Dr. Nadine Gaab is an associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard Medical School, and a member of the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Gaab’s research at Boston Children’s Hospital Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience focuses on children diagnosed with or at risk for developmental disorders, particularly language-based learning disabilities.
Reading comprehension is often a concern for the teachers of students with autism. The comprehension strategies described in this article may help some students gain comprehension skills and improve their ability to read and communicate about written material.
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.
Dialogic reading involves an adult and child having a dialogue around the text they are reading aloud together. Learn how to use this strategy effectively to help kids build vocabulary and verbal fluency skills and understand story structure and meaning. Downloadable handouts to help guide parents in using dialogic reading are available in English and 17 other languages.
When fiction and nonfiction books are integrated into the teaching of a content area such as science, graphic organizers are useful for organizing information and enabling students to classify observations and facts, comprehend the relationships among phenomenon, draw conclusions, develop explanations, and generalize scientific concepts.
Beginning readers are not usually fluent, but classroom practices can help them develop this important skill. This article describes both direct and indirect methods for increasing fluency through classroom instruction.
Speech recognition, also referred to as speech-to-text or voice recognition, is technology that recognizes speech, allowing voice to serve as the “main interface between the human and the computer.” This Info Brief discusses how current speech recognition technology facilitates student learning, as well as how the technology can develop to advance learning in the future.
Writing is a new way for young children to tell their stories and express themselves, but they are also learning valuable lessons about print concepts and letter-sound relationships when they put pen to paper.
Don’t know a morpheme from a phoneme? Find out what these and other words mean in this glossary of commonly used terms related to reading, literacy, and reading instruction.
Find out how to help your students improve their writing through activities and tools that support the drafting stage. Show your students how to use technology tools to create, revise, and store their drafts in a digital writing portfolio.
Spelling difficulties can be enduring in individuals with reading disabilities, sometimes even after reading has been successfully remediated. Addressing spelling difficulties is important, because poor spelling can hamper writing and can convey a negative impression even when the content of the writing is excellent.
The goal of phonics instruction is to help children learn the alphabetic principle — the idea that letters represent the sounds of spoken language — and that there is an organized, logical, and predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.
Find out how an elementary school in Sheridan, Wyoming transformed their literacy instruction from a balanced literacy approach to a structured literacy framework. Integrating systematic and explicit instruction resulted in improved reading and writing achievement for their students, and professional growth for all of the teachers.
Writing allows children to express their thoughts, creativity, and uniqueness. It is a fundamental way in which children learn to think critically, organize and communicate ideas, and make thinking visible and permanent. And learning to write well helps children to be better readers!
When it comes to reading comprehension instruction, the text needs to be king (or queen). It should determine the questions to be asked and the stopping points where guidance and teaching can take place.
Suggestions for fostering independent reading include: (a) Give children books that are not too difficult. (b) Help them find books they will enjoy. (c) Encourage them to try many kinds of material. Although independent reading cannot substitute for teaching decoding, it improves reading comprehension and the habit of reading.
