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Authentic Literacy Activities for Developing Comprehension and Writing

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Authentic Literacy Activities for Developing Comprehension and Writing

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This article defines what exactly authentic literacy comprehension is, and provides many examples of instructional strategies and lessons that teachers can use across disciplines to ensure that students are truly comprehending and learning in the classroom. The instructional strategies for both reading and writing mentioned in the article are for a wide range of genres including informational texts and procedural texts. There are also example activities and lessons from a science classroom that can help teachers to visualize the instruction and spark their creativity, which is extremely helpful.

Duke, N. K., Purcell‐Gates, V., Hall, L. A., & Tower, C. (2006). Authentic literacy activities for developing comprehension and writing. The Reading Teacher, 60(4), 344-355.

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Developing Deaf Children's Reading and Writing Skills in Primary School

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Developing Deaf Children's Reading and Writing Skills in Primary School

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I thought that this guide was a useful resource to include in this toolbox, as it can be a resource that teachers can use when working with parents of Deaf children. This guide is a really accessible and informative for parents, and might help schools, teachers and parents to develop family-school partnerships in order to promote reading comprehension in the Microsystems of both school and home. I think this is especially important for hearing parents of Deaf children who might not know how to approach literacy with their child and even teachers who might feel lost when trying to help both students and parents.

Developing deaf children's reading and writing skills in primary school. (n.d.). Retrieved June 22, 2017, from http://www.ndcs.org.uk/family_support/education_for_deaf_children/education_during_school_years/developing_reading.html

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Free guides to download

There are many simple things you can do to develop language and literacy (reading and writing) skills in children with a hearing loss or glue ear during primary school. NDCS has produced guides called 'Helping your deaf child to develop language, read and write', with versions for 5-7 year olds and 8-11 year olds. They will give you ideas of how to build up language and reading and writing skills through everyday play and activities.
The guide gives tips about:

Challenges deaf children face when learning language and reading and how to overcome them at home.

How to help deaf children learn to read, with information about the sound of language, letters and sounds, high frequency and tricky words.

Reading books with your child.

Helping your child with writing - including the challenges deaf children might face when learning to write and how to overcome them.

Encouraging writing skills by helping with spelling, prefixes and suffixes, sentence structure and grammar, and content.

Activities and games to develop reading and writing skills.

Top The guide gives tips about:

The challenges deaf children face when learning language and how to overcome them at home.

Choosing reading materials.

Encouraging children to read at home and making it an enjoyable experience.

Finding factual information for your child to read, such as leaflets and brochures.

Challenges deaf children face with writing and how to help.

How to help with different types of writing, such as stories and letters.

Developing interesting language.

Technical skills for writing, such as verb tenses, paragraphs and handwriting.

Activities and games to develop reading and writing skills.

Top
"I found this book easy to follow and I liked the fun activities, including the lotto game. " - Nicky Hancock, Scotland

If you're not already an NDCS member, you'll need to sign up for free to access the guides on this page. NDCS members also have free access to a range of information resources, support services, and events.

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Developing deaf children's reading and writing skills in primary school

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There are many simple things you can do to develop language and literacy (reading and writing) skills in children with a hearing loss or glue ear during primary school. NDCS has produced guides called 'Helping your deaf child to develop language, read and write', with versions for 5-7 year olds and 8-11 year olds.

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Deaf Cognition: Foundations and Outcomes

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Deaf Cognition: Foundations and Outcomes

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This book contains a compilation of entries from scholars and leaders in field of Deaf Education all related to Deaf Cognition. The chapters each focus on a different subtopic of Deaf Cognition but are all related to how the Deaf population develops cognitively, and learns and comprehends. Chapter 12 specifically, which is titled "Language Comprehension and Learning by Deaf Students," explores in depth the way in which Deaf students learn in the classroom and provides theoretical underpinnings for their learning which are extremely important for teachers of the Deaf to understand.

Marschark, M., & Hauser, P. C. (Eds.). (2008). Deaf cognition: Foundations and outcomes. Oxford University Press.

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Assessment Tools for Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

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Assessment Tools for Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

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This document contains a lengthy list of many different assessments that can be used to evaluate Deaf and hard of hearing students' language and literacy skills. From writing, to vocabulary, to social language, this list could be extremely useful for teachers to have as a resource to refer to when working with students and trying to assess them in the classroom.

Tanner, M. Assessment Tools for Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

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Assessment Tools for Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

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What Teachers Can Learn about Reading Motivation through Conversations with Children

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What Teachers Can Learn about Reading Motivation through Conversations with Children

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This article is a worthwhile read for teachers, as it includes an often forgotten, or left behind, perspective when it comes to motivation to read: the student! In this article, teachers asked students directly what motivates them to read, and how to make reading more meaningful for them. These perspectives seem widely held among many students, and reading this article may help teachers to rethink their approaches to literacy instruction to better account for students' needs in the classroom.

Edmunds, K. M., & Bauserman, K. L. (2006). What teachers can learn about reading motivation through conversations with children. The Reading Teacher, 59(5), 414-424.

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Deaf Children's Approaches to Spelling- Difficulties, Strategies, and Teaching Techniques

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Deaf Children's Approaches to Spelling- Difficulties, Strategies, and Teaching Techniques

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The key takeaway that I got from this article was that there are some patterns of mistakes that Deaf children tend to make when spelling. The results of this research demonstrate that and using fingerspelling is a key strategy that good Deaf readers use to decode English print. This once again reaffirms that fingerspelling has an important place in the classroom and as a result, the researchers offer some recommendations for how to better incorporate fingerspelling into the classroom.

Wakefield, P. (2006). Deaf Children's Approaches to Spelling—Difficulties, Strategies and Teaching Techniques. Deafness & Education International, 8(4), 174-189.

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Modeling Reading Vocabulary Learning in Deaf Children in Bilingual Education Programs

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Modeling Reading Vocabulary Learning in Deaf Children in Bilingual Education Programs

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This article presents a new model related to Deaf students' vocabulary learning in which takes a model related to bilinguals' vocabulary learning and make its more Deaf friendly. It recognizes Deaf students as Bilingual Learners and the need for proficiency in L1 before L2. Although the study took place in the Netherlands, this model is still useful to consider and highly applicable in bilingual classrooms.

Hermans, D., Knoors, H., Ormel, E., & Verhoeven, L. (2007). Modeling reading vocabulary learning in deaf children in bilingual education programs. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, enm057.

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When I first started looking for resources related to assessment, I was thinking big picture and of huge assessments. However, assessing students' progress daily in the classroom is just as important as assessing performance on a big unit exam. These are 20 ways that teachers can assess students in the classroom without disrupting instruction during the natural flow of the school day such as posing open ended questions, think-pair-shares, writing, exit tickets etc.

20 Simple Assessment Strategies You Can Use Every Day. (2017). Retrieved June 22, 2017, from http://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/assessment/20-simple-assessment-strategies-can-use-every-day/

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20 Simple Assessment Strategies You Can Use Every Day
contributed by Saga Briggs

The ultimate goal of teaching is understanding.

But sometimes it's easier to talk than to teach, as we all know, especially when we need to cover a lot of material in a short amount of time. We hope students will understand, if not now then before test time, and we keep our fingers crossed that their results will indicate we've done our job.

The problem is, we often rely on these tests to measure understanding and then we move on. There isn't always time to address weaknesses and misunderstandings after the tests have been graded, and the time to help students learn through strategies to ask great questions is gone.

Below are 22 simple assessment strategies and tips to help you become more frequent in your teaching, planning, and curriculum design.

Book TeachThought Professional Development for training on assessment practices that grow teachers
22 Simple Assessment Strategies & Tips You Can Use Every Day 1. An open-ended question that gets them writing/talking
Avoid yes/no questions and phrases like "Does this make sense?" In response to these questions, students usually answer 'yes.' So, of course, it's surprising when several students later admit that they're lost.

To help students grasp ideas in class, ask open-ended questions that require students that get students writing/talking. They will undoubtedly reveal more than you would've thought to ask directly.
2. Ask students to reflect
During the last five minutes of class ask students to reflect on the lesson and write down what they've learned. Then, ask them to consider how they would apply this concept or skill in a practical setting.
3. Use quizzes
Give a short quiz at the end of class to check for comprehension.
4. Ask students to summarize
Have students summarize or paraphrase important concepts and lessons. This can be done orally, visually, or otherwise.
5. Hand signals
Hand signals can be used to rate or indicate students' understanding of content. Students can show anywhere from five fingers to signal maximum understanding to one finger to signal minimal understanding. This strategy requires engagement by all students and allows the teacher to check for understanding within a large group.
6. Response cards
Index cards, signs, whiteboards, magnetic boards, or other items are simultaneously held up by all students in class to indicate their response to a question or problem presented by the teacher. Using response devices, the teacher can easily note the responses of individual students while teaching the whole group.
7. Four corners
A quick and easy snapshot of student understanding, Four Corners provides an opportunity for student movement while permitting the teacher to monitor and assess understanding.

The teacher poses a question or makes a statement. Students then move to the appropriate corner of the classroom to indicate their response to the prompt. For example, the corner choices might include "I strongly agree," "I strongly disagree," "I agree somewhat," and "I'm not sure."
8. Think-pair-share
Students take a few minutes to think about the question or prompt. Next, they pair with a designated partner to compare thoughts before sharing with the whole class.
9. Choral reading
Students mark text to identify a particular concept and chime in, reading the marked text aloud in unison with the teacher. This strategy helps students develop fluency; differentiate between the reading of statements and questions; and practice phrasing, pacing, and reading dialogue.
10. One question quiz
Ask a single focused question with a specific goal that can be answered within a minute or two. You can quickly scan the written responses to assess student understanding.
11. Socratic seminar
Students ask questions of one another about an essential question, topic, or selected text. The questions initiate a conversation that continues with a series of responses and additional questions. Students learn to formulate questions that address issues to facilitate their own discussion and arrive at a new understanding.
12. 3-2-1
Students consider what they have learned by responding to the following prompt at the end of the lesson: 3) things they learned from your lesson; 2) things they want to know more about; and 1) questions they have. The prompt stimulates student reflection on the lesson and helps to process the learning.
13. Ticket out the door
Students write in response to a specific prompt for a short period of time. Teachers collect their responses as a "ticket out the door" to check for students' understanding of a concept taught. This exercise quickly generates multiple ideas that could be turned into longer pieces of writing at a later time.
14. Journal reflections
Students write their reflections on a lesson, such as what they learned, what caused them difficulty, strategies they found helpful, or other lesson-related topics. Students can reflect on and process lessons. By reading student work-especially - types of learning journals that help students think- teachers can identify class and individual misconceptions and successes. (See also
15. Formative pencil-paper assessment
Students respond individually to short, pencil-paper formative assessments of skills and knowledge taught in the lesson. Teachers may elect to have students self-correct. The teacher collects assessment results to monitor individual student progress and to inform future instruction.

