Making Sense of Phonics: The Hows and Whys (Second Edition)

A practical guide to help K–12 students enlarge their vocabulary and get involved in noticing, understanding, and using new words. Grounded in research, the book explains how to select words for instruction, introduce their meanings, and create engaging learning activities that promote both word knowledge and reading comprehension. This updated edition includes chapters on vocabulary and writing; assessment; and differentiating instruction for struggling readers and English language learners, including coverage of response to intervention (RTI). There are also expanded discussions of content-area vocabulary and multiple-meaning words.

Responding to readers’ success stories, practical questions, and requests for extended examples, this volume builds on the groundbreaking work of Bringing Words to Life. The authors present additional tools, tips, and detailed explanations of such questions as which words to teach, when and how to teach them, and how to adapt instruction for English language learners. They provide specific instructional sequences, including assessments, for grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12, as well as interactive lesson planning resources. Invaluable appendices feature engaging classroom activities and a comprehensive list of children’s books and stories with suggested vocabulary for study.

Grasping the meaning of a text enables K-8 students to appreciate its language and structure through close reading, which in turn leads to deeper comprehension. This book explains the relationship between comprehension and close reading and offers step-by-step guidelines for teaching both of these key elements of literacy. Reproducible lessons are shared for eight engaging texts (excerpts from fiction, nonfiction, and poetry), complete with discussion tips, queries that scaffold comprehension, close reading activities, and connections to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The authors model lesson development and guide teachers in constructing their own lessons. Texts for 10 additional lessons are provided in the Appendix.

In this fully revised and expanded edition of a classic, Beck and McKeown share their new findings on Questioning the Author, the approach that galvanized the research field to look at comprehension instruction in a new way. “What’s the big idea?” “What is the author telling us now?” “That’s what the author says, but what does the author mean?” By using queries such as these during reading, at strategic points in a text, students learn how to build meaning and consider and converse with an author’s ideas. These queries help focus discussions on important understandings. They also embolden struggling readers to work through the ideas in a text rather than skim over them. The book includes how-to’s on planning and orchestrating the Questioning the Author approach as well as a practical trouble-shooting guide based on classroom transcripts of 25 common challenges to discussion. For use with Grades 3–8.