Families and educators have voiced concerns about the literacy skills of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the situation. Pandemic era studies have demonstrated the ramifications that students with ASD have faced, including regression of literacy skills, lower grades, lack of support services,…

The Common Core has emphasized reading for comprehension, including making inferences. However, little is known about the instructional materials included in core literacy programs for teaching inferences. The purpose of this study was to determine the frequency of background, anaphoric, predictive, and retrospective inferences in instructional…

Why aren't more schools seeing significant improvement in students' reading ability when they implement Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multitiered Systems of Support (MTSS) in their literacy programs? These frameworks serve as a way for educators to identify struggling readers and provide the small-group instruction they need to improve their…

Over 18 million children in Ethiopia are enrolled at the primary level with a net enrollment rate of 100 percent. Unfortunately, the positive achievement of getting more children into school has strained the capacity of the system, and student learning has suffered. USAID's 2018 Early Grade Reading Assessment suggests that only 40 percent of…

To address chronically low primary school completion rates and the disconnect between learners' skills at the end of primary school and the skills learners need to thrive in secondary school identified in many low- and middle-income countries, more investment is needed to improve the quality of teaching and learning in upper primary grades.…

Students learn to read and write best when their teachers balance literacy instruction. But how do you strike the "right" balance of skills and knowledge, reading and writing, small and whole group instruction, and direct and dialogic instruction, so that all students can learn to their maximum potential? The answer lies in the…

The current paper examines teaching practices in three first-grade primary classrooms (age range from five years and nine months old to six years and nine months old) in Greek Cypriot public schools, exploring whether the wider changes in critical literacy education declared on a policy level are influencing classroom literacy practices. Greek…

Success for All (SfA) is a whole-school approach to improving literacy in primary schools. Teachers receive training in areas including group learning strategies, phonics, and assessment, and are provided with structured daily lesson plans and teaching materials. There is also support for school leadership in areas such as data management, ability…

Literacy skills taught in the elementary grades establish a good foundation but are not adequate for the demands of secondary content curriculum. In history, preservice teachers must be prepared with a solid content base along with the pedagogy for teaching that content. To better teach and enhance student writing, preservice teachers need to…

Discusses the importance of the adaptability and flexibility of instructional resource materials. Highlights one quality resource for young readers, "Bookshelf, Stage 1," and another for intermediate level students, "Reading beyond the Basal Plus." (MG)

A primer for teaching Hmongs to read and write in their own language contains 67 lessons. It teaches literacy in the Roman alphabet used by Hmongs throughout the world, and is intended for students who have already learned to recognize and write the letters of that alphabet. The book uses spellings of the White dialect of Hmong (Hmoob Dawb) but…

Closed captioning is the process by which audio portions of television programs are transcribed into words that appear on the television screen at the same time as the program. This digest focuses on using closed captioned television for teaching limited-English-speaking literacy learners, and looks at: (1) the educational uses of closed captioned…

Presents data from a literacy study of bilingual classrooms demonstrating that teachers have strong expectations and assumptions about literacy instruction, and that certain literacy methods, materials, and assumptions can also make literacy more difficult for the limited-English-speaking child. (HTH)

This book presents a selection of the research and papers presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the College Reading Association in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October, 2006. This Yearbook begins with Karen Bromley's presidential address, which explored the future of writing by discussing four predictions: the notion that pens and pencils will be…

Reviews ten books in two major categories (Professional References and Instructional Materials), which can assist teachers in helping children develop critical power in literacy. (SR)