Supporting the reading comprehension and content knowledge acquisition of English language learners (ELs) requires instructional practices that continue beyond developing the foundational skills of reading. In particular, the challenges ELs face highlight the importance of teaching reading comprehension practices in the middle grades through…

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen assert that language-based pedagogy is not sufficient reading in the technology-driven society. Educators need to incorporate ways for students to read other signs and symbols and redefine what it means to be literate in a digital age. Still, there are many ways in which print-based texts can be used effectively…

This report is the sixth installment in "Teachers Are the Center of Education," a series created to highlight the critical importance of teachers, salute their great work and amplify their voices. The teachers in this report readily acknowledge that schools of education play an important role in preparing them for classroom success, and they…

In school the author struggled to read and write. In fact, he really did not read until his teens, when he learned by reading the comics in their local paper, much to the chagrin of his two teacher-parents. For the first 12 years of his life the author grew up on a beautiful farm in the border country between England and Wales. His life was so…

When students struggle to read purposefully, they, not surprisingly, have little to contribute in class. Discussions are slow, and papers lack analytical details. This is because such students assume a passive role when studying, surrendering to the text rather than controlling it. As indicated by research into strategic learning, such students…

Family involvement in a child's education is vital to student success. This article presents qualitative findings from a more extensive study that examined family participation within a Response to Intervention (RtI) framework for K-1 grade students receiving Tier 2 reading interventions. RtI is a problem-solving tiered framework designed to…

While most educators assume that not all students try their best on achievement tests, no current research examines if behaviors associated with low test effort, like rapidly guessing on test items, affect teacher value-added estimates. In this article, we examined the prevalence of rapid guessing to determine if this behavior varied by grade,…

This article reports on an intervention study of reading comprehension among young learners of English as a third language (L3) in a multilingual (Spanish-Basque-English) context in the Basque Country. The study involves a pre-test post-test design, with an intervention of 7 weeks using two intact groups of participants that served as experimental…

The Big Lift™ (Big Lift) is a preschool-third-grade collective impact initiative in San Mateo County, California. The initiative is a partnership of the County of San Mateo, San Mateo County Office of Education, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Launched in 2012, the initiative aims to boost children's reading proficiency by third grade…

Many tens of thousands of preservice and inservice teachers have relied on this highly regarded text from leading experts, now in a revised and updated sixth edition. The latest knowledge about literacy teaching and learning is distilled into flexible strategies for helping all PreK-12 learners succeed. The book addresses major components of…

This conceptual essay critiques reading comprehension pedagogies that are part of the current educational landscape. I argue that comprehension pedagogy generally reflects one of three differing orientations, each with its own assumptions about what comprehension is: comprehension-as-outcome pedagogies, which emphasize getting textual meaning…

Written and oral literacy narratives produced by seven fifth-grade students are examined to identify the literacy identities students construct when narrating their past and present experiences with reading and writing. The narrative analyses reveal four major findings: 1. The students who contributed to this study have experienced literacy in…

This article draws on a study which was designed to extend understanding of habitual and committed adolescent readers. The study brought together four theoretical perspectives -- the social, cultural, spatial and historical -- as a way of re-imagining the field of reading. The historical perspective is the one foregrounded here, offering views of…

Problem Statement: Moving schooling age to an earlier time as a result of the transition to the practice of 12-year non-continuous compulsory education in 2012-2013 academic year has brought the discussions on whether students' readiness is sufficient or not. However, the teachers' readiness is also an issue as important as a student's readiness…

The Common Core State Standards place unprecedented emphasis on visual text--appropriately so, as visual components are increasingly ubiquitous in many kinds of text. This shift in emphasis requires substantial changes in our teaching. Concepts of print need to be expanded to include concepts of graphics, and specific graphical devices, such as…