Both student and teacher can quickly assess whether the student acquired the intended knowledge and skills. This is a formative assessment, so a grade is not the intended purpose.
16. Misconception check
Present students with common or predictable misconceptions about a concept you're covering. Ask them whether they agree or disagree and to explain why.
17. Analogy prompt
Teaching with analogies can be powerful. Periodically, present students with an analogy prompt: "the concept being covered is like ____ because ____."
18. Practice frequency
Check for understanding at least three times a lesson, minimum.
19. Use variety
Teachers should use enough different individual and whole group techniques to check understanding that they accurately know what all students know. More than likely, this means during a single class the same technique should not be repeated.
20. Make it useful
The true test is whether or not you can adjust your course or continue as planned based on the information received in each check. Do you need to stop and start over? Pull a few students aside for three minutes to re-teach? Or move on?
21. Peer instruction
Perhaps the most accurate way to check for understanding is to have one student try to teach another student what she's learned . If she can do that successfully, it's clear she understood your lesson.
22. "Separate what you do and don't understand"
Whether making a t-chart, drawing a concept map, or using some other means, have the students not simply list what they think they know, but what they don't know as well. This won't be as simple as it sounds-we're usually not aware of what we don't know.

They'll also often know more or less than they can identify themselves, which makes this strategy a bit crude. But that's okay-the goal isn't for them to be precise and complete in their self-evaluation the goal is for you to gain insight as to what they do and don't know.

And seeing what they can even begin to articulate on their own is an excellent starting point here.
This post was written by Saga Briggins and was first publish by on opencolleges.edu.au; 20 Simple Assessment Strategies You Can Use Every Day

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20 Simple Assessment Strategies You Can Use Every Day

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20 Simple Assessment Strategies You Can Use Every Day contributed by Saga Briggs The ultimate goal of teaching is understanding. But sometimes it's easier to talk than to teach, as we all know, especially when we need to cover a lot of material in a short amount of time.

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This is a wonderful article that suggests that there are  "Seven Rules of Engagement" when it comes to motivation and reading. Teachers can use these rules of engagement to design literacy instruction and classroom instruction in general that is meaningful, engaging and diverse.

Gambrell, L. B. (2011). Seven rules of engagement: What's most important to know about motivation to read. The Reading Teacher, 65(3), 172-178.

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7 Rules of Engagement--Whats Most Important to Know about Motivation to Read Gambrell 2011

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Teacher Practices that Impact Reading Motivation

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Teacher Practices that Impact Reading Motivation

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This website is a great resource to help teachers not only motivate reading in the classroom, but understand the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how to foster intrinsic motivation in the classroom. This website suggests that Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction is an effective way to foster intrinsic motivation, specifically, in the classroom.

McRae, A., & Guthrie, J.T. (2009). Promoting reasons for reading: Teacher practices that impact motivation. In E. H. Hiebert (Ed.), Reading more, reading better (pp. 55-76). New York: Guilford Press.

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Almasi, J. F. (1995). The nature of fourth graders' sociocognitive conflicts in peer-led and teacher-led discussions of literature. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 314-351.

Antonio, D. & Guthrie, J. T. (2008). Reading is social: Bringing peer interaction to the text. In J. T. Guthrie (Ed.), Engaging Adolescents in Reading (pp. 49-63). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Applebee, A. N., Langer, J. A., Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (2003). Discussion-based approaches to developing understanding: Classroom instruction and student performance in middle and high school English. American Educational Research Journal, 40, 685-730.

Assor, A., Kaplan, H., Kanat-Maymon, Y., & Roth, G. (2005). Directly controlling teacher behaviors as predictors of poor motivation and engagement in girls and boys: The role of anger and anxiety. Learning and Instruction, 15, 397-413.

Assor, A., Kaplan, H., & Roth, G. (2002). Choice is good, but relevance is excellent: Autonomy-enhancing and suppressing teacher behaviours predicting students' engagement in schoolwork. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 72, 261-278.

Barbosa, P. & Alexander, L. (2004). Science inquiry in the CORI framework. In J. T. Guthrie, A. Wigfield, & K. C. Perencevich (Eds.), Motivating Reading Comprehension: Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (pp.113-141). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chapman, J. W., & Tunmer, W. E. (1995). Development of young children's reading self-concepts: An examination of emerging subcomponents and their relationship with reading achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, 154-167.

Chinn, C. A., Anderson, R. C., & Waggoner, M. A. (2001). Patterns of discourse in two kinds of literature discussion. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 378-412.

Clark, A., Anderson, R. C., Kuo, L., Kim, I., Archodidou, A., & Nguyen-Jahiel, K. (2003). Collaborative reasoning: Expanding ways for children to talk and think in school. Educational Psychology Review, 15, 181-198.

Coddington, C. S., & Guthrie, J. T. (in press). Teacher and student perceptions of boys' and girls' reading motivation. Reading Psychology.

Dill, E. M., & Boykin, A.W. (2000). The comparative influence of individual, peer tutoring, and communal learning contexts on the text recall of African American children. Journal of Black Psychology, 26, 65-78.

Flowerday, T., & Schraw, G. (2000). Teacher beliefs about instructional choice: A phenomenological study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 634-645.

Grolnick, W. S., & Ryan, R. M. (1987). Autonomy in children's learning: An experimental and individual difference investigation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 890-898.

Guthrie, J. T. (Ed.). (2008). Engaging adolescents in reading. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Guthrie, J. T., & Coddington, C. S. (2009). Reading motivation. In K. Wentzel & A. Wigfield (Eds.), Handbook of Motivation at School (pp. 503-525). New York: Routledge.

Guthrie, J. T., Hoa, L. W., Wigfield, A., Tonks, S. M., Humenick, N. M., & Littles, E. (2007). Reading motivation and reading comprehension growth in the later elementary years. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32, 282-313.

Guthrie, J. T., & Humenick, N. M. (2004). Motivating students to read: Evidence for classroom practices that increase reading motivation and achievement. In P. McCardle & V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research (pp. 329-354). Baltimore: Brookes Publishing.

Guthrie, J. T., McRae, A., & Klauda, S. L. (2007). Contributions of Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction to knowledge about interventions for motivations in reading. Educational Psychologist, 42, 237-250.

Guthrie, J. T., Rueda, R. S., Gambrell, L. B. & Morrison, D. A. (in press). Roles of engagement, valuing and identification in reading development of students from diverse backgrounds In Morrow, L., & Rueda, R. S. (Eds.). Handbook of Reading and Literacy Among Students from Diverse Backgrounds. New York: Guilford Press.

Guthrie, J. T., Wigfield, A., Barbosa, P., Perencevich, K. C., Taboada, A., Davis, M. H., Scafiddi, N. T., & Tonks, S. (2004). Increasing reading comprehension and engagement through Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 403-423.

Guthrie, J. T., Wigfield, A., Humenick, N. M., Perencevich, K. C., Taboada, A., & Barbosa, P. (2006). Influences of stimulating tasks on reading motivation and comprehension. Journal of Educational Research, 99, 232-245.

Linnenbrink, E. A., & Pintrich, P. R. (2003). The role of self-efficacy beliefs in student engagement and learning in the classroom. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 19, 119-137.

Meece, J. L., Anderman, E. M., & Anderman, L. H. (2006). Classroom goal structure, student motivation, and academic achievement. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 487-503.

Meece, J. L., & Miller, S. D. (1999). Changes in elementary school children's achievement goals for reading and writing: Results of a longitudinal and an intervention study. Scientific Studies of Reading, 3, 207-229.

Miller, S. D., & Meece, J. L. (1999). Third graders' motivational preferences for reading and writing tasks. The Elementary School Journal, 100, 19-35.

Nussbaum, A. D., & Steele, C. M. (2007). Situational disengagement and persistence in the face of adversity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 127-134.

Oldfather, P. (2002). Students' experiences when not initially motivated for literacy learning. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 18, 231-256.

Osborne, J. W. (1997). Race and academic disidentification. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 728-735.

Otis, N., Frederick, M. E. G., & Pelletier, L. G. (2005). Latent motivational change in an academic setting: A 3-year longitudinal study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 170-183.

Patrick, H., Anderman, L. H., Ryan, A. M., Edelin, K. C., & Midgley, C. (2001). Teachers' communication of goal orientations in four fifth-grade classrooms. The Elementary School Journal, 102, 35-58.

Pintrich, P. R. (2000). Multiple goals, multiple pathways: the role of goal orientation in learning and achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 544-555.

Pintrich, P. R., & De Groot, E. V. (1990). Motivational and self-regulated learning components of classroom academic performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 33-40.

Reeve, J., & Jang, H. (2006). What teachers say and do to support students' autonomy during a learning activity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 209-218.

Reynolds, P. L., & Symons, S. (2001). Motivational variables and children's text search. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 14-23.

Ryan, R. M., & Connell, J. P. (1989). Perceived locus of causality and internalization: Examining reasons for acting in two domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 749-761.

Taylor, A. Z., & Graham, S. (2007). An examination of the relationship between achievement values and perceptions of barriers among low-SES African American and Latino students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99, 52-64.

Schiefele, U. (1999). Interest and learning from text. Scientific Studies of Reading, 3, 257-279.

Seifert, T. L., & O'Keefe, B. A. (2001). The relationship of work avoidance and learning goals to perceived competence, externality and meaning. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 81-92.

Schunk, D. H. (2003). Self-efficacy for reading and writing: Influence of modeling, goal setting, and self-evaluation. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 19, 159-172.

Sikorski, M. P. (2004). Inside Mrs. O'Hara's classroom. In J. T. Guthrie, A. Wigfield, & K. C. Perencevich (Eds.), Motivating Reading Comprehension: Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (pp.195-223). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Skinner, E. A., Wellborn, J. G., & Connell, J. P. (1990). What it takes to do well in school and whether I've got it: A process model of perceived control and children's engagement and achievement in school. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 22-32.

Unrau, N., & Schlackman, J. (2006). Motivation and its relationship with reading achievement in an urban middle school. The Journal of Educational Research, 100, 81-101.

Vansteenkiste, M., Lens, W., & Deci, E. L. (2006). Intrinsic versus extrinsic goal contents in self-determination theory: Another look at the quality of academic motivation. Educational Psychologist, 41, 19-31.

Voelkl, K. E. (1997). Identification with school. American Journal of Education, 105, 294-318.

Webb, N. M., & Farivar, S. (1994). Promoting helping behavior in cooperative small groups in middle school mathematics. American educational Research Journal, 31, 369-395.

Wentzel, K. R. (2005). Peer relationships, motivation, and academic performance at school. In A. J. Elliot & C. S. Dweck (Eds.), Handbook of Competence and Motivation (pp. 279-296). New York: Guilford Press.

Wigfield, A. & Eccles, J. S. (Eds.). (2002). Development of achievement motivation. San Diego: Academic Press.

Wigfield, A. & Guthrie, J. T. (1997). Relations of children's motivation for reading to the amount and breadth of their reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 420-432.

