Teaching for theme is one aspect of reading comprehension that is often elusive for both teachers and students. Specifically, teachers are challenged with elevating students' thinking from the plot level to a more abstract level when teaching for theme understanding. Students are challenged with transitioning between the story world and the real…

A key instructional goal of English language arts instruction is teaching students to read and interpret complex literary texts. This report reviews the literature on the development and pedagogy of literary analysis skills. It analyzes literary analysis skills as a "key practice," a bundle of disciplinary skills and strategies that form…

In a recent classroom-based action research study, the author's adolescent students deepened their informational text comprehension skills over the course of several interactive, strategic shared text studies. As suggested by research and theory, her students appeared to observe and appropriate cognitive, executive, and discourse strategies as…

Posing text-dependent questions is crucial for facilitating students' comprehension of the text. However, text-dependent questions should not merely ask students to reflect the author's literal or even inferential meaning. The author's message is the starting place for comprehension, rather than the end goal or object of comprehension. The text…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptualization of reading comprehension that extends beyond the traditional cognitive viewpoint on comprehension common in the field. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on literature and theory from various perspectives (cognitive, sociocultural and critical), the authors propose a conceptual…

This article shares a literacy strategy to support students' analysis of the theme of text and provide evidence to support their assertion. The strategy is called Visual to Print Transfer (VPT). The VPT strategy leverages students' out-of-school literacy practices involving media images of Hollywood icons as a way to support their understanding of…

If we want to move children from struggling to read to being proficient readers, we must address the disparate ways that teachers respond to readers with varying abilities. Restorative practices, akin to restorative justice, build relationships, make connections, and foster a reader's sense of ownership and empowerment. What would happen if…

Comprehending expository reading material is a challenge for many students. Research has shown that students' expository reading comprehension can improve with the help of text structure instruction. The purpose of this article is to present teachers with a framework for effectively implementing text structure instruction in their classrooms.…

We introduce RESOLV, a theoretical model to account for readers' construction and management of goals during text comprehension and use. RESOLV focuses on readers' experience of their physical, social, and communicative context prior to actually engaging with texts. RESOLV assumes that readers construct two types of mental models prior to reading:…

Recent research shows that reading comprehension relies heavily on prior knowledge. Far more than generic "reading skills" like drawing inferences, making predictions, and knowing the function of subheads, how well students learn from a nonfiction text depends on their background knowledge of the text's subject matter. And in a cyclical…

This teaching tip outlines a comprehension strategy designed to support early primary students in reading to learn while learning to read. The strategy is born of the authors' classroom practices and is designed to support young children in reading and understanding informational texts by facilitating close interactions between text and reader.…

Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and…

This article exposes the problem of using declarative rather than procedural knowledge to help K--12 students recognize irony in stories. It offers commonplace procedures drawn from students' everyday language experience together with more abstract irony clues to help students recognize irony in stories and increase their story comprehension.…

Teaching children to inquire, discuss ideas, and defend thinking about a literary text is a key aim of the common core state standards (CCSS). This article describes how four third-grade, male struggling readers successfully co-constructed meaning during a discussion based reading intervention rooted in philosophical inquiry. Three elements that…

Four reading strategies and several web tools that are effective for reading closely and identifying textual evidence are described and explained. As teacher-educators with many years of experience teaching reading and the language arts, we have found these reading strategies and web tools helpful for middle school students as they consider…