Children need strong vocabularies, rich background knowledge, and well-developed comprehension strategies to become successful comprehenders. Learn about effective practices for teaching vocabulary and comprehension.
As students progress through schooling, they are often faced with the challenges of comprehending informational and content area text. Informational texts are known for their use of text features. This guide takes you on a teacher’s journey to understanding the importance of teaching text features and shows you how to apply some of these activities in the classroom and with your students.
TextProject formalizes the ongoing work by its founder Elfrieda H. (Freddy) Hiebert, to bring beginning and struggling readers to high levels of literacy through a variety of strategies and tools, particularly the texts used for reading instruction. TextProject’s three priorities in support of its mission are: creating products and prototypes for student reading programs, primarily based on the TExT model of text complexity; providing teacher support resources and classroom reading activities; and supporting and disseminating related research.
A teacher shares his success in using podcasts to improve literacy skills in the classroom, in this blog post from Common Sense Education. Learn more about how reading along with a podcast builds confidence and literacy and keeps students engaged.
To thrive in today’s English Language Arts classroom, students need rapid recall of words they know and the ability to capture, learn and remember new terms.
By actively and independently reading text, students simultaneously can build their word identification, fluency, vocabulary, and text-dependent comprehension skills. Learn about three key steps teachers can take to help students experience success with independent active reading.
Research has shown that students can be taught to comprehend the material better while they are reading. Successful instruction of this type has usually focused on the teaching of comprehension strategies — that is, intentional actions students can use during reading to guide their thinking. Such strategies improve both understanding and memory. Some strategies that have been successfully taught include summarization, questioning, story maps, comprehension monitoring, and graphic organizers; however, the teaching of the combined use of multiple strategies has been most effective in improving reading. Strategy teaching is most effective when it takes a gradual release-of-responsibility approach in which the teacher models the strategy use (“I do it”), guides students to use it successfully within reading (“We do it”), and then assigns independent practice with the strategy (“You do it”). Reading comprehension instruction needs to take place in both narrative and expository text.
Learn how quick writes can help students reflect on and reinforce what they have learned. You’ll find examples of quick write tasks to try in your classroom.
The Simple View of Reading is a formula demonstrating the widely accepted view that reading has two basic components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. Research studies show that a student’s reading comprehension score can be predicted if decoding skills and language comprehension abilities are known.
We deserve lesson plans that are based on evidence and effective strategies, not on standards and wishful thinking. Equity isn’t about rushing to grade-level standards — it’s about providing the methodical teaching that the students in our classrooms deserve.
One of the most misunderstood topics in reading instruction involves the extent to which children should be encouraged to rely on context cues in reading.
Children deepen their learning when they make connections between what they read and what they already know. One method parents can use to help make these connections is called a think aloud, where you pause to talk through your thoughts as you read.
