This article presents a cross-case analysis of two fourth-grade teachers' instruction while preparing their students for an English language arts test. Both teachers taught in high-needs urban public schools and were identified as effective teachers of balanced literacy through a multiple nomination process. This article uses situated literacy…

The associations among second- and third-grade students' content-area knowledge, vocabulary, and reading gains and the science instruction they received were examined in this exploratory longitudinal study. We also asked whether there were child characteristics x instruction interaction effects on students' content-area literacy. Second graders (n…

The issue of whether to separate English language development (ELD) into a separate instructional block or whether to integrate it with reading/language arts instruction is an unanswered question with theoretical and practical implications. We addressed this question by observing instruction across the year in 85 kindergarten classrooms that…

Twenty kindergarten classrooms were observed during two full days of integrated language instruction. Over 300 observed literacy tasks were analyzed by activity format, duration, cognitive complexity, organization, and participation structures. Results indicated that, although most of the activities were meaning based, over half of the observed…