos Pérez-González, Mar Agudo Romeo Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/87042/preparing-teachers-to-teach-reading-and-writing-in-multilingual-digital-and-ai-mediated-contexts