Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study investigates the extent to which students' use of different discussion strategies fosters a balance between attending to the technical elements of authored texts and responding empathetically. Because small‐group discussion is a common approach to literary study, the analysis focuses on two small‐group discussions of “Charlie Howard's Descent,” Mark Doty's poem about the murder of a young gay man by other young men in his community. The two discussions were parsed into episodes that were scored according to the extent that they displayed balance. Then, each student turn was analyzed in terms of the discussion strategies employed. The analysis suggests that the strategies of searching for meaning, contextualizing, and interpreting contribute to the most balanced readings. Noting author's craft can lead to overly technical readings, although it has the potential to be paired with other strategies to facilitate a more balanced discussion.

This teaching tip details one teacher's implementation of student‐led book talks in her primary‐grade classroom. The author describes a simple gradual‐release method that she has successfully used with her students in order to get them talking about the books that they are reading independently. She found that when used in the readers' workshop model, student‐led book talks not only help to create a vibrant reading community in which students discuss books and recommend them to one another but also help to develop students' oral language skills, which correlates well with the Common Core language arts standards for listening and speaking.

Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and attitudes.

This article explains how teachers can understand, notice, and supportively respond to readers who struggle with self‐monitoring during text reading. The unique strategic processing demands for readers who struggle support the argument that teaching children to find and notice errors is different than fixing a word, or getting it right. Three critical attributes of teaching for self‐monitoring based on the important works of Peter Johnston and Marie Clay are put forth: teacher observation and hypothesizing, noticing and naming, and teaching for strategic activity and agency. Teaching examples provide a frame for critical attributes to guide professional conversations around self‐monitoring.

Practitioners face many challenges when working with students who are experiencing difficulty with comprehension. The act of creating meaning with texts is complex, and comprehension is often measured in schools as a product of reading. Product assessments, such as answering questions or retelling a text, take place after reading, which makes it difficult to understand why and when a student may be experiencing difficulties. Using design-based research, the author examined the implementation of verbal protocols in classrooms as a formative assessment tool for comprehension. During this two-month study, three reading specialists drew on the landscape model of reading as a theoretical framework to better understand their students’ think-aloud statements. Findings indicated that reading specialists implemented verbal protocols as a formative assessment tool with diagnostic interpretation about their students’ reading difficulties and were able to use this information to effectively coach students on their reading processes.

The case of a 17‐year‐old deaf student serves as a means of identifying specific home and school supports that had facilitated robust language and literacy development across the life span. Data consist of observations of the student while reading and thinking aloud, as direct evidence of proficiency, as well as follow‐up student and parent interviews that elicited an insider perspective regarding factors that had contributed to successful development from early childhood to adolescence. The authors discuss the importance of early and consistent exposure to language via the signed and auditory modalities and early and ongoing exposure to literacy‐based activities and explicit instruction in both home and school settings. The findings support several practices that can help ensure successful language and literacy development for deaf or hard of hearing students.

It has been more than 35 years since Pearson and Gallagher's landmark study on the gradual release of responsibility. How has this instructional practice endured the test of time? In this article, the authors revisit the history of the gradual release of responsibility, explore current practices and challenges for educators, and provide implications for contemporary classrooms.

Poor reading comprehension may be due to having ineffective comprehension monitoring, the metacognitive process of evaluating and regulating comprehension. When comprehension breaks down due to an inconsistency either at the word-level (e.g., due to an unfamiliar word) or at the sentence-level (e.g., due to contradictory information), readers may identify the misunderstanding and take steps to regulate their comprehension. In the current study, we utilized two eye-movement tasks (one newly developed) to examine comprehension monitoring in third through fifth grade students (n = 123), when confronted with word- and sentence-level inconsistencies, by measuring the amount of time they read (gaze duration) and reread the target inconsistent words. We investigated how this skill may be associated with individual differences in age, reading comprehension ability, and vocabulary knowledge. The results showed that generally, all students detected the word-level inconsistencies, indicated by longer gaze durations, and attempted to regulate their comprehension after detecting both word- and sentence-level inconsistencies, as indicated by more time spent rereading. Students with stronger reading comprehension (when controlling for their vocabulary), and stronger vocabulary knowledge (when controlling for their reading comprehension) were more likely to attempt regulating their comprehension. In general, the difference between the control words and the inconsistent words was smaller for third graders and larger for fourth and fifth graders, which we argue indicates greater levels of comprehension monitoring—specifically employing repair strategies. With eye-tracking technology becoming more accessible, these tasks may be useful in assessing children’s reading processes to better understand at which level of comprehension monitoring they may be struggling, which in return will allow us to develop more individualized instruction for all readers.

This study examined the efficacy of a supplemental, multicomponent adolescent reading intervention for middle school students who scored below proficient on a state literacy assessment. Using a within-school experimental design, the authors randomly assigned 483 students in grades 6-8 to a business-as-usual control condition or to the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention (STARI), a supplemental reading program involving instruction to support word-reading skills, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, and peer talk to promote reading engagement and comprehension. The authors assessed behavioral engagement by measuring how much of the STARI curricular activities students completed during an academic school year, and collected intervention teachers' ratings of their students' reading engagement. STARI students outperformed control students on measures of word recognition (Cohen's d = 0.20), efficiency of basic reading comprehension (Cohen's d = 0.21), and morphological awareness (Cohen's d = 0.18). Reading engagement in its behavioral form, as measured by students' participation and involvement in the STARI curriculum, mediated the treatment effects on each of these three posttest outcomes. Intervention teachers' ratings of their students' emotional and cognitive engagement explained unique variance on reading posttests. Findings from this study support the hypothesis that (a) behavioral engagement fosters struggling adolescents' reading growth, and (b) teachers' perceptions of their students' emotional and cognitive engagement further contribute to reading competence.

With the pressures put on teachers today to meet standards, cover a dense curriculum, and be involved in numerous meetings, taking the time to reflect on instruction may be pushed aside. The authors examined the importance of reflection and its impact on teaching and learning. Reflection allows teachers to evaluate subjective and objective criteria that help them respond and make modifications to lessons. Many teachers engage in reflection intuitively. The authors describe how one teacher fully engages in the reflective process through the use of the reflective SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, plan) strategy. In an era of accountability, SOAP notes help document instruction and student learning, thus benefiting educators and students. The SOAP notes model can be applied to any content area across all grade bands. One must consider the question of how teachers can fully engage in reflection to improve instruction and meet the learning needs of their students.