Sharing reading techniques with families is an important responsibility of teachers. Dialogic reading is one way to improve young students' expressive vocabulary skills, which are important for later reading success. Dialogic reading also supports students' understanding of story structure and content. This well researched technique has not been…

The use of culturally relevant texts can support students' reading development, foster a love of reading, help students form positive identities, and broaden their social consciousness. Well-matched culturally relevant texts have particular promise in increasingly diverse classrooms. Drawing on the academic literature and their experience as…

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:…

Reading and creating stories is a longstanding pedagogical approach to literacy learning in elementary school classrooms because stories offer personal and human experiences to which students can relate and respond. Stories, including digital forms such as short films, offer accounts of what it is to belong to a community and its worldviews and…

This teaching tip showcases how students use iPads to video record themselves orally reading. In the Record, Listen, Reflect process, students conduct repeated readings with a familiar text, watch the recorded video, and conduct running records on themselves. Having an opportunity to watch videos of their own reading gives students a glimpse of…

Posing text-dependent questions is crucial for facilitating students' comprehension of the text. However, text-dependent questions should not merely ask students to reflect the author's literal or even inferential meaning. The author's message is the starting place for comprehension, rather than the end goal or object of comprehension. The text…

Given the increasing diversity in U.S. schools and the impact of texts that reflect students' identities and experiences in the world, it has become imperative for teachers to be able to effectively integrate culturally relevant texts. In this article, the authors show how to do this using five steps to guide the process. First, teachers need to…

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…

This article explains how teachers can understand, notice, and supportively respond to readers who struggle with self-monitoring during text reading. The unique strategic processing demands for readers who struggle support the argument that teaching children to find and notice errors is different than fixing a word, or getting it right. Three…

This article was inspired by the fact that teachers have been asked to increase the difficulty of texts that students encounter without clear guidance on how to support their students when reading difficult texts. First, findings are presented from a recent review that investigated the effects of increased text difficulty on elementary students'…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a multiple tiered system of instructional interventions that may also serve to identify children with Specific Learning Disabilities (particularly in reading and spelling). This article summarizes the findings of Evaluation of Response to Intervention Practices for Elementary School Reading (Balu, Zhu, Doolittle,…

Signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaces No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. NCLB and its Reading First mandate brought punitive accountability models and scripted core curricula into schools. Based on the language of…

In this article, the authors report findings from a yearlong study that addressed teaching first-grade students to make inferences and engage in inferential discussion about children's literature. Because of the importance of both inferencing and discussion for comprehension, a collaborative team of two researchers and a classroom teacher focused…

The purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of providing reading interventions that are differentiated and aligned with an individual student's most foundational reading skill need. The authors present profiles of different readers and suggest three principal areas for support: decoding words, reading at an appropriate rate, and…

An essential element in teaching children to effectively comprehend text is the use of teacher-led think alouds. This article presents a three-step model to improve the quality and quantity of think alouds in K-6 classrooms. The article follows elementary teachers who planned, implemented, transcribed, and reflected upon think aloud lessons to…