As the world told becomes the world shown, the texts of the 21st century will require teachers to adopt new skills, strategies, and pedagogical frameworks to support students' transactions with multimodal texts. This shift from a focus on monomodal, print-based texts to a focus on the skills necessary for producing and consuming multimodal texts…

The purpose of this book is to introduce the research on readability, defined here as reading ease. The first part of the book covers how people read. A series of national literacy surveys show that the average person in the U.S. and most other countries are adults of limited reading skills. For example, the average adult in the U.S. reads at the…

Early in the 20th century, educators began looking for scientific methods for matching texts with readers. Some of the best minds in education dedicated themselves to this task, including Edward L. Thorndike, William S. Gray, Ralph Tyler, Edgar Dale, Irving Lorge, and Jeanne S. Chall. The purpose of this book is to bring students of reading into…