Examines a peer-led middle school literature discussion to demonstrate the social and performative nature of interpretation. Finds that two students' stances in relation to a text are shaped by social and cultural conditions within and beyond the classroom. (RS)

Describes the development and evaluation of new classroom materials, including a Class 1 textbook, teacher textbook, and eight supplementary readers, designed to teach children in India to read and write in Telugu. Notes that in schools using the new materials, children showed significant learning gains, and teachers and parents were highly…

Describes a young child, age two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half, as he interacts with three types of storybook media (CD-ROM, Language Experience Approach, and traditional) at home with his mother. Reveals seven distinct episodes of interaction, which were compared across storybook media experiences. Finds that the proportion of engagement in…

Research indicates that engagement with text is critical to becoming a good reader and can be fostered in primary grades by using informal assessments of individual student's reading ability to guide instruction. Describes running record, miscue analysis, and cloze-procedure assessment tools and the assessment task of oral retelling. Sidebars list…

Proposes that the unique features of electronic text can interact with the special skills, abilities, and diverse experiences of English language learners to help us better understand both the goals, processes, and special characteristics of the bilingual experience and the acquisition of electronic literacy skills. (Contains 29 references.)…

This article describes how content area readers/informational books can be used in beginning reading programs to support both literacy development and the learning of national standards-based content. Benefits from using content area readers/informational books with young readers include: (1) Certain children, often boys, are far more excited by…

In this article, the author reviews his unsuccessful and successful strategies for teaching research and analytical skills, which illustrate changes in his assumptions about and attitude toward teaching. Older and perhaps wiser as well, the author no longer assumes that students already know how to do what teachers expect them to be able to do by…

Reading comprehension instruction in many classrooms focuses on teacher-generated questions which actually measure comprehension of specific text rather than developing metacognitive strategies for comprehending all text. Explicit instruction in the metacognitive strategies of making text connections, predicting, and sequencing, was evaluated for…

Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal…

Throughout seven years of teaching in urban schools, the author discovered that the most effective ways to teach difficult literary texts was to refer to students' out-of-school activities. In other words, to connect the "leaky edges of the "social outside"" with the "individual inside" is to create a curriculum of…

Electronic portfolio technology can be used in different contexts to create classroom communities in which everyone, not just the teacher, cares about each student's learning. The authors describe how students in an urban middle school, undergraduate teacher preparation program, and graduate leadership program used an electronic bulletin board and…

This paper describes Project LITERACY-HI, an ongoing 3-year federally funded study of the benefits of electronically enhanced text for mainstreamed students with hearing impairments. Preliminary information documents the ongoing difficulties with reading experienced by most students with hearing impairments. The project is creating electronic…

An undergraduate course in children's literature was developed at De Montfort University in Bedford, England, United Kingdom (UK). In a children's literature course for first year students from a variety of backgrounds, age groups, and future intents, it is important to consider the discourse of children's literature, to trace intertextual…

This paper reviews the literature on the impact of technology on reading instruction, with a specific focus on language development as enhanced by the use of CD-Rom programs. The paper cites a study in which two separate groups, preschool children and third graders, were asked to talk about a story they listened to and saw on CD-Rom, providing…

The purpose of this research study was to explore the effects of children's trade books on the development of science concepts. The two objectives of this exploratory study were to determine whether children's ideas about specific science concepts change when trade books containing information about those concepts are read to them, and…