Wigfield, A., Guthrie, J. T., Tonks, S., & Perencevich, K. C. (2004). Children's motivation for reading: Domain specificity and instructional influences. The Journal of Educational Research, 97, 299-309.

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Teacher Practices that Impact Reading Motivation

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Using Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) or practices to encourage engagement, educators can advance the breadth and depth of students' reading by explicitly and systematically nourishing students' motivations as readers.

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Does Early Reading Failure Decrease Children's Reading Motivation?

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Does Early Reading Failure Decrease Children's Reading Motivation?

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In this article, Morgan et. al studied how early reading failure impacts children's motivation to read and found a marked correlation between the motivation levels of skilled and unskilled readers. These findings are important for teachers to consider, and suggest that teachers need to work to find new and exciting ways to motivate and engage students who may struggle to read and have negative self-concepts when it comes to reading, in order to increase their self-confidence and reverse students' deficit thinking.

Morgan, P. L., Fuchs, D., Compton, D. L., Cordray, D. S., & Fuchs, L. S. (2008). Does early reading failure decrease children's reading motivation?. Journal of learning disabilities, 41(5), 387-404.

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When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations?

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When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations?

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Findings of this article suggests that Deaf students do, in fact, activate signed translations of written English to help them to comprehend text and parse out the meaning of various English texts. This is important for teachers to understand, and may inform the signs they choose to use in the classroom and the ways in which they approach teaching English literacy.

Morford, J. P., Wilkinson, E., Villwock, A., Piñar, P., & Kroll, J. F. (2011). When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations?. Cognition, 118(2), 286-292.

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25 Reading Strategies That Work in Every Content Area

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25 Reading Strategies That Work in Every Content Area

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I personally love the diverse reading strategies that are in the article to promote comprehension in the classroom, as they seem to appeal to all types of learners. There is a reading strategies and instructional tool for almost every type of student in the classroom, and teachers can easily pull from this list based on the content, what students' are reading, and what students need in the classroom.

25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area. (2017). Retrieved June 22, 2017, from http://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/literacy/25-reading-strategies-that-work-in-every-content-area/

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by TeachThought Staff

Reading is simply a sequence of symbol interpretation.

By understanding that letters make sounds, we can blend those sounds together to make whole sounds that symbolize meaning we can all exchange with one another. By mastering the symbols and their most common contexts, reading becomes a practice in thought-less about decoding and more about understanding.

Without getting too Platonic about it all, reading doesn't change simply because you're reading a text from another content area. Only sometimes it does.

Science content can often by full of jargon, research citations, and odd text features.

Social Studies content can be an interesting mix of itemized information, and traditional paragraphs/imagery.

Literature? Well, that depends on if you mean the flexible form of poetry, the enduring structure of a novel, or emerging digital literature that combines multiple modalities to tell a story.

This all makes reading strategies somewhat content area specific. Stopping (maybe the most undervalued strategy ever) and Rereading might make more sense in science, while Visualization and Text Connections may make more sense reading literary works. Questioning the Text may make equal sense in both.

But if you'd like to start with a basic set of strategies, you could do worse than the elegant graphic above from wiki-teacher.com. (Useful site, by the way.) It lists 12 basic reading comprehension strategies, to which we've added 13 for a full 25.

Looking for related curricula ideas? Check out our Reading Comprehension Strategy Resources
25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area
1. Reread

2. Activate Prior Knowledge

3. Use Context Clues

4. Infer

5. Think Aloud

6. Summarize

7. Locate Key Words

8. Make Predictions

9. Use Word Attack Strategies

10. Visualize

11. Use Graphic Organizers

12. Evaluate Understanding

See also 7 Strategies For Using Context Clues In Reading
To the above list, we'd add:
13. Question the Text

14. Stop!

15. Monitor & Repair Understanding (While Reading)

16. Paraphrase

17. Annotate the Text

18. Adjust Reading Rate

19. Prioritize Information

20. Use Graphic Notetaking

21. Predict

22. Set a Reader Purpose

23. Text-connections (text-to-self, text-to-text, text-to-world)

24. Skim

25. SSQ (Stop, Summarize, Question)

We'll gather these and put them in a Before Reading, During Reading, and After Reading matrix soon. Only because we like you.

See Also: 25 Self-Guided Reading Responses For Fiction And Non-Fiction
25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area

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25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area

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Reading strategies useful in every content area include Questioning the text, Visualization, and using Context Clues to infer meaning.

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A Summary of the Vocabulary Research with Students Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

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A Summary of the Vocabulary Research with Students Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

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This meta-analysis of vocabulary research with Deaf and Hard of Hearing students was conducted in 2010, and the results are extremely useful for teachers to consider. The article provides some background on development of vocabulary and offers instructional strategies based on the research findings for how to promote the vocabulary development of Deaf and Hard of Hearing students in the classroom.

Luckner, J. L., & Cooke, C. (2010). A summary of the vocabulary research with students who are deaf or hard of hearing. American Annals of the Deaf, 155(1), 38-67.

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The Metalinguistics of Fingerspelling: An Alternative Way to Increase Reading Vocabulary in Deaf Readers

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The Metalinguistics of Fingerspelling: An Alternative Way to Increase Reading Vocabulary in Deaf Readers

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Although this is an older article, the findings are critical for teachers to understand, specifically hearing teachers who often use fingerspelling in the classroom significantly less often than teachers who are Deaf. Fingerspelling does, in fact, play a large role in the development of students' vocabulary.

Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy. "The metalinguistics of fingerspelling: An alternate way to increase reading vocabulary in congenitally deaf readers." Reading Research Quarterly (1987): 455-474.

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10 Ways to Use Technology to Build Vocabulary

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10 Ways to Use Technology to Build Vocabulary

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Technology is now an ever present part of schooling. It's hard to avoid, and is often thought to be a distraction to students' learning. However, in this article, teachers are provided with 10 different ways through which they can use technology to specifically build students' vocabulary lexicon. Some of these strategies are especially appealing for teaching Deaf students, such as making visuals for vocabulary like semantic maps. In addition, the article states that using technology in the classroom can also serve as an immediate reference for students, as teachers can link definitions to text being used, and students can search any vocabulary terms they may come across in the classroom and might not know. The ideas in this article are great, and worth implementing.

10 Ways to Use Technology to Build Vocabulary. (2016, December 08). Retrieved June 22, 2017, from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/10-ways-use-technology-build-vocabulary

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An eVoc strategy is an electronic or technology-based strategy that teachers can use to develop students' vocabulary learning and interest in words. We use the term eVoc both to highlight that the strategies rely on digital tools and resources and to suggest the evoking of learning potential that is possible when technology and media are part of the instructional mix.

As literacy educators, we need to use the tools that 21st-century technologies afford us (International Reading Association, 2009). Nearly 100% of schools in the United States have Internet access (Wells & Lewis, 2006). In 2010, we can assume that access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) will continue to improve with the increased availability of inexpensive mobile devices and the U.S. Department of Education's inclusion of technology in education reform (National Education Technology Plan, 2010).

Although the pervasiveness of ICTs in all aspects of 21st-century life is quite clear and well accepted, it is less clear how teachers might successfully integrate technology into literacy instruction and specifically vocabulary instruction. Improving students' vocabulary is an area of urgent need if we are to develop the advanced literacy levels required for success in school and beyond (Biancarosa & Snow, 2006; Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2008). Vocabulary is also an area where teachers are asking for guidance on instructional approaches, strategies, and materials (Berne & Blachowicz, 2008). We believe that digital tools and media are available in most schools that teachers could harness now to improve vocabulary learning, tools that capture the interest of students and that provide scaffolds and contexts in which to learn with, and about, words more profitably.

The purpose of this article is to highlight 10 eVoc strategies that hold promise for improving vocabulary learning in intermediate grades and that employ digital tools and resources that are readily available and feasible to implement in today's schools. Given the fast pace of technology innovation, not all of these eVoc strategies have direct research evidence; however, they are all supported by research on effective vocabulary instruction, much of it carried out with print materials (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000; Pearson, Hiebert, & Kamil, 2007), and multimedia learning (Fadel & Lemke, 2008; Mayer, 2001).

We encourage teachers to select one or more of these eVoc strategies to try out and adapt to their particular students, curricula, and teaching context. We hope that they share their successes and limitations with their colleagues and with the broader literacy community on the Internet. In the following sections, we first summarize research on vocabulary learning and then present 10 eVoc strategies organized by three principles of vocabulary instruction applied in a digital context. Across all three areas, the role of interest and engagement with words and word learning is addressed.

What does research tell us about vocabulary learning?

Even within our increasingly visual world (Kress, 2003), words remain our pr imar y means of communicat ion. The Nat ional Reading Panel Report (NICHD, 2000) and the RAND Reading Study Group (2002) heightened the importance of vocabulary instruction for student literacy learning. Books and articles on vocabulary instruction are popular (e.g., Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2008; Blachowicz & Obrochta, 2005; Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2008), and research on vocabulary is enjoying renewed attention.

Why is vocabulary learning so important? To understand a text, one must understand the words that represent the ideas or concepts. Studies confirm the high correlation (0.6 to 0.8) between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (Baumann & Kame'enui, 2004; Pearson et al., 2007). We also know that there are degrees of word knowledge, from "I've never heard this word before," to "I know this word and can apply it in multiple contexts" (Lubliner & Scott, 2008), as well as metacognitive knowledge about how to apply prior knowledge and strategies to vocabulary learning (Beck et al., 2008).

Of particular concern to educators is the development of academic language. Although we learn oral language that enables us to speak to one another fairly easily, learning academic language is more complex because it involves abstract literacy tasks and language not customarily used in oral speech (Fang, Schleppegrell, & Cox, 2006; Zwiers, 2007). Academic language is a second language, because all literate people must learn it to enable them to access academic content (Solomon & Rhodes, 1995).

For English learners (ELs), academic language may represent the task of learning a third language. Thus, special care must be taken to give them every advantage in learning academic language, particularly in content areas. For example, research suggests that Spanish-speaking students can be taught to recognize cognates (i.e., words with similar meanings that look and sound alike in two languages, such as operation [English] and operación [Spanish]) and use cognate information to comprehend English texts (Lubliner & Grisham, in press; Proctor, Dalton, & Grisham, 2007).

We know that there is a wide range in students' word knowledge and that as early as age 5, there is a 30-million-word exposure gap between "haves" and "have nots" (Hart & Risley, 1995). The results of this gap are manifested in students' literacy learning, particularly reading comprehension. The Matthew Effect, where strong readers get stronger and weak readers get weaker (Stanovich, 1986), as well as the fourth-grade reading slump (Chall & Jacobs, 2003), can be attributed, at least in part, to a less developed store of conceptual knowledge and vocabulary.

The good news is that we can improve vocabulary learning and address the gap by actively and systematically teaching vocabulary to our students (Pearson et al., 2007; Zwier s, 2007). Teaching words, morphology, and word origins is an important component in any vocabulary learning program. It is also necessary to provide multiple exposures to the word in different contexts and to teach word learning strategies, such as using context clues, cognate information, and deciding when a word is important to know and remember. Although teaching can make a real difference in vocabulary learning, explicit teaching of vocabulary is not enough; a dedicated teacher can teach perhaps 300-400 words per year (Beck et al., 2008).

