While a science teacher needs to be thoroughly grounded in science content and methodology, the science teacher also needs to be a reading teacher. Science experiments and demonstrations need to be integrated with reading in the science curriculum. Reading in science helps students with comprehension, the development of concepts and…

Offers classroom teachers a way to use listening activities to improve students' comprehension, a procedure that has worked well with a group of children in grades K-3. (JC)

Reviews representative instructional studies of inference training, reciprocal teaching, and process training. Discusses both the concept of explicit comprehension instruction and potential difficulties in classroom implementation. Raises two important curricular concerns. (NH)

Reflects on the author's experiences teaching a course on great documents in American history to high school students, concentrating on teaching the Declaration of Independence and the "Federalist Papers." Countering the students' tendencies toward superficial reading and encouraging deep analysis are the teacher's primary goals. (SLD)

This paper outlines the teaching and research program in language and education at the University of Southampton (England) and examines problem areas found in the combination of language and education, including confusion in interpretation of textual material by students. Language and education often involves language teaching, but not language,…

Notes that classroom assessment of literacy is dominated by methods more appropriate to external mandates. Suggests an alternative method grounded in the teacher's professional judgment and in the relations between curriculum, instruction, and assessment. (FL)

A major problem in the teaching of reading is to determine the scope or breadth of the curriculum--how broad to develop the objectives of instruction becomes paramount in curriculum development. Breadth of the curriculum may then be represented by points on a continuum with a wider scope on one end and narrowing down toward the other end. This…

Although the constraints of time and environment under which most language learning is done mean that a natural language situation can never be reproduced in school, many of the findings from first language acquisition studies apply to second language (L2) learning. This would mean therefore that instead of stressing speaking in a beginning L2…

Jonathan Culler's notion, that each change of perspective a reader makes brings something different from the text, is explored by using four curricula. They are: the traditional language arts curriculum, an active reading comprehension curriculum, a psychology curriculum, and a feminist curriculum. By analyzing the same text, "Snow White and…

The article defends the teaching of philosophy at elementary and secondary levels and examines some existing precollege philosophy curricula; special attention is given to the American Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children and a Canadian effort to establish moral education in the schools. (SB)

Includes five articles with the following topics: a computerized reading motivation/comprehension program used to enrich a high school curriculum; a summer reading-ahead program for seventh and eighth graders; educating students about censorship; protecting books from theft; and an author's visit that showed a high school how to integrate reading…

Examines advantages and disadvantages of using textbooks as the basis for curriculum and instruction, discussing textbooks as the predominant instructional medium. The article describes attributes of good textbooks and text structures, identifies strategies for improving readers' text comprehension, and notes teachers' role as facilitators in…

Considers the benefits of extensive reading, examines some of the reasons for its failure to take off, describes two programs, and offers teachers some leading questions to help them develop their own programs. (three references) (Author/CK)

Elementary school teachers acknowledge the need for better writing instruction, but seldom have time for it within their already crowded curricula. Writing instruction suffers from placing skills development before writing activities, from emphasis on reading, and because many teachers are not well prepared to teach writing. A low priority is…

Argues that national policy has imposed on American public education four different standards of literacy, each one more demanding than the one preceding it--signature, recitation, comprehension, and application. Suggests, also, that each standard, which had its root cause in the nation's economy and social structure, was initially applied only to…