Keri Franklin has proposed that creating the appropriate social-emotional environment for peer response (or peer conferencing, as she calls it) is a necessary first step. Within the context of her peer response process, though, are there strategies that can be adopted that would further scaffold students' ability to take each other's work…

In this article, we describe how books addressing social-emotional topics can be used by teachers of young children during class read-alouds to enhance students' social-emotional development. Teachers of young children typically choose books for class read-alouds based on curriculum topics and student interest; however, they may not be aware of…

Student success in higher education often involves the effective integration of source texts into students' writing (Horowitz, 1986); therefore, advanced second language (L2) students are particularly well served by effective reading-to-write instruction. Teaching L2 students to write from sources is challenging because of several issues,…

Purpose: Momentum around the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in US K-12 classrooms is increasing. Opponents have argued that Ethnic Studies does not challenge students academically and prepare them for high stakes testing (Planas, 2012; Sanchez, 2007). Conversely, research continues to show ways Ethnic Studies contribute to students'…

The concept of close reading is an important consideration when addressing the Common Core State Standards. In addition, "close reading" permeates the CCSS and suggests a particular way of reading and responding to texts. Trying to help students become successful readers in both school based settings and in the world outside of school is…

This article addresses the triadic nature regarding meaning construction of texts. Grounded in Rosenblatt's (1995; 1998; 2004) Transactional Theory, research conducted in an undergraduate Language Arts curriculum course revealed that when presented with unfamiliar texts, students used prior experiences, social interactions, and literary strategies…

Middle school students bring various identities into the classroom, including their reading identities and their self-concepts concerning their views of themselves as readers. Using identity and psychosocial and sociocultural theoretical constructs as a foundation, I conducted phenomenological case studies that focused on middle school remedial…

This research replicates an earlier study and extends it by shifting instructional responsibility from researchers to special education teachers, who implemented reading instruction that included multisyllabic word decoding, academic vocabulary, and three comprehension strategies (generating main ideas, comparing and contrasting people and events,…

This paper reports on some data on the effects of screen-based interactivity on children's engagement with storybook apps during family shared book reading that were gathered in a 2-year, small-scale ethnographic case study in Spain. Data analysis focuses on the complex interplay between the storybook app's interactive features and the children's…

This research replicates an earlier study (O'Connor, Beach, Sanchez, Bocian, & Flynn, 2015) and extends it by shifting instructional responsibility from researchers to special education teachers, who implemented reading instruction that included multisyllabic word decoding, academic vocabulary, and three comprehension strategies (generating…

At a time when some high school English classrooms erase and distort experiences and identities, it is vital for educators to explore pedagogies that provide radically reimagined forms of liberatory thought. This article explores ways the work of Coates can serve as "blueprint liberation" in the English classroom. The line of broken,…

This article will share a postcolonial analysis of three widely taught texts that the author has used to introduce both secondary English language arts classes and college students in multicultural young adult literature courses to postcolonial criticism: Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," Gene Luen…

This research synthesis was conducted to understand the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve learning from informational text for students with learning disabilities in elementary school (K-5). The authors identified 18 studies through a comprehensive search. The interventions were evaluated to determine treatment effects and to…

Students face challenging texts in higher education, whether they are discipline-specific journal articles or great works of literature. Building on research in content area reading and disciplinary literacy, this case study explores the various stances undergraduate honors students take when coping with challenging texts while enrolled in a…

In this article Ernest Morrell argues that while it is right and important to focus on contemporary literacies, it would be erroneous to assume that digital tools are the real essence of any powerful classroom interaction. No matter what technological innovations arise, the core classroom transactions are between teachers and students, students…