Direct vocabulary instruction is essential, but research indicates that students with well-developed vocabulary learn many more words indirectly through reading than from instruction (Cunningham & Stanovich, 2001; Nagy & Herman, 1985). Two strategies that encourage children to read widely and deeply are to provide an array of reading materials that capitalize on their interests and to set aside time for reading during the school day and at home (Trelease, 2006). Conversations about their reading with adults and peers also strengthen students' word learning (Biemiller & Boote, 2006).

Whether directly teaching vocabulary and word learning strategies, or increasing students' volume of reading, an important research-based principle that applies across the board is to promote a lively interest in words through student expression and participation in a learning community that enjoys playing with words, builds on individual interests as well as curriculum needs, and emphasizes self-efficacy in word learning (Beck et al., 2008; Graves & Watts- Taffe, 2008).

These recommendations to improve vocabulary by encouraging wide reading, teaching words and word learning strategies, and promoting active learning and interest in words are not new. The purpose of this article is to encourage teachers to apply these research-based recommendations in new ways, using digital tools, media, and the Internet-that is, to deploy technology in service of vocabulary learning.

Despite the ubiquity of technology and media, it is not on teachers' priority lists of vocabulary instruction strategies and materials (Berne & Blachowicz, 2008). We address this gap by offering 10 eVoc strategies organized into three instructional areas. First, we offer strategies for teaching words and word learning strategies. Second, we focus on on-demand digital language tools to support just-in-time strategic vocabulary learning and reading. Third, we suggest ways to increase the volume of reading to support students' incidental vocabulary learning. Along the way, we offer ways to stimulate students' interest in words and self-efficacy. Technology, when used flexibly in response to students' varied needs and interests, can and should be part of the solution to the vocabulary gap.

Teaching and learning vocabulary

The first five eVoc strategies focus on explicit teaching of vocabulary and helping students become independent word learners.

eVoc strategy 1: Learn from visual displays of word relationships within text

Developing breadth and depth of vocabulary depends on building connections between words and developing elaborate webs of meaning (Boulware- Gooden, Carreker, Thornhill, & Joshi, 2007). Graphic organizers and visual displays highlight the relationships between words (Baumann & Kame'enui, 2004). Two of our favorite word mapping tools that support visual representation are Wordle and Wordsift.

Wordle is a free Web application that allows you to create a word cloud based on the frequency of words in a particular text. It can be used to stimulate students' thinking about the meaning, importance, and relationship of words as they analyze, create, and publish Wordles. To create a word cloud, you paste text into the applet and then manipulate the visual display by selecting the color scheme, layout, and font. Word clouds can be used to highlight keywords and themes to prepare students for reading, as well as prompt discussion after reading.

For example, we created the word cloud in Figure 1 based on an online National Geographic Kids article about the troubling disappearance of honeybees in North America. Questions about this Wordle might include the following:

What does the word cloud suggest this article is about?

What seem to be the most important words?

How do these words go together?

Why do you think the Wordle designer chose this shape of word cloud? (Hint: Think of what bees look like when they swarm.)

Figure 1: Word cloud for bees using Wordle

Students will most likely conjecture that the article is about bees. Some students may notice the less prominent words-dead and poisons-and wonder if the bees are sick. When asked about the color choice, they may speculate that the author/designer chose bright colors to get your attention, or that black goes with poison. What is important in this kind of prereading discussion is students' close attention to the words and how they might relate to one another and to the larger text that they represent. Students actively engage with meaning as they draw on background knowledge about words and concepts as well as on visual literacy skills.

The same bees word cloud could prompt a discussion after reading the article, guided by questions such as,

Do you think the word cloud captured what was most important to learn?

Are there keywords or ideas that are left out?

What superordinate terms reflect the main ideas?

As students manipulate the word cloud's layout, color, and font, they integrate verbal and visual representations, strengthening the multimedia learning effect (Fadel & Lemke, 2008) while developing an important digital literacy skill in our visual society.

For some students, the creative design aspect serves as the hook to engage them in meaning making; for others, it is the words themselves that entice them to explore meanings and relationships. Although Wordles can be published to the public gallery and printed, another option is to use a screen capture program to save the Wordle as an image, creating a bank of images on your desktop or school server. They can then be inserted into a document, PowerPoint, class blog, or other text.

WordSift is another free word cloud tool available on the Internet. Like Wordle, a word cloud is created based on text that is cut and pasted into the application. Although WordSift does not support artistic design of the display, it offers important learning supports. Each word can be clicked on to show a collection of related images, a word map, and a listing of sentences from the text that present the word in different contexts. WordSift also sorts words by difficulty and identifies academic words. Note that both Wordle and WordSift support several different languages, a feature particularly helpful to ELs (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010).

eVoc strategy 2: Take a digital vocabulary field trip

In the original vocabulary field trip (Blachowicz & Obrochta, 2005), the teacher begins with a large poster of a topic, such as weather. Students are seated on the carpet, and the teacher leads a field trip that includes having students observe and record what they saw as they read books and other materials. As students volunteer weather words, the teacher records them on sticky notes or tag board and puts them up beside the poster. After the observations are concluded, the teacher returns the students' attention to the words, repeating them and linking them to the poster. Next, students sort the weather words into conceptually related groups and engage in other semantic activities.

Teachers can create a digital version of a vocabulary field trip using a free online program called TrackStar (trackstar.4teachers.org). Like the popular WebQuest (Dodge, 1995), TrackStar allows you to collect a series of websites and annotate them so that students follow the online journey.

On the left side of the figure you can see the questions and multiple websites that we selected to guide students in finding out about weather in Alaska, where the Iditarod takes place. We selected a context where weather is extreme to heighten students' interest and to provide a dramatic contrast to their own local weather. We begin with a website featuring photos and video of dogsledding in Alaska and asked students to respond with descriptions of the weather conditions.

Next, students visit a website on the aurora borealis and look for connections between the aurora and Alaskan weather. They complete the virtual field trip with a visit to a website on weather comparisons, where they examine the differences between local weather and Alaskan weather. Throughout this process, they visit several teacher-selected websites and gain knowledge about words through multiple exposures in different contexts and through different media, including reading, viewing, writing, and conversation.

eVoc strategy 3: Connect fun and learning with online vocabulary games

No list of technology applications for vocabulary would be complete without mention of the vocabulary games that are available for free on the Internet. We recommend two sites that offer a variety of activities to engage students in playing with words and word meanings: Vocabulary Games and Vocabulary. Games include crossword puzzles, picture-word matches, word scrambles, and 8 Letters in Search of a Word (a game that can draw you in unexpectedly as you race to create as many words as possible from eight letters within the time limit). The games are supplemented with themed word lists, test preparation items, and activities on prefixes and suffixes. These sites can be bookmarked for students' independent practice and can provide a basis for whole-group instruction.

eVoc strategy 4: Have students use media to express vocabulary knowledge

The previous eVoc strategies all require student interaction, from manipulating a visual word map to taking an online vocabulary field trip. This strategy focuses on students' vocabulary representations in multiple modes-writing, audio, graphic, video, and animation (Nikolova, 2002; Xin & Rieth, 2001). The first set of examples draws on promising research with universally designed digital text (Dalton & Proctor, 2007), suggesting the benefit of having students develop word meaning as they read a definition, view graphics, listen to the word, write or audiotape a personal connection to the word, create a caption for a graphic, and complete an interactive word map (Proctor et al., 2007; Proctor, Uccelli, Dalton, & Snow, 2009). Figure 2 illustrates how students communicate word knowledge as they create a caption for an image. These types of activities offer students different modes of representation and expression and can be created with a variety of composing tools and formats, such as digital stories, photo essays, podcasts, and so on.

Figure 2: Students create captions to illustrate their understanding of contribute

Note. From Dalton, B., Proctor, C.P., Snow, C.E., Uccelli, P., & Mo, E. (2008, September). Improving reading comprehension for struggling readers: Understanding the role of vocabulary development, guided strategy use, and Spanish language supports in a digital reading environment. Final report to the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.

A multimedia composing and presentation tool that is often underused is PowerPoint. We have certainly seen many poor PowerPoint examples (e.g., the ubiquitous three bullet points and silly clip art approach). However, we have found that PowerPoint can be used creatively for expression. In addition to benefiting from reading and viewing multimodal representations of vocabulary, recent research suggests that students may also benefit from creating multimedia representations of words in PowerPoint slides that are hyperlinked together (Pritchard & O'Hara, 2009). Working with fifth graders, Bridget (first author) created an example of a multimedia glossary item for camouflage, a word from the science curriculum (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Multimedia glossary example of camouflage using a PowerPoint template

The model elaborates word knowledge in context and illustrates how design influences the message. To provide a structure to guide students in creating their own entries, Bridget created a template that students could fill in and adapt. The template includes a space for the word, a short definition, an explanation for why the word is important, a graphic, an audio recording or sound, and a source. As students create and revise their entries, they reflect on the word's meaning (What does this mean?), its representation (How does this particular graphic and sound effect illustrate this word?) and process (What images did you consider and discard?).

Students' glossary items can be combined into a master document and sorted by word to show multiple meanings and representations (Pritchard & O'Hara, 2009). Another approach to compiling students' individual work is to teach them how to hyperlink their slides so that a view of one version of a word includes hyperlinks to others' versions of that word. Although this example uses PowerPoint as the media format, these types of vocabulary collections can be created in different modes and published online as a word wiki or word blog. This kind of collaborative publication and engagement with an external audience is characteristic of successful multimedia learning (Fadel & Lemke, 2008). There really is no end to the creative possibilities when students use media to develop and celebrate the wonder of words.

eVoc strategy 5: Take advantage of online word reference tools that are also teaching tools

Many online word reference tools are also excellent teaching resources. For example, the Visual Thesaurus website complements its fee-based content with free information such as the Behind the Dictionary and Teachers at Work columns and teacher-created themed word lists. Many use multiple distribution platforms to reach learners wherever they are. For example, the Back in School webpage of Dictionary.com (dictionary.reference.com/studenthandbook) links to Facebook, has an iPhone application, a free toolbar application, a word of the day that is communicated on Twitter or as a text message on your mobile phone, and a free weekly word explorer audio podcast on iTunes.

Develop strategic digital readers with "on-demand" vocabulary help

This section highlights two online tools that provide just-in-time support while reading. Students can develop their strategic learning repertoire as they customize their own collection of supports.

eVoc strategy 6: Support reading and word learning with just-in-time vocabulary reference support

Whether avid or reluctant reader, we all encounter unfamiliar words in our reading and need strategies for what to do when this occurs. Rather than using print dictionaries or asking the teacher, students can learn to use online dictionaries and thesauri. When they have access to word help on demand, at the point of need, both monolingual (Reinking & Rickman, 1990) and bilingual (Yoshii, 2006) students tend to use them more often than print references and improve their understanding. Many of these Internet-based tools are free (they vary in difficulty, so try out different applications to determine the best fit for your students).

