There is a growing awareness that reading and writing informational texts are important skills for functioning successfully in our current society. Informational texts provide purposeful and authentic reasons for reading and writing while enhancing children's vocabulary knowledge and content understanding. This article describes The Tools…

The author presents self-report data from students in three upper-level undergraduate courses to illustrate the comparative effectiveness of different out-of-class assessment approaches in promoting completion and comprehension of reading assignments. Students reported agreeing or strongly agreeing that all three assignments motivated them to…

Despite many calls for K-12 disciplinary literacy instruction--instruction that teaches students the specialized ways of reading, writing, and reasoning of the academic disciplines--there are questions about what disciplinary literacy instruction means for the prominent school domain of English language arts. This article investigates the…

Reading just one text on any topic, Cummins argues, isn't enough if we expect students to learn at deep levels about the topic, synthesize various sources of information, and gain the knowledge they need to write and speak seriously about the topic. Reading a second or third text expands a reader's knowledge on any topic or story--and the why…

Class preparation is recommended by instructors in most college courses, but checking whether a student does so is not easy. A new blended learning system, named ClassPrep, has been proposed and implemented. The usability of the system was examined for two undergraduate psychology courses: one advanced course (n = 11) and one introductory course…

Teachers can potentially address reading comprehension deficits in a content area, such as science, by using the students in their classrooms as resources. We examined the effects of a class-wide partner reading intervention with science reading materials on a measure of content comprehension skills. A total of 65 fourth-grade students and 61…

Research Findings: A social validity measure was used to examine 56 bilingual preschool teachers' perceptions and acceptability of an interactive shared book reading vocabulary intervention implemented in English with Spanish-speaking preschool children (N = 334) in a dual language program model. Social validity outcomes indicated that bilingual…

Literature in this field of English language learners (ELLs) in US public schools indicates that the needs of these adolescent ELLs are not being met due to a lack of language support and inaccessibility to content. This research examined the enactment of a curriculum with preservice teachers designed to address the specific needs of adolescent…

Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting student's academic language development. Often, however, instructional approaches that are more familiar to teachers, such as helping students learn new vocabulary, are prioritized over more complex and less familiar explorations into disciplinary…

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the relationship between secondary English learner students' perspectives of effective teacher practices and how these practices contribute to their self-efficacy in the content area of social studies. As reported by the National Association of Education Progress secondary English learners…

The face of developmental reading is changing. Yet, the mission does not change: Students must be prepared to tackle academic texts if they are to be successful in college, and this is the essence of academic literacy instruction. Developmental reading professionals must have a deep understanding of academic vocabulary acquisition. Unfortunately,…

Pleasure reading is an absolute choice to eradicate readicide, a systematic killing of the love for reading. This paper encompasses the different forms and consequences of readicide which will have negative impact not only on comprehension but also on the prior knowledge of a reader. Reading to score well on tests impedes the desire for reading…

The main goal of this study was to investigate how readers' visual attention distribution during reading of conflicting science information is related to their scientific reasoning behavior. A total of 25 university students voluntarily participated in the study. They were given conflicting science information about earthquake predictions to read…

Modeling in the classroom is the key to successful teaching. This study examines whether preservice teachers would use content area literacy instructional routines, which had been modeled in my university course, in their student teaching and first-year classrooms. Both content area literacy and disciplinary literacy were modeled in my university…

Keeping a log of scientific investigations, discoveries, and notes is a process that scientists have used throughout history. Elementary-age children engage in similar types of documentation when they perform investigations and sketch, label, or provide details about their work and findings. This column includes activities inspired by children's…