Teachers are asked to use reading science to inform how they teach phonics and phonological awareness. As teachers look to the research base to guide their practice, some questions and concerns regarding what best practice looks like have come up. This article starts with a brief description of phonics and phonemic awareness and then discusses…

Decades of research offer important understandings about the nature of comprehension and its development. Drawing on both classic and contemporary research, in this article, we identify some key understandings about reading comprehension processes and instruction, including these: Comprehension instruction should begin early, teaching word-reading…

Family literacy programs can be effective for supporting the literacy learning of both parents and children. Educators and community members can be constructive in establishing family literacy programs in their school and in the community. Having knowledge of successful family literacy programs is important for both initiating and continuing with…

Laws, practices, and research about reading difficulties have been gradually and rapidly changing since the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1974. It is difficult for schools to keep up, especially when it takes approximately 16 years for research to reach widespread public knowledge. In this article, I frame the…

Interactive read-alouds are versatile in that teachers can teach an array of literacy skills through this instructional strategy. However, our observations of six primary grade teachers and prior research revealed that teachers' implementation of interactive read-alouds varies. Without the necessary planning and preparation for interactive…

The authors emphasize the importance of cultivating autonomous motivation for literacy in early childhood by supporting students' basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness while building foundational skills. Additionally, the authors highlight four key findings specific to early childhood (pre-K-2) literacy development:…

This article describes how second-grade students' literacy learning was enhanced as they used their developing knowledge of nonfiction in an integrated English language arts/science unit toward the creation of multimodal nonfiction science books. After explaining the Common Core State Standards that guided the unit, the author outlines the…

Digital literacies abound in playing a foundational role in the rhythm and pattern of our lives, yet debates continue about how to harness them to teach and learn literacy. In an effort to humanize digital literacies, this department column offers a vast array of topics, from participatory work that pushes educators and researchers to communicate…

Based on research conducted in a fourth-grade classroom, the author describes one teacher's process for integrating social studies and English language arts using a writers' workshop approach. Furthermore, the fourth-grade teacher was able to provide students with an opportunity to engage in multimodal composition. After conducting research…

This piece introduces a framework for how to envision Personal Digital Inquiry (PDI) in K-8 classrooms. To conceptualize what teaching and learning might look like in these classrooms, important practices are situated along a two-dimensional continuum of digital inquiry that varies in terms of levels of support and purposes of technology use. We…

When literacy instruction uses books selected on the basis of thematic content, it can foster the attainment of literacy goals while developing readers' knowledge. This paper provides a rationale for the use of thematically-related texts in literacy instruction and describes some thematic units that have been a part of literacy intervention…

Almost 43% of the world's population is online. Research suggests that the prowess attributed to young people as a tech-savvy homogeneous population is misguided. Many of our students are laboring to utilize the Internet and other digital technologies as tools for literacy and learning. Furthermore, many teachers are struggling to create the…

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…

This article presents four practical principles that lead to enhanced word-meaning instruction in the elementary grades. The authors, a collaborative team of researchers and classroom teachers, identified and developed these principles and related instructional activities during a three-year vocabulary instruction research project. The principles…

This Teaching Tips article describes a classroom-based research project conducted between a teacher and a researcher. The topic arose from the teacher's concern about the inaccuracies and misconceptions exhibited by many of her third-grade students as they fluently decoded unfamiliar expository texts. The teacher researched her practice and the…