The Institute for Education Sciences identifies main idea and summarization instruction as effective practices for improving adolescent students' reading comprehension. Main idea generation is a higher-level comprehension skill that requires students to read the text, connect information across the paragraph or section, determine the most…

Diane Relf was concerned by what felt like an unbridgeable gulf between Year 7's vocabulary and comprehension, and her aspirations both for their inclusion in history and their later academic success. As a subject leader without the benefit of any history-specific training at the start of her career, she embarked on a journey of intensive reading…

Content area literacy and disciplinary literacy are umbrella terms that describe two approaches to literacy instruction embedded within different subject areas or disciplines. Under a content area literacy approach, students learn reading and writing processes that are common across disciplines. As part of content area literacy instruction,…

Expository writing--the kind of writing that explains and informs--is essential for success in school and the workplace. Students who cannot write at a competent level struggle in college. With the advent of e-mail and the Internet, an increasing number of jobs require solid writing skills. No matter what path students choose in life, the ability…

Research shows that cognitively demanding text-based writing assignments increase students' reading comprehension skills and analytic writing competencies. In this article, we describe the steps that upper-elementary grade teachers can take to develop cognitively demanding assignments that build these higher-level literacy skills and put students…

The clear message in the common core literacy standards is that students need to do less narrative reading and more informational reading. But narrative, the author contends, is the deep structure of all good writing. Teachers need to show students how narrative works in their reading, be it fiction or nonfiction. Students should understand that a…

Students' academic achievement across content areas is often dependent on their ability to express knowledge through written expression. Many adolescent students lack the skills to write efficiently and effectively. These low-achieving writers can benefit from instruction in self-regulating the writing process. One approach, Self-Regulated…

Claims that increasing numbers of reading educators are looking to recent advances in holistic writing assessment to explore new potentials for assessing reading comprehension. Reports on a research project exploring use of freewriting to assess reading comprehension; describes use of written retellings as a tool to support reading; and presents a…

Addressing the question of how schools and teachers can foster an advanced level of reading awareness among secondary students, this paper focuses on the similarity in language used to describe recent research on both the composing process and comprehension as acts of constructing meaning. It presents a perspective on the reading/writing…

Describes the Reading/Writing Task, a procedure used to assess what students recall and comprehend from their reading but that also guides them to recall, summarize, and react to what they have read. Discusses the activities involved in the task and the evaluation procedure, and outlines the Reading/Writing Task scoring framework. (TJQ)

Traditional methods of studying literature have included making assignments, having class discussions of the texts, and then assigning students to write about them. However, based on the concept that reading literature is a form of composing and that aspects of the process model for teaching writing can be applied to teaching literature, the…

This report describes research that focused on the comprehension and composition of simple texts. The first section reviews the overall goals and theoretical perspectives of the project. The second section describes the following studies carried out during the project: analysis and extension of prior thinking-out-loud (TOL) data, TOL and reading…

In response to teachers' requests for specific information about implementing the curriculum in the Expository Writing Program (EWP), this manual presents the instructional methods and materials used during the Teaching Expository Reading and Writing Project. First, the lines of research that formed the basis for the instructional program are…

An examination of the value of using more sophisticated computer programs in the language arts program led to the design and development of "Thinking Networks," which provide the teacher with a new tool for teaching through nonverbal representation. Using microcomputers to improve reading and writing instruction can incorporate the…

Describes the Directed Reading-Writing Activity (DRWA) as a framework that helps high school students write about the information they acquire through reading. Discusses how the DRWA's three steps--preparation, involvement, and reaction--extends the thought processes associated with reading comprehension into effective writing. (AEW)