Can students read difficult but self-selected texts--and if so, how? In this article we describe what we learned about middle school students' use of background knowledge and specific vocabulary from interviews and surveys in our longitudinal study of magazine reading habits. Then we discuss the implications of these findings for structuring…

Reluctant and struggling readers, many of whom are boys, are placed in reading intervention classes; however, often the environmental conditions of these intervention classrooms are not conducive for fostering a student's love for reading. This article describes Cambourne's optimal conditions for literacy learning and the results from implementing…

When the authors realized that successful book selection is not a natural skill for all learners, they developed a tool to support self-selection of independent reading material without book leveling. This tool is called BOOKMATCH, and it supports readers for whom book selection is "complicated." BOOKMATCH is an acronym in which each letter…