The paper focuses on principles for the design of school activities involving the collective reading of multiple texts. We show that the collective reading of multiple texts has been practiced in rare occasions in Western history. Scrutiny of the reasons for the persistence and the decline of this practice in different societies suggests that it…

Teachers of core middle level classes are now expected to play a larger role in supporting students' reading of course materials than has traditionally been the case. University courses and high-quality professional development emphasizing content literacy can equip teachers with important insights about reading and can provide them with a…

Since Susan Adler, Alberta Dougan, and Jesus Garcia like "big ideas," the author offers one to ponder: young people in this country can not read with comprehension. The saddest thing about this crisis is that it is no secret. The 2001 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for reading, published in every major…

David Booth, a renowned storyteller and educator, conducted a one-day Saturday conference that focused on reading comprehension. The day consisted of three one-hour sessions that discussed and demonstrated effective comprehension classroom techniques with elementary school students. This conference was conducted at a public college in New York…

This study examines cognitive ability profiles of children with specific age-based normative weaknesses in reading comprehension and compares those profiles to the profiles of (a) children with at least average achievement in reading comprehension, reading decoding skills, and mathematics and (b) children with low achievement across the 3…

Word reading fluency, as indexed by the fast and accurate identification of single words, predicts both general reading ability and reading comprehension. This study compared the effects of context training and isolated word training on subsequent measures of word reading fluency. Good and poor readers were given 12 repetitions of two sets of…

In an effort to increase her students' interest in science, a teacher in an underresourced school secured large donations of science-related books for her classroom of second-language learners. By balancing her science classroom library and read-alouds with a number of interesting nonfiction trade books and storybooks, the teacher tried to enhance…

Increasing numbers of middle school teachers recognize that literacy is the responsibility of all teachers. Traditionally, teachers in many content areas have developed on the read-and-answer-the-questions approach almost exclusively when reading is part of their instruction. Now they can find a smorgasbord approach of content area reading…

This study had two purposes. One was to investigate the effect of text format on underachieving first-year college students' self-efficacy for reading; the second was to compare self-efficacy ratings with subsequent reading comprehension. Seventy-six students in a university learning support services program at a large Northeastern university…

To evaluate the usefulness of two DIBELS subtests (Phonemic Segmentation Fluency and Nonsense Word Fluency), 107 kindergartners and 101 first-graders who had taken the DIBELS were given a writing-of-words task and the Slosson Oral Reading Test of sight words. In addition, the 1st-graders' DIBELS included an Oral Reading Fluency subtest that…

Testing of deaf readers' comprehension of relative clause structures in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language suggests that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate good from poor deaf readers, but rather a processing deficit may underlie poor readers' comprehension difficulties. (Author/CB)

In the computer age, challenges have gained a new quality, and teachers, especially with their pedagogic responsibilities, have gained a new role to play. To familiarize themselves with the new technology and to become aware of its value in language education, the potentials of this new technology can be utilized to enhance the basic language…

Use the teaching ideas in this rich resource to improve your students' reading comprehension. By nurturing meaningful talk about reading and learning, you can monitor and support students' metacognitive use of strategies such as predicting, making connections, questioning, visualizing, and summarizing. A comprehensive breakdown of the components…

Meeting the standards. Differentiating. Intriguing, involving, and inspiring students. Teachers meet standards; differentiate instruction; and intrigue, involve, and inspire students with these innovative lessons ripped from the headlines--and from the comics, the weather map, and the classified ads. The author offers step-by-step directions for…

This study investigates the differences in children's comprehension and enjoyment of storybooks according to the medium of presentation. Two different storybooks were used and 132 children participated. Of these, 51 children read an extract from "The Magicians of Caprona," about half reading an electronic version with an online dictionary, and the…