Some word reference tools can be mounted on the browser toolbar, allowing you to right click on any word to look it up and have a brief definition display. More comprehensive dictionaries can be bookmarked for easy access while reading on the computer. The increasingly popular e-book readers, which are becoming more common in schools and homes, usually provide dictionary help in the form of audio pronunciations of the word and brief definitions.

Two popular free online dictionaries/thesauri are Reference.com and Merriam-Webster. Tools expressly designed for students include Word Central from Merriam-Webster , Back in School from Dictionary.com, and Yahoo Kids! American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

A strength of digital text is its capacity to communicate in multiple modes, enhancing understanding by providing two channels of input, visual/spatial and linguistic (Mayer, 2001). Merriam-Webster offers an online visual dictionary (visual.merriam-webster .com/index.php), and Enchanted Learning provides a picture dictionary for young children. Be on the alert for educational sites that offer specialized picture glossaries, such as NASA's online space picture dictionary. These sites can be added to your browser favorites. And, finally, it is important to teach students to notice and strategically use the vocabulary help that is offered on various sites, such as the word wizard that pops up when students are reading Scholastic News Online.

eVoc strategy 7: Use language translators to provide just-in-time help for ELLs

Successful ELs leverage first-language knowledge to develop their English (Adesope et al., 2010; Jiménez, García, & Pearson, 1996). Online dictionaries often support multiple languages (e.g., the Yahoo! Kids dictionary supports 90 languages), and EL students should be taught to look for this option. Another resource is the language translator. The value of a translator is that it supports learning words as they occur naturally in authentic text and allows students to view bilingual versions of a text side by side so that they can use their first-language knowledge to develop their English vocabulary. You can paste text into the translator field, select the input and output languages, and view the translation (see Babelfish, Google translator, and Bing Translator). You may also download a toolbar extension that translates any webpage automatically. Although these tools are not perfect (and may never be, given the nuances involved in translation), they are a good place to start for ELs. In fact, students often find the translator's mistakes both humorous and an entry point for discussing the nuances of word meanings.

Expand wide reading and incidental word learning with digital text

Reading widely and deeply is important for vocabulary development and reading comprehension. These two strategies help increase students' volume of reading and, indirectly, their incidental word learning (Cunningham & Stanovich, 2001; Nagy & Herman, 1985).

eVoc strategy 8: Increase reading volume by reading digital text

Class libraries, read-alouds, book clubs, and independent reading time during the school day can increase the amount and variety of student reading. However, it is challenging to find the resources and time required to provide up-to-date material, to be responsive to students' interests, and to accommodate readers at different reading levels. Teachers can dramatically expand text options for students by including reading on the Internet and other digital texts. A high percentage of students already use the Internet for homework; we can extend their learning and exploration of words in context as they read and view varied text genres on the Internet, or read texts downloaded onto a class computer, an e-book reading device, or a smartphone.

Increasing the reading of informational text is especially important for learning in the content areas, and informational content reigns supreme on the Internet. To use current events as one example, the currency of information and use of media to communicate the news is unparalleled. To begin, we recommend bookmarking quality sites that students read on a regular basis. Many educational publishers and organizations provide free online content, including articles and media about current events, some of which are generated by students themselves. A few of our favorites include the following:

A recent visit to some of our favorite sites included articles about the top stories in the news, a student blog about animal myths featured in the animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox, and an explanat ion of threesided snowflakes. The texts include graphics, video, and sound, along with written text, providing many ways of engaging with the content. Students can rotate taking on the role of Internet news repor ter, scanning bookmarked sites for interesting news to share with the class or post to a class blog. Students can also pursue individual interests as they read digital text during sustained silent reading.

A second example is based on literature students read in the classroom, generating interest in more reading by developing intertextual connections (Hartman, 1992). Using a digital poster or PowerPoint screen to show a splash of book cover images and screen captures of websites, movie trailers, and blogs invites students to pursue their interests in particular authors, books, genres, popular culture, and media.

For example, a screen displaying a book that the class is reading, such as Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux, links to several screens, one featuring her website and online interviews, another to a site with video clips from The Tale of Despereaux movie, and still another highlighting other fantasy books and comics. The splash screens can be printed out to build a wall mural that students expand as they continue reading.

These examples highlight the value of teachers previewing Internet content. However, students will also need support in learning how to search and find their own reading materials on the Internet. This will necessitate teaching Internet safety, something that is now required to obtain E-Rate funding (Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, 2009), as well as strategies for searching and evaluating Internet content (Henry, 2006).

eVoc strategy 9: Increase reading volume by listening to digital text with a text-to-speech tool and audio books

A common concern among educators is the readability of websites and Internet content. One powerful strategy is to allow students to listen to text with a text-to-speech (TTS) tool or, when available, listen to audio narration. This provides students with access to age-appropriate content and grade-level curriculum, a right mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004. For struggling readers, TTS increases their reading speed, reduces stress, and for some, but not all, improves comprehension (Elkind & Elkind, 2007).

Fortunately, there are free TTS tools that can be mounted on the browser toolbar for easy access while reading, such as Click, Speak for Firefox (click speak.clcworld.net), or downloaded to your desktop, such as the NaturalReader free TTS utility. Balabolka is a PC-based TTS application that can run off a thumb drive. Some e-book readers such as Microsoft Reader are free to download and can be used with public domain content that is part of their e-book library.

There are also commercial TTS tools that range in price depending on the features, such as those from Kurzweil, Aeques, TextHELP, and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D). Note that students who have a documented print disability may obtain digital versions of core curriculum texts from organizations such as Bookshare and RFB&D. To explore strategies for listening to text, check out the Learning Through Listening website. Johnson (2003) also offered suggestions for using audiobooks in the classroom in her Reading Online article, "Audiobooks: Ear-resistible!"

eVoc strategy 10: Combine vocabulary learning and social service

Many of these eVoc strategies use Web 2.0 technologies to promote social learning. They also tap into students' natural desire to create, to participate in communities, and to develop strategic competence. Recent reports on students' digital literacies highlight the importance of this kind of learning (Ito et al., 2010). This final eVoc strategy is a free online vocabulary game, Free Rice that has attracted millions of users, young and old. We believe it offers an opportunity to promote students' engagement with words while contributing to the social good.

Free Rice presents a word and four answer choices on the screen. For each correct answer, the United Nations World Food Programme donates 10 grains of rice to countries in need. The game adjusts its difficulty level based on the response, filling a bowl with rice as the player adds to his or her score. As a class activity, the teacher could project the website on screen and guide students in playing the game for 5 minutes daily, discussing choices (e.g., "I think it must be 'x' because 'y'") and strategies (e.g., "Any words we can eliminate? Does the root word give us a clue we can use?"). Students can play individually or with a partner, reporting back to class on their rice earnings and sharing intriguing new words.

In closing, we invite you to go digital with word learning. These 10 eVoc strategies use technology to support the wide reading, direct instruction, active learning, and interest in words that we know are essential to vocabulary development. In a digital world, knowing how to use the tools and resources available online is part of becoming a strategic learner. We hope that this list provides a useful and evocative jumpingoff point for integrating technology and media into your students' vocabulary learning experience.

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10 Ways to Use Technology to Build Vocabulary

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Drawing on research-based principles of vocabulary instruction and multimedia learning, this article presents 10 strategies that use free digital tools and Internet resources to engage students in vocabulary learning. The strategies are designed to support the teaching of words and word learning strategies, promote students' strategic use of on-demand web-based vocabulary tools, and increase students' volume of reading and incidental word learning.

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Examination of the Spelling Skills of Middle School Students Who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

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Examination of the Spelling Skills of Middle School Students Who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

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This is an especially informative article, as it sheds light on some of the different types of spelling errors that Deaf and Hard of Hearing students tend to make. These errors seem to be common and widespread, and associated with specific linguistics elements of spelling. Being able to identify these more specific spelling errors can help teachers to understand what they need to focus on in the classroom when it comes to spelling.

Bowers, L., McCarthy, J. H., Schwarz, I., Dostal, H., & Wolbers, K. (2014). Examination of the spelling skills of middle school students who are deaf and hard of hearing. The Volta Review, 114(1), 29-54.

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Improving Instructional Practice to Teaching Spelling and Overcoming Written Language Deficits

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Improving Instructional Practice to Teaching Spelling and Overcoming Written Language Deficits

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This is an awesome lesson plan/instructional plan for teachers to read through to get some ideas about how to teach spelling and thus help children to improve their writing. The author identifies the problems that Deaf students face when it comes to spelling and expands on the traditional spelling list strategy that is often used to teach spelling, and even incorporates a visual spelling list in which the teacher videotapes herself signing each word and in the context of a sentence. This is an awesome idea.

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The Importance of Fingerspelling for Reading

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The Importance of Fingerspelling for Reading

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This article is a great resource for both teachers and parents that explains the role that fingerspelling plays in reading. It gives an overview of the development of fingerspelling throughout the life of a Deaf child which is important for teachers to understand, as Deaf children can process fingerspelling from a very early age and should therefore be exposed to it as soon as possible. In addition, the different types of fingerspelling are explained as well as how to appropriately use fingerspelling in the classroom. I love this article because it helped expand my understanding of fingerspelling and its usefulness in the classroom.

Baker, S. (2010). The importance of fingerspelling for reading. Visual Language and Visual Learning Science of Learning Center.(Research Brief No. 1). Washington, DC.

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I love some of the ideas in this article for how to teach spelling and engage students in spelling. I actually observed some of these ideas being implemented in a classroom I worked in last summer at Lexington School for the Deaf, specifically using a Graffiti Wall. The students were so excited when they found out they were going to throw water balloons on the wall and try to hit different words once they identified them correctly. These are really great ways to mix up spelling instruction and make it more fun. It's certainly better than going through a spelling word list!

5 Fun Ways to Teach Spelling. (2016). Retrieved June 22, 2017, from http://www.reallygoodstuff.com/community/5-fun-ways-to-teach-spelling/

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Really Good Teachers™ Blog and Forum | A Really Good Stuff® Community

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Every teacher knows that spelling can be a challenge for students. The English language is full of unusual rules and peculiar words that do not seem to follow any rule at all. The orthography of it can be mind-boggling (and fascinating all at once)! When it is time to introduce new spelling words, try one of the five fun ways below to help your students remember how to spell their weekly words.

Teach Spelling with Movement

Move It!

Putting movement to spelling words is a great way to involve the whole body. Many alternative spelling techniques have students touch their arms at different intervals to reinforce letter order. Use a proven method or create your own tapping to help your students.

Textures

Just as preschool students learn their letters by using a variety of substances to write in, so too can your older students learn their spelling words. Shaving cream, sand, dry erase boards, and paint can all give your students the reinforcement they need. Think outside the box!

