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Changes in education policy, the accumulation of research evidence that skilled instruction prevents and ameliorates reading failure, accountability requirements, and a new emphasis on multi-tiered interventions in schools are all causing a growing interest in improving teacher knowledge and skill in reading instruction. Consensus frameworks that explain reading development and individual differences provide an outline for what teachers need to know. The details of that content, however, including the English phonological system, the organization of English orthography, and the language structures that are processed during reading and writing, are challenging for teachers to learn. Recent studies are reviewed that investigate the relationship between teacher knowledge, practice, and student outcomes. The paper argues that teachers must have considerable knowledge of language structure, reading development, and pedagogy to differentiate instruction for diverse learners. Policy mandates for improvement of reading achievement should provide for more effective teacher education, as the knowledge base is not learned casually or easily. Research on how teachers best develop expertise should inform our licensing and professional development programs.

In the context of a longitudinal, four-year study of reading instruction in low-performing, high-poverty urban schools, we surveyed teacher knowledge of reading-related concepts, and established a modest predictive relationship between teachers' knowledge, classroom reading achievement levels, and teachers' observed teaching competence. There were significant associations among these variables at the third and fourth grade levels. To obtain this result, measures of teacher content knowledge in language and reading were refined in a three-stage process. Our purpose was to explore the type and level of questions that would begin to discriminate more capable from less capable teachers, and that would have a predictive relationship with student reading achievement outcomes. After experimenting with measurement of K-2 teachers' content knowledge (Form #1), we piloted a Teacher Knowledge Survey with 41 second and third grade teachers in one study site (Form #2). We then refined and expanded the Survey (Form #3) and administered it to 103 third and fourth grade teachers in both project sites. Teachers' misconceptions about sounds, words, sentences, and principles of instruction were pinpointed so that professional development could address teachers' needs for insight and information about language structure and student learning.

One of the most common findings in studies of teacher knowledge is that teachers are unaware of or misinformed about the elements of language that they are expected to explicitly teach. Given the strong consensus that explicit, systematic teaching of both spoken and written language structure is important when students cannot intuit this information, one should expect that teachers can identify phonemes, graphemes, syllables, morphemes, basic parts of speech, sentence structures, and narrative or expository discourse organization. Unfortunately, levels of content knowledge about language are typically found to be very low.

With the revival of whole language ideas and practices over the last decade, explicit, systematic, code-based reading and spelling programs have fallen out of favor in many districts and classrooms. Instead, \"guided reading\" practices, broadly construed, are widespread. These approaches either de-emphasize or seriously neglect teaching of the alphabetic code and of language structure in general. Among the ideas and practices that accompany these approaches are \"sight word\" teaching practices that are not only ineffective, but that ignore what we know about language itself and about the cognitive-linguistic processes of word learning (Christensen & Bowey, 2005; Ehri, 2014; Kilpatrick, 2015; Moats, 2017, 2010; Seidenberg, 2017). In this article I briefly describe those whole word practices, explain why they are misguided, and urge that they be replaced with a multi-linguistic approach to teaching and learning. That is what will help students read \"by sight.\"

Phoneme-grapheme mapping is fundamental at any grade level, but is especially helpful with second- and third-grade students who have gaps in learning the basic code. Some suggested methods for teaching words with less common patterns or correspondences include: a) grouping words with some memorable similarity (two, twice, twenty, twilight, twin; one, only, once; their, heir; where, here, there); b) calling attention to the odd part of a word (friend; any); c) pronouncing the word the way it looks (was sounds like /w/ /a/ /s/ not /w/ /u/ /z/; d) using mnemonics (there is a rat in separate: the principal is my pal); and e) asking the learner to pay very close attention to the letter sequence by visualizing it and building it backwards and forwards with letter tiles before writing it. Louisa Moats, Ed.D., has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and author of many influential scientific journal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. Dr. Moats developed her current approach to teacher training, called LETRS, from her experiences as an instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, St. Michael's College in Vermont, the Dartmouth Medical School Department of Psychiatry, and the University of Texas, Houston.

Structured Literacy™ (SL) teaching is the most effective approach for students who experience unusual difficulty learning to read and spell printed words. The term refers to both the content and methods or principles of instruction. It means the same kind of instruction as the terms multisensory structured language education and structured language and literacy.Structured Literacy™ teaching stands in contrast with approaches that are popular in many schools but that do not teach oral and written language skills in an explicit, systematic manner. Evidence is strong that the majority of students learn to read better with structured teaching of basic language skills, and that the components and methods of Structured Literacy™ are critical for students with reading disabilities including dyslexia.

Recent consensus documents are reviewed to define research-based practices in early reading instruction. Examples of professional development that incorporates research-based practices are provided, with particular reference to the Texas Reading Initiative and the authors' research project in Houston and in Washington, DC. Data relating gains in teacher knowledge, ratings of teaching effectiveness, and student achievement are presented. Conditions essential to sustaining and scaling research-based reading instruction are discussed and major obstacles identified.

This article discusses prevalent reading instruction practices that may be the root cause of less than optimal results with Response to Intervention (RTI) implementations and that should be replaced with research-driven approaches in order for the framework to achieve its promise.

Reminder: A Lot Is Known about Reading Difficulties and How to Treat Them At the time of the National Reading Panel Report (NRP) (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), consensus had been reached in the research community about the essential components of instruction most closely associated with prevention of reading difficulty. Foundational reading skills are enumerated at the end of the English Language Arts section, instead of the beginning, implying that they are of secondary importance.\\n It requires acceptance of diversity in the student population and genuine responsiveness to the cognitive, language, and behavioral-genetic differences that students bring to schooling.