Reading in the content areas of science, social studies, and current events is a difficult task that is even more elusive to Spanish speaking English language learners. There is a huge increase in children transitioning from their L1 (e.g., Spanish) to L2 (e.g., English) in classrooms across the US. These ELs face challenges due to a lack of…

The purpose of this study is to investigate elementary students' explanations of how physical features of the land influence the location of humanly defined structures including trade routes, such as the silk routes. The silk routes were a series of caravan trade routes that extended from Turkey to China and were located as far south as India and…

Many mainstreamed students with limited English proficiency continue to face the difficulty of learning English as a second language (ESL) while studying mathematics and other content areas framed in the language of native speakers. The difficulty these students often encounter in mathematics classes and their poor performance on subsequent…

This study examined meta-cognitive strategies utilized by bilingual, Hispanic 6th graders from three Chicago public schools that had embraced a staff development initiative designed to help increase Hispanic students' reading comprehension levels. The Strategic Teaching and Reading Project (STRP) emphasizes five basic comprehension strategies:…

The cognitive and metacognitive knowledge of a proficient bilingual sixth-grade reader who was Latina was studied by comparing her reading processes with those of a marginally proficient bilingual reader and a proficient monolingual reader. Four key dimensions are identified that distinguish the proficient bilingual reader's performance. (SLD)

A study was undertaken to examine the effects of teaching five writing rules on English summarization and comprehension under two conditions of reading instruction. The five summary writing rules taught included: (1) identifying unimportant statements, (2) identifying repetition of ideas in statements, (3) identifying lists of things or series of…

Differences in reading achievement of bilingual and monolingual groups of fifth, sixth, and seventh graders were investigated in several Texas schools where the Czech-American culture was significant. Sixty-three bilingual students were compared with monolingual students who had Czech surnames or Czech-American backgrounds, on the basis of…