Two hundred ninety-eight primary teachers (88% female) from across all Australian states and territories reported on the frequency with which they implemented instructional adaptations for struggling writers in their classrooms. They also rated their preparation and self-efficacy for teaching writing. The majority of participating teachers…

Writing is a key area of literacy in the early years, however writing receives less research attention than reading despite its impact on students' learning generally, and literacy development specifically. Writing skills have also been shown to be quite stable--good writers in the early years stay good writers in the later years. Therefore it is…

The Common Core set a standard for all children to read increasingly complex texts throughout schooling. The purpose of the present study was to explore text characteristics specifically in relation to early-grades text complexity. Three hundred fifty primary-grades texts were selected and digitized. Twenty-two text characteristics were identified…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention for second graders at risk for academic failure, which taught reading comprehension embedded in social studies content. The intervention included instruction about the structure of cause/effect expository text, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and close…

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…