Many English teachers feel underprepared to teach students with disabilities. While teachers may want to do whatever they can to make all their students successful, some may feel that they don't have as much time as they would like to prepare high-quality differentiated instruction, to fully accommodate every student, or even to know what…

This literature review examines the relationship between phonemic awareness and the ability to read. It addresses four main issues: (1) if phonemic awareness is a prerequisite for or a consequence of learning to read; (2) what is needed to teach phonemic awareness; (3) tasks or activities and assessment tools to develop phonemic awareness; and (4)…

Noting that traditional measures of textbook difficulty and traditional measures of student reading ability suffer from a lack of correspondence, this booklet deals with the problems of (1) identifying the levels of conceptual difficulty of text materials, (2) identifying students' abilities to understand text materials, (3) matching the…

The paper suggests rationales and practical procedures for improving student learning skills in high school social studies courses. A major objective is to help classroom teachers minimize problems brought about by the mismatch between student capabilities and program demands. It is hypothesized that secondary social studies teachers have not…

Literacy is the manipulation of thoughts and language to express ideas. It helps to build an understanding of various texts, people and situations, and promotes self-empowerment. Global society depends increasingly on literacy as a major factor for progress. Unfortunately, at a time when the ability to read and write is becoming imperative in…

To weigh the negative effects of "primerese" against its supposedly improved readability, a study compared the reading of controlled basal stories with that of the same stories minimally rewritten into more natural language. Participants were 64 white, lower middle class first grade students selected from five classrooms (all with basal…