An ethnographic study described a successful educational environment for students from low-income families and examined what it is about those environments that makes them successful. The subject class was a combined fourth and fifth grade class at Taft Elementary School in a predominantly African American working class community two miles from…

Despite movements to fight illiteracy in Laos, the number of illiterates in 1997 remains around 300,000 which represents 27% of people in the 15-40 age group. Concentrated Language Encounter (CLE) techniques were adapted for teaching reading and writing in the Lao language. A pilot project implemented CLE techniques at nine pilot schools in two…

Responding to a call to action by California's state leaders to make reading instruction in the early grades a top priority in the public schools, this booklet discusses California's new K-3 reading program. It begins with a discussion of what prompted this new focus on reading, and then discusses the four major elements of a balanced reading…

This software product teaches reading skills beyond simple word recognition. The accompanying twelve printed lesson plans are designed to complement the reading skills with other methods and areas of emphasis including kinesthetic learning, listening skills, decision making skills, syntactic understanding, word analysis, dictionary skills, and…

This software product uses word and picture association, matching, fill in the blank, and sentence construction that focus on making the user (K-3 students) a competent whole sentence reader in English or Spanish. The accompanying printed lesson plans are designed to complement the reading skills with other methods and areas of emphasis including…

Noting that little in language can be understood without taking into consideration the wider picture of communicative purpose, content, context, and audience, this book address practical uses of various approaches to discourse analysis. Several assumptions run through the chapters: knowledge is socially constructed; the manner in which language…

Much is being emphasized in staff development in the area of reading instruction. It is important for teachers to study and think reflectively about what can be done to improve the elementary reading curriculum. One procedure that can be used is to hold a quality workshop based on the needs of reading teachers. Teachers might volunteer to serve on…

A study focused on involving parents in a reading workshop to teach parents strategies used in their child's classroom. Subjects consisted of 11 parents (who were already highly involved in their child's classroom) of first-grade children from an affluent elementary school in central Virginia who agreed to participate in the workshop. Parents…

Frank Smith (1988) describes a "literacy club" as a classroom where no child is excluded from a wealth of reading and writing activities. One teacher, in designing a literacy club for his classroom, wanted to use a "balanced literacy" approach because using such an approach would allow him to incorporate many different…

This booklet is part of a series of seven booklets designed to introduce aspects of effective reading instruction that should be considered when teaching reading to students with disabilities. It focuses on essential skill building and teaching activities related to early intervention in reading. The methods described of teaching reading to…

This paper is in large part a critique of Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences presented in his 1983 book "Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences," and asserts that the multiple intelligences (MI) concept has been widely misinterpreted. The paper outlines some of the misconceptions of Gardner's theory as identified by…

This document is comprised of four consecutive issues (Winter 1998-Fall 1999) of a newsletter published quarterly to provide information on current research and practice to early childhood professionals teaching in the primary grades in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Montana. The winter 1998 issue focuses on retention in the early grades,…

In order to help kindergartners and first graders who need extra work on their literacy skills, this book offers a plan for teaching phonemic awareness and letter sound correspondence. The plan in the book is a developmentally sequenced, 11-week program to give students repeated opportunities to practice and enhance their beginning reading and…

From 1989 to 2000, the K-12 population of English language learners doubled in the United States and more than tripled in 12 states. When small rural schools first enroll children whose first language is not English, there may be no teachers endorsed specifically to meet linguistic needs, and special educators may be called on for advice. Special…

The main objective of this evaluation was to compare the achievement of the Ten Schools Program (TSP) students with the achievement of students in comparable schools. Since the original 10 schools selected for the TSP evaluation in 1988 were no longer a proper comparison group, evaluators selected a new set of 12 comparison schools. The mission of…