This study explored the instructional potential of bilingual picturebooks for building word consciousness in bilingual elementary students. Word consciousness refers to knowledge about words as well as interest in and enthusiasm for learning new words. This disposition helps students build their vocabularies and learn more words from talk and…

"Word Study with Students Who Struggle: Reading, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction, Grades 4-12" is intended for the middle and secondary classroom teacher. This handy book emphasizes the use of word study with its hands-on, accessible approach, to help students catch up with their peers. This book will help you determine student…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the experience of integrating word study spelling programs for second grade teachers across six elementary schools in Northern Virginia. Word study is a developmental spelling approach that can be used by teachers to differentiate instruction and meet student needs. Despite the growing…

Word sorts are standard practice for aiding children in acquiring skills in English language arts. When included in the general music classroom, word sorts may aid students in acquiring a working knowledge of music vocabulary. The author shares a word sort activity drawn from vocabulary in John Lithgow's children's book "Never Play…

This column provides ideas and techniques to enhance your science teaching. This month's issue discusses planning and using interactive word walls to support science and reading instruction. Many classrooms have word walls displaying vocabulary that students have learned in class. Word walls serve as visual scaffolds to support instruction. To…

In this quasi-experimental study, we assessed the promise of Word Generation, a research-based academic vocabulary program, on improving the reading achievement outcomes of struggling sixth-grade readers in an after-school small group instructional setting. After 34 hours of academic vocabulary instruction, we compared the performance of a…

No previous empirical study has investigated whether the learning disabilities (LD) identification decisions of proposed methods to operationalize processing strengths and weaknesses approaches for LD identification are associated with differential treatment response. We investigated whether the identification decisions of the…

This article describes a year-long reading intervention with a first-grade English-learner who began the year as a non-reader. Systematic instruction from a literacy specialist and her classroom teacher included familiar re-reading, word study, and teacher-guided reading with carefully matched texts, within the context of English language and…

The study investigated the impact of podcasts and vodcasts accessed through an iPod on fourth-and sixth-grade students' vocabulary acquisition. Students were randomly assigned to either a podcast group or a vodcast group. Regardless of group assignment, each student completed three six-minute podcasts or vodcasts a day for three days. On average,…

We describe findings from a series of longitudinal studies utilizing a response to intervention framework implemented over 3 years with students in Grades 6 through 8 with reading disabilities and poor reading comprehension. Students were identified based on reading comprehension scores in Grade 5 (n = 1,083) and then randomized to treatment or…

This project examined the words selected for instruction from fourth-grade English/Language Arts (ELA) and science programs with the goal of describing the unique words in these two text types. Seven features of the words were established: (a) length, (b) frequency, (c) frequency of a word's morphological family, (d) familiarity, (e) dispersion…

The ability to define a word with accuracy and precision is an important skill that has been associated with academic achievement. This study investigated the feasibility of conducting a lesson on formal word definitions to improve children's definitional production. The participants were 18 children in grade 4 (mean age: 9 years; 8 months) who…

The Louisiana Striving Readers evaluation assessed the implementation and effectiveness of the Voyager "Passport Reading Journeys" (PRJ), a widely used supplemental literacy intervention for struggling adolescent readers that reflects the research-based practices recommended by the National Reading Panel (2000) and other more recent…

The authors recommend a reading tutoring lesson framework, in a checklist format, to guide volunteer tutors during tutoring sessions for children in elementary grades 1-3. The reading tutor checklist is intended to be used by literacy coaches, reading specialists, and classroom teachers to train literacy volunteers in schools. The checklist…

The authors advocate that a high-quality curriculum is an important first step toward good teaching and successful learning. Good curriculum comes from knowing what students can do, can almost do, and need to learn how to do as readers, writers, and language users. In this book, the authors combine their experience and learning in literacy…