Rap Attack

Your students may not remember last week's spelling words, but chances are they remember the lyrics to their favorite songs. Instead of using a monotone voice to go over new words each week, rap them - complete with spelling each words out! You may even catch your students humming or singing the words under their breath throughout the day.

Charades

Much like moving their arms to tap out spelling words, charades gets students' whole bodies involved. Make up clever movements for each word on the weekly list and have students practice them throughout the week. For the word "row" you could do a rowing motion as you say each letter. Action words are great for this!

Graffiti Wall

Hang up a plain sheet of butcher paper (or use brown paper bags from the grocery store that you have cut open) and have students practice writing their spelling words on the wall. The paper can be easily taken down before the weekly test, but it will make an excellent learning center during the week. Have a basket of colorful markers, pencils, or crayons available for students to use.

Learning spelling words can be challenging, but with some outside the box thinking your students can really get into the spirit of spelling. Share your favorite spelling strategies with us below! We would love to know how you inspire your students to excel in spelling.

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5 Fun Ways to Teach Spelling - Really Good Teachers™ Blog and Forum | A Really Good Stuff® Community

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Every teacher knows that spelling can be a challenge for students. The English language is full of unusual rules and peculiar words that do not seem to follow any rule at all. The orthography of it can be mind-boggling (and fascinating all at once)!

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This website was launched by the Northwest Evaluation Association as a resource for teachers to use to gain insight and information related to assessments in literacy: what they mean, how to interpret the data, how to assess in the classroom and how to determine what is a "sound" assessment. This may help teachers to re-evaluate their own assessment practices to ensure that they are equitable and truly evaluate students and their progress.

Understanding, Interpreting, Applying Assessment. (n.d.). Retrieved June 22, 2017, from http://assessmentliteracy.org/

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Assessment Basics Archives - Teach. Learn. Grow.

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Data doesn't lie, and it made Faith believe in herself. Faith was a student who the state of Michigan said was a failure. But because one of her teachers used assessment data effectively, she made...

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This book is a worthwhile read for teachers in respect to assessing literacy. In this book, readers can learn about the history of assessment, and how to assess children's literacy development, progress and reading level in grades K-8. This an especially helpful resource for future teachers, who like me, have never had to formally assess literacy in the classroom.

Bailey, A. L., & Heritage, M. (Eds.). (2008). Formative assessment for literacy, grades K-6: Building reading and academic language skills across the curriculum. Corwin Press.

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Alison Bailey is an associate professor in the Psychological Studies in Education Program of the Department of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, in addition to being a faculty associate researcher for the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST). A graduate of Harvard University, Bailey's research focuses primarily on language and literacy development, English language development in second language learners, and language assessment. At CRESST, her work focuses on researching the empirical basis of academic language for assessment, curriculum, and teacher professional development. Bailey serves on the advisory boards of numerous states and commercial publishers developing language and literacy assessments for English Language Learners. She is coauthor of the new IPT assessment of English language development at the prekindergarten-kindergarten level, editor and contributing author to The Language Demands of School: Putting academic English to the test (Yale Press, 2007), and coeditor and author (with Allyssa McCabe and Gigliana Melzi) of Spanish-Language Narration and Literacy Development (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2008).

Margaret Heritage is Assistant Director for Professional Development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA, and leads the data use program of the Assessment and Accountability Comprehensive Center.

Prior to joining CRESST, she had many years of teaching and leadership experience in schools in the United Kingdom and the United States, including a period as a County Inspector of Education in the United Kingdom, and as principal at the UCLA laboratory school. She has also taught graduate classes in Education at the Department of Education at the University of Warwick, England, the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Stanford University.

Her current work focuses on data use for school improvement, learning progressions, formative assessment, and teachers' use of formative assessment evidence.

Margaret Heritage is the co-author (with Alison Bailey) of Formative Assessment for Literacy, Grades K-6: Building Reading and Academic Language Skills Across the Curriculum, published by Corwin Press.

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Formative Assessment for Literacy, Grades K-6

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Alison Bailey is an associate professor in the Psychological Studies in Education Program of the Department of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, in addition to being a faculty associate researcher for the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST).

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Developing Language and Writing Skills of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: A Simultaneous Approach

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Developing Language and Writing Skills of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: A Simultaneous Approach

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This is a great article that once again debunks the myth that the use of American Sign Language in the classroom detracts from the development of reading and writing skills and even offers an approach for teachers to consider using to teach writing: Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction. This type of instruction was found to improve the ASL and English skills of students, and promoted students' metalinguistic awareness of both languages.

Dostal, H. M., & Wolbers, K. A. (2014). Developing language and writing skills of deaf and hard of hearing students: A simultaneous approach. Literacy Research and Instruction, 53(3), 245-268.

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Vocabulary Use by Low, Moderate, and High ASL-Proficient Writers Compared to Hearing ESL and Monolingual Speakers

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Vocabulary Use by Low, Moderate, and High ASL-Proficient Writers Compared to Hearing ESL and Monolingual Speakers

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The findings of this article suggest that ASL proficiency is correlated with vocabulary and writing for Deaf students, as students who were proficient and had native-like competency in ASL wrote in a less formulaic way and incorporated a more diverse vocabulary lexicon in their writing as compared with Deaf students who limited proficiency. This article can help teachers to understand patterns that Deaf writers tend to make in their writing, as well.

Singleton, J. L., Morgan, D., DiGello, E., Wiles, J., & Rivers, R. (2004). Vocabulary use by low, moderate, and high ASL-proficient writers compared to hearing ESL and monolingual speakers. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 9(1), 86-103.

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Using Balanced and Interactive Writing Instruction to Improve the Higher Order and Lower Order Writing Skills of Deaf Students

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Using Balanced and Interactive Writing Instruction to Improve the Higher Order and Lower Order Writing Skills of Deaf Students

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This article can also inform the instruction that teacher's use to help develop and improve Deaf students' writing skills. Findings of this article and the specific instructional method used, incorporating Morning Message into the school day, suggest that interactive writing instruction does in fact improve students' writing.

Wolbers, K. A. (2007). Using balanced and interactive writing instruction to improve the higher order and lower order writing skills of deaf students. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 13(2), 257-277.

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Teaching Writing to Deaf Students: Does Research Offer Evidence for Practice?

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Teaching Writing to Deaf Students: Does Research Offer Evidence for Practice?

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This article might be helpful for teachers to read as it provides an overview of the research related to writing instruction for Deaf students over the last 25 years. It might help provide background knowledge to teachers regarding the writing process and help shape their instruction related to writing as a result.

Strassman, B. K., & Schirmer, B. (2013). Teaching Writing to Deaf Students: Does Research Offer Evidence for Practice?. Remedial and Special Education, 34(3), 166-179.

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I love all of the instructional ideas that this article offers teachers. Some of the ideas target how to start the writing process, how to inspire students, how to improve students' writing, and how to make writing fun in general. There are also explicit examples of each of the 30 ideas to help teachers to visualize how each instructional strategy might look in the classroom, which is extremely helpful.

30 Ideas for Teaching Writing. (2003). Retrieved June 22, 2017, from https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/922

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Summary: Few sources available today offer writing teachers such succinct, practice-based help-which is one reason why 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing was the winner of the Association of Education Publishers 2005 Distinguished Achievement Award for Instructional Materials.

Explore NWP.org's resources on Teaching Writing

More Resources on Teaching Writing

The National Writing Project's 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing offers successful strategies contributed by experienced Writing Project teachers. Since NWP does not promote a single approach to teaching writing, readers will benefit from a variety of eclectic, classroom-tested techniques.

These ideas originated as full-length articles in NWP publications (a link to the full article accompanies each idea below).

Table of Contents: 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

1. Use the shared events of students' lives to inspire writing.

2. Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.

3. Use writing to improve relations among students.

4. Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.

5. Work with words relevant to students' lives to help them build vocabulary.

6. Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.

7. Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry.

8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.

9. Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.

10. Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.

11. Use casual talk about students' lives to generate writing.

12. Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.

13. Practice and play with revision techniques.

14. Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.

15. Teach "tension" to move students beyond fluency.

16. Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.

17. Require written response to peers' writing.

18. Make writing reflection tangible.

19. Make grammar instruction dynamic.

20. Ask students to experiment with sentence length.

21. Help students ask questions about their writing.

22. Challenge students to find active verbs.

23. Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.

24. Ground writing in social issues important to students.

25. Encourage the "framing device" as an aid to cohesion in writing.

26. Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.

27. Think like a football coach.

28. Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.

29. Use home language on the road to Standard English.

30. Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.

1. Use the shared events of students' lives to inspire writing.

Debbie Rotkow, a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith's words, is "natural and purposeful."

When a child comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag, these events can inspire a poem. When Michael rode his bike without training wheels for the first time, this occasion provided a worthwhile topic to write about. A new baby in a family, a lost tooth, and the death of one student's father were the playful or serious inspirations for student writing.

Says Rotkow: "Our classroom reverberated with the stories of our lives as we wrote, talked, and reflected about who we were, what we did, what we thought, and how we thought about it. We became a community."
ROTKOW, DEBBIE. 2003. "Two or Three Things I Know for Sure About Helping Students Write the Stories of Their Lives," The Quarterly (25) 4.
2. Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.

When high school teacher Karen Murar and college instructor Elaine Ware, teacher-consultants with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, discovered students were scheduled to read the August Wilson play Fences at the same time, they set up email communication between students to allow some "teacherless talk" about the text.

Rather than typical teacher-led discussion, the project fostered independent conversation between students. Formal classroom discussion of the play did not occur until students had completed all email correspondence. Though teachers were not involved in student online dialogues, the conversations evidenced the same reading strategies promoted in teacher-led discussion, including predication, clarification, interpretation, and others.
MURAR, KAREN, and ELAINE WARE. 1998. "Teacherless Talk: Impressions from Electronic Literacy Conversations." The Quarterly (20) 3.
3. Use writing to improve relations among students.

Diane Waff, co-director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, taught in an urban school where boys outnumbered girls four to one in her classroom. The situation left girls feeling overwhelmed, according to Waff, and their "voices faded into the background, overpowered by more aggressive male voices."

Determined not to ignore this unhealthy situation, Waff urged students to face the problem head-on, asking them to write about gender-based problems in their journals. She then introduced literature that considered relationships between the sexes, focusing on themes of romance, love, and marriage. Students wrote in response to works as diverse as de Maupassant's "The Necklace" and Dean Myers's Motown and DiDi.

In the beginning there was a great dissonance between male and female responses. According to Waff, "Girls focused on feelings; boys focused on sex, money, and the fleeting nature of romantic attachment." But as the students continued to write about and discuss their honest feelings, they began to notice that they had similar ideas on many issues. "By confronting these gender-based problems directly," says Waff, "the effect was to improve the lives of individual students and the social well-being of the wider school community."
WAFF, DIANE. 1995. "Romance in the Classroom: Inviting Discourse on Gender and Power." The Quarterly (17) 2.
4. Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.

Jan Matsuoka, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), describes a revision conference she held with a third grade English language learner named Sandee, who had written about a recent trip to Los Angeles.

