Close to one billion people in the world do not have basic literacy skills. A key challenge is reaching children in the midst of circumstances that make a traditional school-based approach impractical. This chapter will describe a cross-disciplinary, mobile technology approach to literacy education. The Curious Learning approach distributes…

Literacy instruction for students with significant intellectual disabilities traditionally emphasizes isolated skills instruction focusing on sight words and basic vocabulary. Recent research suggests these students benefit from high-quality instruction that includes comprehension and storybook reading. This study examined the effect of a…

Basic words have been defined as those from which other words can be derived semantically. The assumption underlying the instructional utility of a list of basic words is that a knowledge of them would provide a key to the understanding of a much larger set of related words. Although it has been shown that there are far too many basic words in the…

Details a study indicating that the minimal level of literacy necessary for adults in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is very high. Provides a master list of vocabulary words, symbols, numbers, abbreviations, computational skills, and writing skills needed for functional literacy. (MKM)

The literacy training strategy of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has gained a great deal of recognition over the past 15 years. In Freire's method, the context of the learner's life is carefully studied to find the critical issues in the formulation of dialogue between teacher and learner. A basic vocabulary then is generated to insure power…

This article describes how content area readers/informational books can be used in beginning reading programs to support both literacy development and the learning of national standards-based content. Benefits from using content area readers/informational books with young readers include: (1) Certain children, often boys, are far more excited by…