This article illustrates how two fourth-grade bilingual teachers transformed their writing instruction for bi/multilingual learners by integrating a functional approach to language and literacy teaching and learning. The authors use a systemic functional linguistics genre pedagogy to explore and elucidate the teachers' innovative instructional…

Children's literature plays an essential role in the literacy development of children. This department column focuses on the teaching and use of children's literature and provides educators with information about a wide range of books across multiple genres that are representative of the diverse world in which we live. A strong emphasis is placed…

For more than two decades, accommodations have served as the primary strategy for ensuring the valid participation of multilingual learners (MLLs) in high-stakes summative assessments. Using historical analyses of the evolution of testing accommodation guidelines and related instructional practices, the authors explain how the application of…

Adaptive teaching is an instructional approach where differences among learners are clearly recognized. For the last decade, our research team has studied literacy teachers' instructional adaptations in numerous classrooms in different regions of the United States. In this article, we share conclusions and insights from this longitudinal research.…

The Editors of The Reading Teacher introduce a new column, "By Educators, for Educators" through sharing ideas from the Interesting Ways series edte.ch/blog/interesting-ways/. Curated by Tom Barrett, the Interesting Ways Series is an example of crowdsourcing or the power collaborative thought. The Interesting Ways Series has more than 30…

This Teaching Tip article explores the importance of phrasing while reading. It also presents an instructional intervention strategy for helping students develop greater proficiency in reading with phrases that reflect the meaning of the text.

As teachers, we are always reflecting on and refining our craft. In this article, the author shares how her understanding and implementation of comprehension strategy instruction has evolved over the past ten years. These shifts include her current thinking about the gradual release of responsibility instructional model, how content and big ideas…

A group of elementary school reading teachers used their time in a Professional Learning Community to develop a systematic intervention to address the needs of struggling readers in grades 3 to 5. Working as a team, they identified a collection of books that was culturally diverse, high interest, appealing to boys and girls, aligned with…

The new age of digital media and information technologies demands more complex interpretive meaning-making from readers than ever before. Early childhood teachers must therefore incorporate higher-level literacy instruction focused on interpretative meaning to prepare students to meet these increasing literacy demands. This study redesigned the…

Describes a program that associates phonics instruction with children's earliest reading and writing, using the ERIS method to teach sound/letter correspondences and to provide opportunities for writing and reading. (NKA)