"I told her I wanted her story to have more focus," writes Matsuoka. "I could tell she was confused so I made rough sketches representing the events of her trip. I made a small frame out of a piece of paper and placed it down on one of her drawings - a sketch she had made of a visit with her grandmother."

"Focus, I told her, means writing about the memorable details of the visit with your grandmother, not everything else you did on the trip."

"'Oh, I get it,' Sandee smiled, 'like just one cartoon, not a whole bunch.'"

Sandee's next draft was more deep than broad.
MATSUOKA, JAN. 1998. "Revising Revision: How My Students Transformed Writers' Workshop." The Quarterly (20) 1.
5. Work with words relevant to students' lives to help them build vocabulary.

Eileen Simmons, a teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma State University Writing Project, knows that the more relevant new words are to students' lives, the more likely they are to take hold.

In her high school classroom, she uses a form of the children's ABC book as a community-building project. For each letter of the alphabet, the students find an appropriately descriptive word for themselves. Students elaborate on the word by writing sentences and creating an illustration. In the process, they make extensive use of the dictionary and thesaurus.

One student describes her personality as sometimes "caustic," illustrating the word with a photograph of a burning car in a war zone. Her caption explains that she understands the hurt her "burning" sarcastic remarks can generate.
SIMMONS, EILEEN. 2002. "Visualizing Vocabulary." The Quarterly (24) 3.
6. Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.

John Levine, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), helps his college freshmen integrate the ideas of several writers into a single analytical essay by asking them to create a dialogue among those writers.

He tells his students, for instance, "imagine you are the moderator of a panel discussion on the topic these writers are discussing. Consider the three writers and construct a dialogue among the four 'voices' (the three essayists plus you)."

Levine tells students to format the dialogue as though it were a script. The essay follows from this preparation.
LEVINE, JOHN. 2002. "Talking Texts: Writing Dialogue in the College Composition Classroom." The Quarterly (24) 2.
7. Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry.

The following is a group poem created by second grade students of Michelle Fleer, a teacher-consultant with the Dakota Writing Project (South Dakota).

Underwater
Crabs crawl patiently along the ocean floor
searching for prey.
Fish soundlessly weave their way through
slippery seaweed
Whales whisper to others as they slide
through the salty water.
And silent waves wash into a dark cave
where an octopus is sleeping.

Fleer helped her students get started by finding a familiar topic. (In this case her students had been studying sea life.) She asked them to brainstorm language related to the sea, allowing them time to list appropriate nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The students then used these words to create phrases and used the phrases to produce the poem itself.

As a group, students put together words in ways Fleer didn't believe many of them could have done if they were working on their own, and after creating several group poems, some students felt confident enough to work alone.
FLEER, MICHELLE. 2002. "Beyond 'Pink is a Rose.'" The Quarterly (24) 4.
8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.

Douglas James Joyce, a teacher-consultant with the Denver Writing Project, makes use of what he calls "metawriting" in his college writing classes. He sees metawriting (writing about writing) as a way to help students reduce errors in their academic prose.

Joyce explains one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects one error that occurs frequently in a student's work and points out each instance in which the error is made. He instructs the student to write a one page essay, comparing and contrasting three sources that provide guidance on the established use of that particular convention, making sure a variety of sources are available.

"I want the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away with a thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to understand any debate that may surround the particular usage."
JOYCE, DOUGLAS JAMES. 2002. "On the Use of Metawriting to Learn Grammar and Mechanics." The Quarterly (24) 4.
9. Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.

Glorianne Bradshaw, a teacher-consultant with the Red River Valley Writing Project (North Dakota), decided to make use of experiences from her own life when teaching her first-graders how to write.

For example, on an overhead transparency she shows a sketch of herself stirring cookie batter while on vacation. She writes the phrase "made cookies" under the sketch. Then she asks students to help her write a sentence about this. She writes the words who, where, and when. Using these words as prompts, she and the students construct the sentence, "I made cookies in the kitchen in the morning."

Next, each student returns to the sketch he or she has made of a summer vacation activity and, with her help, answers the same questions answered for Bradshaw's drawing. Then she asks them, "Tell me more. Do the cookies have chocolate chips? Does the pizza have pepperoni?" These facts lead to other sentences.

Rather than taking away creativity, Bradshaw believes this kind of structure gives students a helpful format for creativity.
BRADSHAW, GLORIANNE. 2001. "Back to Square One: What to do When Writing Workshop Just Doesn't Work." The Quarterly (23) 1.
10. Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.

Stephanie Wilder found that the grades she gave her high school students were getting in the way of their progress. The weaker students stopped trying. Other students relied on grades as the only standard by which they judged their own work.

"I decided to postpone my grading until the portfolios, which contained a selection of student work, were complete," Wilder says. She continued to comment on papers, encourage revision, and urge students to meet with her for conferences. But she waited to grade the papers.

It took a while for students to stop leafing to the ends of their papers in search of a grade, and there was some grumbling from students who had always received excellent grades. But she believes that because she was less quick to judge their work, students were better able to evaluate their efforts themselves.
WILDER, STEPHANIE. 1997. "Pruning Too Early: The Thorny Issue of Grading Student Writing." The Quarterly (19) 4.
11. Use casual talk about students' lives to generate writing.

Erin (Pirnot) Ciccone, teacher-consultant with the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project, found a way to make more productive the "Monday morning gab fest" she used as a warm-up with her fifth grade students. She conceived of "Headline News." As students entered the classroom on Monday mornings, they wrote personal headlines about their weekends and posted them on the bulletin board. A headline might read "Fifth-Grader Stranded at Movie Theatre" or "Girl Takes on Responsibility as Mother's Helper."

After the headlines had been posted, students had a chance to guess the stories behind them. The writers then told the stories behind their headlines. As each student had only three minutes to talk, they needed to make decisions about what was important and to clarify details as they proceeded. They began to rely on suspense and "purposeful ambiguity" to hold listeners' interest.

On Tuesday, students committed their stories to writing. Because of the "Headline News" experience, Ciccone's students have been able to generate writing that is focused, detailed, and well ordered.
CICCONE, ERIN (PIRNOT). 2001. "A Place for Talk in Writers' Workshop." The Quarterly (23) 4.
12. Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.

Patricia A. Slagle, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the Louisville Writing Project(Kentucky), understands the difference between writing for a hypothetical purpose and writing to an audience for real purpose. She illustrates the difference by contrasting two assignments.

She began with: "Imagine you are the drama critic for your local newspaper. Write a review of an imaginary production of the play we have just finished studying in class." This prompt asks students to assume the contrived role of a professional writer and drama critic. They must adapt to a voice that is not theirs and pretend to have knowledge they do not have.

Slagle developed a more effective alternative: "Write a letter to the director of your local theater company in which you present arguments for producing the play that we have just finished studying in class." This prompt, Slagle says, allows the writer her own voice, building into her argument concrete references to personal experience. "Of course," adds Slagle, "this prompt would constitute authentic writing only for those students who, in fact, would like to see the play produced."
SLAGLE, PATRICIA A. 1997. "Getting Real: Authenticity in Writing Prompts." The Quarterly (19) 3.
13. Practice and play with revision techniques.

Mark Farrington, college instructor and teacher-consultant with the Northern Virginia Writing Project, believes teaching revision sometimes means practicing techniques of revision. An exercise like "find a place other than the first sentence where this essay might begin" is valuable because it shows student writers the possibilities that exist in writing.

For Farrington's students, practice can sometime turn to play with directions to:

add five colors

add four action verbs

add one metaphor

add five sensory details.

In his college fiction writing class, Farrington asks students to choose a spot in the story where the main character does something that is crucial to the rest of the story. At that moment, Farrington says, they must make the character do the exact opposite.

"Playing at revision can lead to insightful surprises," Farrington says. "When they come, revision doesn't seem such hard work anymore."
FARRINGTON, MARK. 1999. "Four Principles Toward Teaching the Craft of Revision." The Quarterly (21) 2.
14. Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.

Bernadette Lambert, teacher-consultant with the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project (Georgia), wondered what would happen if she had her sixth-grade students pair with an adult family member to read a book. She asked the students about the kinds of books they wanted to read (mysteries, adventure, ghost stories) and the adults about the kinds of books they wanted to read with the young people (character-building values, multiculturalism, no ghost stories). Using these suggestions for direction, Lambert developed a list of 30 books. From this list, each student-adult pair chose one. They committed themselves to read and discuss the book and write separate reviews.

Most of the students, says Lambert, were proud to share a piece of writing done by their adult reading buddy. Several admitted that they had never before had this level of intellectual conversation with an adult family member.
LAMBERT, BERNADETTE. 1999. "You and Me and a Book Makes Three." The Quarterly (21) 3.
15. Teach "tension" to move students beyond fluency.

Suzanne Linebarger, a co-director of the Northern California Writing Project, recognized that one element lacking from many of her students' stories was tension. One day, in front of the class, she demonstrated tension with a rubber band. Looped over her finger, the rubber band merely dangled. "However," she told the students, "when I stretch it out and point it (not at a student), the rubber band suddenly becomes more interesting. It's the tension, the potential energy, that rivets your attention. It's the same in writing."

Linebarger revised a generic writing prompt to add an element of tension. The initial prompt read, "Think of a friend who is special to you. Write about something your friend has done for you, you have done for your friend, or you have done together."

Linebarger didn't want responses that settled for "my best friend was really good to me," so "during the rewrite session we talked about how hard it is to stay friends when met with a challenge. Students talked about times they had let their friends down or times their friends had let them down, and how they had managed to stay friends in spite of their problems. In other words, we talked about some tense situations that found their way into their writing."
LINEBARGER, SUZANNE. 2001. "Tensing Up: Moving From Fluency to Flair." The Quarterly (23) 3.
16. Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.

Ray Skjelbred, middle school teacher at Marin Country Day School, wants his seventh grade students to listen to language. He wants to begin to train their ears by asking them to make lists of wonderful sounding words. "This is strictly a listening game," says Skjelbred. "They shouldn't write lunch just because they're hungry." When the collective list is assembled, Skjelbred asks students to make sentences from some of the words they've collected. They may use their own words, borrow from other contributors, add other words as necessary, and change word forms.

Among the words on one student's list: tumble, detergent, sift, bubble, syllable, creep, erupt, and volcano. The student writes:

A man loads his laundry into the tumbling washer, the detergent sifting through the bubbling water.

The syllables creep through her teeth.

The fog erupts like a volcano in the dust.

"Unexpected words can go together, creating amazing images," says Skjelbred.
SKJELBRED, RAY. 1997. "Sound and Sense: Grammar, Poetry, and Creative Language." The Quarterly (19) 4.
17. Require written response to peers' writing.

Kathleen O'Shaughnessy, co-director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana (Louisiana), asks her middle school students to respond to each others' writing on Post-it Notes. Students attach their comments to a piece of writing under consideration.

"I've found that when I require a written response on a Post-it instead of merely allowing students to respond verbally, the responders take their duties more seriously and, with practice, the quality of their remarks improves."

