Being able to speak English fluently does not guarantee that a student will be able to use language effectively in academic settings. Fluency must be combined with higher order thinking skills to create an “academic language,” which allows students to effectively present their ideas in a way that others will take seriously. The author, an ELL teacher, describes her use of “protocols” (a cheat sheet of sentence starters) to build students’ cognitive academic language proficiency.
This report reviews and analyzes existing research on effective literacy instruction and the impact of successful literacy programs for students in grades 4-12.
The performance gap — what students are expected to do versus what they can do — is compounded each year a child falls short of acquiring expected skills. As a result, underachieving high school students are at great risk for academic failure, discouragement, and disengagement. This article offers a framework to support adolescent literacy that ties improved student outcomes to an instructional core and an infrastructure core.
Many reading programs claim to boost student performance, but how is that measured? Johns Hopkins University examined more than 200 published studies to create this quick guide to programs.
How can content-area, non-reading-specialist teachers contribute to academic literacy? They can incorporate these five techniques throughout their lessons: (1) provide explicit instruction and supported practice in effective comprehension techniques, (2) increase the amount and quality of reading content discussions, (3) maintain high standards for text, conversation, questions, and vocabulary, (4) increase student motivation and engagement with reading, and (5) provide essential content knowledge to support student mastery of critical concepts. Find out why these strategies and the literacy areas they represent are so important.
Schools often struggle to find appropriate materials and approaches to support adolescent literacy. Strategies that work for children can ignore teens’ existing skills, knowledge, and life experience, and exclude them from the critical content that their peers are studying. Here are some effective teaching strategies for struggling older students.
Sharon Vaughn, Marie Tejero Hughes, Sally Watson Moody, Batya Elbaum
There are a variety of grouping formats that have been proven effective for teaching reading to students with learning disabilities: whole class, small group, pairs, and one-on-one. This article summarizes the research and implications for practice for using each of these grouping formats in the general education classroom.
Literacy programs seem to have sprung up everywhere, but how can you tell the good ones from the bad ones? This guide identifies the key elements to consider in evaluating adolescent literacy programs.
This article presents a round-up of intervention initiatives aimed at struggling adolescent readers. It provides a snapshot of program characteristics and research findings for Reciprocal Teaching, Apprenticeship in Reading, Read 180, Language!, SRA Corrective Reading, and Strategic Instruction Model (SIM).
Through the use of multiple texts, all students have the opportunity to learn new information and make meaningful contributions to discussions. Moreover, varied texts provide multiple perspectives that help students rethink events and issues that impact everyone and deepen their knowledge of literary genres.
