Decades of educational research have demonstrated that students are most likely to be successful when instruction is explicit and engaging and provides students with multiple opportunities to practice with teacher feedback. To be explicit means more than simply telling students what to do. It is the teacher's responsibility to help the student…

There is a tradition in primary classes of using rich authentic activities to teach science. The idea of pupils learning science through experiment and discovery is appealing. But this is not how children are taught in other subjects. When children learn to read, there are tiny steps, mastering each one before moving onto more challenging books.…

This teaching tip aims to build awareness of using a text's structure as a framework for building students' reading comprehension. The authors detail the Framework for Accelerating the Strategic Comprehension of Text (FASCT) to support elementary students reading comprehension abilities by explicitly teaching students to use the structure of a…

This teaching tip aims to build awareness of using a text's structure as a framework for building students' reading comprehension. The authors detail the Framework for Accelerating the Strategic Comprehension of Text (FASCT) to support elementary students reading comprehension abilities by explicitly teaching students to use the structure of a…

According to research by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD; 2000), reading is the single most important skill a child will learn in life. Reading proficiency is a powerful predictor of academic success, on-time graduation, and future earning potential in the workforce. Children who reach adulthood without adequate…

In the present article, I revisit the ongoing controversy surrounding the use of translation in the foreign language classroom in general. I begin by defining the concept of 'translation' arguing that translation can be understood either as a method or as a means and that it is exactly the ambiguity of the term that has led to the current debate…

This article describes an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration between English faculty and an organizational behavior (OB) professor to scaffold case analysis writing in an upper-level OB course at an English-medium university in the Middle East. Case analysis writing is challenging for students as an academic genre or type of writing…

This article describes an intervention program to improve writing skills, intended to be a useful tool for everyday remedial work in primary school. The design was based on an initial review of the approaches most often used for writing intervention and identification of the main concerns for such intervention; namely, the use of direct and…

High-leverage practices (HLPs) are instructional approaches educators in K-12 can use to teach different types of learners and content. They are deemed "high leverage" because they are foundational to effective instruction, they help with managing and intervening in students' behavior, and they support successful implementation of the…

Instructional explanations have sometimes been described as an ineffective way to teach science, representing a transmissive view of learning. However, science teachers frequently provide instructional explanations, and students also offer them in cooperative learning. Contrary to the transmissive view regarding explanation, studies suggest that…

In the context of an on-going project emphasising the centrality of speaking and listening in the primary curriculum, the present article turns to vocabulary development: to the wide differences characterising primary age children in this regard, to their consequent unequal access to the wider curriculum, and to means by which such deficiencies…

Although most students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) receive instruction in the general education setting (U.S. Department of Education, 2018), their academic outcomes have been found to be poor. Two evidenced-based practices that improve outcomes for students with SLD are explicit instruction and cognitive and metacognitive strategy…

Previous research examining "frontloading" academic vocabulary establishes it as an effective instructional activity for students who are English learners. This article extends and builds from those earlier findings, showing the relevance and importance of explicit vocabulary instruction for all students identified with specialized…

Response-prompting procedures are a form of systematic direct instruction based on the principles of ABA. Researchers have identified six specific and distinct response-prompting procedures for teaching both academic and functional skills: (1) graduated guidance; (2) most-to-least prompting; (3) system of least prompts; (4) progressive time delay;…

There has been concern about student literacy expressed in the community in recent years, following the results of national and international assessment. In spelling, there are insufficient hard data, but the perception is that our students are not receiving the exemplary spelling education they require. A number of possible reasons have been…