"Research Informing Practice--Practice Informing Research: Innovative Teaching Methodologies for World Language Educators" is an edited volume that focuses on innovative, nontraditional methods of teaching and learning world languages. Using teacher-research projects, each author in the volume guides readers through their own personal…

US government mandates to implement intensive phonics instruction in elementary classrooms invoke an alleged scientific superiority of this approach over more meaning-centered models. But curiously absent from this scientific enterprise is a study of the phonics system itself. Advocates of intensive phonics have not demonstrated that the commonly…

A study attempted to delineate the parameters of practice that are referred to as literature-based reading instruction and explored the perspectives of the teacher, the students, and the researcher about the use of literature in three different literature-based classrooms. Six teachers (third grade or above) were identified, teachers who were…

Previous research has examined either the effects of strategy instruction or the effects of literature-based instruction on children's literacy learning. Much less is known, however, about the combination of teacher-led strategy instruction within a literature-based framework. A qualitative case study explored what diverse second-grade students…

A study investigated how literature-based reading/language arts materials were being used in two "exemplary" third/fourth grade combination classes, the influence of teacher epistemology on classroom instruction, and whether teachers were enacting the whole language emphasis mandated by the state. One of the two participating teachers…

This study was conducted to describe the process of reflective coaching as a means of assisting a kindergarten teacher in developing her own kindergarten program in which she stated she wished to begin to incorporate new strategies based on emergent literacy research. A kindergarten teacher and a teacher educator/researcher participated in the…

The essential theories underlying the whole language approach require individual teachers to examine their assumptions about teaching and learning and to undergo a major paradigmatic shift that requires a new set of assumptions. One of the principal tenets of whole language is that the classroom teacher becomes an autonomous professional. This…

A study was conducted to investigate the curricular experiences of the low achievers, including the quality of the programs they participated in and the congruence between their classroom and pullout programs. Three lower-middle-class first graders in the Pacific Northwest participated in the study: John spent the entire day in the classroom;…

Research on restructuring domain-specific knowledge suggests that inferences made by a learner are based more on what and how concepts are structured and organized in particular domains than on the age of the learner. In this view, it is possible for children to operate more expertly in a particular area than could be explained by global stage or…

This study examined the relationship between teacher and student understandings. Subjects consisted of 26 third-grade students, of whom six were chosen for case studies, in a school in a large metropolitan area. All students were Latino, bilingual, and from working class homes. Modified cloze lessons were taught, and three types of data were…