Sentence stems are widely used by teachers, but what do we know about developing sentence stems and using them effectively? Sentence stems are intended to facilitate students' participation in academic conversations and writing and support students to develop the language expected in school, but sometimes the stems do not provide the support…

This column explains three ways that teachers can improve reading test performance. Basically, the idea is that instead of teaching students to respond to particular question types as is typical of test preparation despite the ineffectiveness of this practice, it is better to teach students to read the test passages more effectively. Three…

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…

Sector analysis (in which the three parts of a simple sentence are the subject, predicate, and sentence adverbial) provides clear steps for developing literal questions. Research indicates that those based on the predicate lead to more learning and better understanding. (JM)

Points out that if relationships between sentences are made implicit (for the sake of simplicity or readability), comprehension may suffer and explains three teaching strategies for improving students' comprehension of implicit connectives. (RL)