Teachers in English-medium classrooms can support students' translingual composing by inviting students to write using all their language resources. However, students in these contexts often express hesitancy about their ability to spell in languages beyond English. This article describes support strategies teachers can use to scaffold students'…

Developing young children's vocabulary is essential for later reading success; thus, early childhood classrooms require a comprehensive vocabulary approach that teaches academic vocabulary. Yet even providing young children with child-friendly definitions of sophisticated words can be a challenge. First, the authors outline the components of a…

Contemporary students, accustomed to the agency and multimodality afforded by digital media in their out-of-school lives, require literature pedagogies that provide currency and appeal while furthering their understandings of literary techniques. Literature circles have long promoted student voice and choice but can lack criticality and attention…

Metalinguistic Awareness is the ability to consciously reflect on and manipulate language, from the level of the phoneme, to words, to whole phrases. Research has shown that engaging in metalinguistic activities can have a positive impact on reading. This article details some of the component skills of metalinguistic awareness (in this case,…

Digital literacies abound in playing a foundational role in the rhythm and pattern of our lives, yet debates continue about how to harness them to teach and learn literacy. In an effort to humanize digital literacies, this department column offers a vast array of topics, from participatory work that pushes educators and researchers to communicate…

This article on word-learning strategies describes a theory- and research-based set of procedures for teaching students to use word-learning strategies--word parts, context clues, the dictionary, and a combined strategy--to infer the meanings of unknown words. The article begins with a rationale for teaching word-learning strategies, particularly…

The world is increasingly interconnected through technology. In order to live and work in a global village our students need to develop global literacy. Global literacy incorporates a range of overlapping concepts including an advocacy dimension, global citizenship responsibility, and cultural and linguistic awareness. Further, global literacy…

Vocabulary instruction is a key component of reading comprehension but is often not addressed sufficiently in classrooms. The authors worked with a team of fifth-grade teachers in professional development targeted to learning instructional strategies for developing students' vocabularies. In this article, the authors share two strategies that the…

Teachers can capitalize on the overwhelmingly visual nature of contemporary society for learning and teaching through integrating photography in their classroom instruction. In offering an alternative pathway for acquiring and expressing knowledge, photography has the potential to strengthen instruction across disciplines by drawing on multiple…

Teachers are often asked to implement research-based instructional programs with fidelity and to ensure that all students reach high academic standards. These requests sometimes conflict when teachers find that not all their students are benefiting from the research-backed programs. In this article, we suggest that researchers and teachers can…

This article details one teacher's implementation of reading workshop in her second grade classroom. She provided a framework for authentic reading using the five components of reading workshop: time, choice, response, community, and structure. She found that reading workshop is a highly effective practice for not only increasing students'…

The authors offer a new perspective on close reading that uses a range of multimodal texts to capitalize on the visual nature of contemporary society and to support literacy within the academic disciplines. Specifically, a qualitative study explored teachers' perspectives on the use of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a practice borrowed from…

Storytelling is a practice that enables children to apply their literacy skills. This article shares a collaborative literacy strategy devised to enable children to create multimodal stories about their familiar school environment. The strategy uses resources, including the children's own drawings, images from Google Maps, and the Puppet Pals…

In this article, we describe how literacy strategies can be adapted for playing (and reading) video games--games that embed disciplinary content in multimedia texts. Using close viewing and guided playing strategies with online games and simulations, we share ideas for helping students navigate and comprehend multimedia texts in order to learn…

The goal of this investigation was to explore how a fourth grade teacher could integrate iPads into her literacy instruction to simultaneously teach print-based and digital literacy goals. The teacher used iPads for a three-week period during her literacy instruction and selected apps that provided unique approaches to helping the students meet…