The authors explore foundational ideas of disciplinary literacy and articulate a research-based heuristic for teaching disciplinary literacy in English language arts: generating, weaving, and curating. The authors apply the heuristic to the classroom, arguing that high school teachers should explicitly enhance students' opportunities for…

Research has strongly supported the role of classroom talk as a valuable teaching and learning tool. Carefully crafted teacher-student discussions that encourage broad student participation and knowledge building correlate with increased knowledge generation and higher academic achievement. To better understand classroom talk as an instructional…

Many teachers feel that students should not struggle with text; instead, they should read easier texts in order to learn from them and make adequate growth in reading. In turn, teachers might use easier or leveled texts as a solution or a graphic novel or multimodal version to differentiate text reading and to motivate and engage reluctant…

Rising expectations for middle grade students to independently read and comprehend complex, discipline-specific texts have also raised expectations for the ways teachers will teach. Helping all students, despite assessed reading levels, to access grade level texts calls for instructional approaches that not only meet readers where they are, but…

This piece is framed by questions we are often asked when we talk about online reading assessments and instruction with teachers. We begin with some of the lessons we have learned in our own experiences with designing measures of online reading comprehension. Then we share our thoughts about key design considerations as well as some of the biggest…

In this article, we draw clear distinctions between generic reading comprehension and disciplinary literacy in history. We argue that disciplinary reading restores agency to the reader, changing the typical relationship between text and reader, in which knowledge flows down from one to the other. Sourcing, for example, enjoins readers to engage…

Many literacy teachers are creating contexts for students to learn and use a range of reading comprehension strategies. As useful as reading strategy instruction is, relatively little has been documented on the ways in which reading strategies can become tools for critical literacy. In this paper, the author illustrates how a reading strategy can…

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is the latest effort to reform education through standards. This article examines how the Standards promise to prepare students for the changing world of the 21st century, yet do not consider the changing nature of literacy--especially the centrality of the Internet as a 21st century text, and online…

This article describes what happened when 49 preservice teachers participated in an e-book reading experience in order to prepare them to teach with e-books in K-12 classrooms. In addition to examining the preservice teachers' digital reading behaviors and dispositions, this manuscript also examines reader factors and text factors of digital texts…

As the second decade of the new millennium begins, the authors state that it would seem appropriate to look once again at the status of literacy education as it affects adolescents and adults. Each year since 1997, an article appears in the periodical "Reading Today" listing the topics in literacy that are receiving varying degrees of attention,…

Using interviews and 10 weeks of consecutive lesson plans with supporting documentation, the author analyzes four first-year teachers' assigned in-class and out-of-class reading assignments and their choices and uses of reading strategies they learned in their preservice program. (Contains 2 tables.)

To date, nearly all one-to-one literacy instruction is delivered in person, often in university-based reading clinic settings. This traditional tutoring format, however, has not met the needs or fit the schedules of many adolescents. Distance technology, accompanied with research that confirms literacy instructional components do remain intact,…

Twenty-seven middle school English learners participated in a study to determine the efficacy of the Think-Aloud Strategy, one of several metacognitive strategies created to help students strategically negotiate appropriate meaning from text. Students were grouped by level of English-language proficiency and were administered a reading…

Considers how using reading discussion groups with preservice teachers leads to greater comprehension and engagement. Outlines the structure used to involve students in independent reflection and group discourse about self-selected course readings. Describes a study of the effects of engaging students in structured small-group discussions about…

Examines adolescents who faced many comprehension challenges when studying diverse history content. Focuses on the challenges that an innovative history chapter with embedded texts presents to middle-grade students and the strategies and stances that student readers use in relation to these challenges. Examines the nature of students' historical…