One student wrote:

While I was reading your piece, I felt like I was riding a roller coaster. It started out kinda slow, but you could tell there was something exciting coming up. But then it moved real fast and stopped all of a sudden. I almost needed to read it again the way you ride a roller coaster over again because it goes too fast.

Says O'Shaughnessy, "This response is certainly more useful to the writer than the usual 'I think you could, like, add some more details, you know?' that I often overheard in response meetings."
O'SHAUGHNESSY, KATHLEEN. 2001. "Everything I Know About Teaching Language Arts, I Learned at the Office Supply Store." The Quarterly (23) 2.
18. Make writing reflection tangible.

Anna Collins Trest, director of the South Mississippi Writing Project, finds she can lead upper elementary school students to better understand the concept of "reflection" if she anchors the discussion in the concrete and helps students establish categories for their reflective responses.

She decided to use mirrors to teach the reflective process. Each student had one. As the students gazed at their own reflections, she asked this question: "What can you think about while looking in the mirror at your own reflection?" As they answered, she categorized each response:

I think I'm a queen - pretending/imagining
I look at my cavities - examining/observing
I think I'm having a bad hair day - forming opinions
What will I look like when I am old? - questioning
My hair is parted in the middle - describing
I'm thinking about when I broke my nose - remembering
I think I look better than my brother- comparing
Everything on my face looks sad today - expressing emotion.

Trest talked with students about the categories and invited them to give personal examples of each. Then she asked them to look in the mirrors again, reflect on their images, and write.

"Elementary students are literal in their thinking," Trest says, "but that doesn't mean they can't be creative."
TREST, ANNA COLLINS. 1999. "I was a Journal Topic Junkie." The Quarterly (21) 4.
19. Make grammar instruction dynamic.

Philip Ireland, teacher-consultant with the San Marcos Writing Project (California), believes in active learning. One of his strategies has been to take his seventh-graders on a "preposition walk" around the school campus. Walking in pairs, they tell each other what they are doing:

I'm stepping off the grass.
I'm talking to my friend.

"Students soon discover that everything they do contains prepositional phrases. I walk among my students prompting answers," Ireland explains.

"I'm crawling under the tennis net," Amanda proclaims from her hands and knees. "The prepositional phrase is under the net."

"The preposition?" I ask.

" Under."
IRELAND, PHILIP. 2003. "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time." The Quarterly (25) 3.
20. Ask students to experiment with sentence length.

Kim Stafford, director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark College, wants his students to discard old notions that sentences should be a certain length. He explains to his students that a writer's command of long and short sentences makes for a "more pliable" writing repertoire. He describes the exercise he uses to help students experiment with sentence length.

"I invite writers to compose a sentence that goes on for at least a page - and no fair cheating with a semicolon. Just use 'and' when you have to, or a dash, or make a list, and keep it going." After years of being told not to, they take pleasure in writing the greatest run-on sentences they can.

"Then we shake out our writing hands, take a blank page, and write from the upper left to the lower right corner again, but this time letting no sentence be longer than four words, but every sentence must have a subject and a verb."

Stafford compares the first style of sentence construction to a river and the second to a drum. "Writers need both," he says. "Rivers have long rhythms. Drums roll."
STAFFORD, KIM. 2003. "Sentence as River and as Drum." The Quarterly (25) 3.
21. Help students ask questions about their writing.

Joni Chancer, teacher-consultant of the South Coast Writing Project (California), has paid a lot of attention to the type of questions she wants her upper elementary students to consider as they re-examine their writing, reflecting on pieces they may make part of their portfolios. Here are some of the questions:

Why did I write this piece? Where did I get my ideas?
Who is the audience and how did it affect this piece?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
Was this piece easy or difficult to write? Why?
What parts did I rework? What were my revisions?
Did I try something new?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
What elements of writer's craft enhanced my story?
What might I change?
Did something I read influence my writing?
What did I learn or what did I expect the reader to learn?
Where will I go from here? Will I publish it? Share it?
Expand it? Toss it? File it?

Chancer cautions that these questions should not be considered a "reflection checklist," rather they are questions that seem to be addressed frequently when writers tell the story of a particular piece.
CHANCER, JONI. 2001. "The Teacher's Role in Portfolio Assessment." In The Whole Story: Teachers Talk About Portfolios, edited by Mary Ann Smith and Jane Juska. Berkeley, California: National Writing Project.
22. Challenge students to find active verbs.

Nancy Lilly, co-director of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project, wanted her fourth and fifth grade students to breathe life into their nonfiction writing. She thought the student who wrote this paragraph could do better:

The jaguar is the biggest and strongest cat in the rainforest. The jaguar's jaw is strong enough to crush a turtle's shell. Jaguars also have very powerful legs for leaping from branch to branch to chase prey.

Building on an idea from Stephanie Harvey ( Nonfiction Matters, Stenhouse, 1998) Lilly introduced the concept of "nouns as stuff" and verbs as "what stuff does."

In a brainstorming session related to the students' study of the rain forest, the class supplied the following assistance to the writer:

Stuff/Nouns : What Stuff Does/Verbs
jaguar : leaps, pounces
jaguar's : legs pump
jaguar's : teeth crush
jaguar's : mouth devours

This was just the help the writer needed to create the following revised paragraph:

As the sun disappears from the heart of the forest, the jaguar leaps through the underbrush, pumping its powerful legs. It spies a gharial gliding down the river. The jungle cat pounces, crushing the turtle with his teeth, devouring the reptile with pleasure.
LILLY, NANCY. "Dead or Alive: How will Students' Nonfiction Writing Arrive?" The Quarterly (25) 4.
23. Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.

For a final exam, Sarah Lorenz, a teacher-consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, asks her high school students to make a written argument for the grade they think they should receive. Drawing on work they have done over the semester, students make a case for how much they have learned in the writing class.

"The key to convincing me," says Lorenz, "is the use of detail. They can't simply say they have improved as writers - they have to give examples and even quote their own writing . . . They can't just say something was helpful - they have to tell me why they thought it was important, how their thinking changed, or how they applied this learning to everyday life."
LORENZ, SARAH. 2001. "Beyond Rhetoric: A Reflective Persuasive Final Exam for the Writing Classroom." The Quarterly (23) 4.
24. Ground writing in social issues important to students.

Jean Hicks, director, and Tim Johnson, a co-director, both of the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), have developed a way to help high school students create brief, effective dramas about issues in their lives. The class, working in groups, decides on a theme such as jealousy, sibling rivalry, competition, or teen drinking. Each group develops a scene illustrating an aspect of this chosen theme.

Considering the theme of sibling rivalry, for instance, students identify possible scenes with topics such as "I Had It First" (competing for family resources) and "Calling in the Troops" (tattling). Students then set up the circumstances and characters.

Hicks and Johnson give each of the "characters" a different color packet of Post-it Notes. Each student develops and posts dialogue for his or her character. As the scene emerges, Post-its can be added, moved, and deleted. They remind students of the conventions of drama such as conflict and resolution. Scenes, when acted out, are limited to 10 minutes.

"It's not so much about the genre or the product as it is about creating a culture that supports the thinking and learning of writers," write Hicks and Johnson.
HICKS, JEAN and TIM JOHNSON. 2000. "Staging Learning: The Play's the Thing." The Quarterly (22) 3.
25. Encourage the "framing device" as an aid to cohesion in writing.

Romana Hillebrand, a teacher-consultant with the Northwest Inland Writing Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find a literary or historical reference or a personal narrative that can provide a fresh way into and out of their writing, surrounding it much like a window frame surrounds a glass pane.

Hillebrand provides this example:

A student in her research class wrote a paper on the relationship between humans and plants, beginning with a reference to the nursery rhyme, "Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies . . . ." She explained the rhymes as originating with the practice of masking the stench of death with flowers during the Black Plague. The student finished the paper with the sentence, "Without plants, life on Earth would cease to exist as we know it; ashes, ashes we all fall down."

Hillebrand concludes that linking the introduction and the conclusion helps unify a paper and satisfy the reader.
HILLEBRAND, ROMANA. 2001. "It's a Frame Up: Helping Students Devise Beginning and Endings."The Quarterly (23) 1.
26. Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.

Suzanne Cherry, director of the Swamp Fox Writing Project (South Carolina), has her own way of dramatizing the comma splice error. She brings to class two pieces of wire, the last inch of each exposed. She tells her college students, "We need to join these pieces of wire together right now if we are to be able to watch our favorite TV show. What can we do? We could use some tape, but that would probably be a mistake as the puppy could easily eat through the connection. By splicing the wires in this way, we are creating a fire hazard."

A better connection, the students usually suggest, would be to use one of those electrical connectors that look like pen caps.

"Now," Cherry says (often to the accompaniment of multiple groans), "let's turn these wires into sentences. If we simply splice them together with a comma, the equivalent of a piece of tape, we create a weak connection, or a comma splice error. What then would be the grammatical equivalent of the electrical connector? Think conjunction - and, but, or. Or try a semicolon. All of these show relationships between sentences in a way that the comma, a device for taping clauses together in a slapdash manner, does not."

"I've been teaching writing for many years," Cherry says. "And I now realize the more able we are to relate the concepts of writing to 'real world' experience, the more successful we will be."
CHERRY, SUZANNE. "Keeping the Comma Splice Queen Happy," The Voice (9) 1.
27. Think like a football coach.

In addition to his work as a high school teacher of writing, Dan Holt, a co-director with the Third Coast Writing Project (Michigan), spent 20 years coaching football. While doing the latter, he learned quite a bit about doing the former. Here is some of what he found out:

The writing teacher can't stay on the sidelines. "When I modeled for my players, they knew what I wanted them to do." The same involvement, he says, is required to successfully teach writing.

Like the coach, the writing teacher should praise strong performance rather than focus on the negative. Statements such as "Wow, that was a killer block," or "That paragraph was tight" will turn "butterball" ninth-grade boys into varsity linemen and insecure adolescents into aspiring poets.

The writing teacher should apply the KISS theory: Keep it simple stupid. Holt explains for a freshman quarterback, audibles (on-field commands) are best used with care until a player has reached a higher skill level. In writing class, a student who has never written a poem needs to start with small verse forms such as a chinquapin or haiku.

Practice and routine are important both for football players and for writing students, but football players and writers also need the "adrenaline rush" of the big game and the final draft.
HOLT, DAN. 1999. "What Coaching Football Taught Me about Teaching Writing." The Voice (4) 3.
28. Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.

High school teacher Jon Appleby noticed that when yearbooks fell into students' hands "my curriculum got dropped in a heartbeat for spirited words scribbled over photos." Appleby wondered, "How can I make my classroom as fascinating and consuming as the yearbook?"

Here are some ideas that yearbook writing inspired:

Take pictures, put them on the bulletin boards, and have students write captions for them. Then design small descriptive writing assignments using the photographs of events such as the prom and homecoming. Afterwards, ask students to choose quotes from things they have read that represent what they feel and think and put them on the walls.

Check in about students' lives. Recognize achievements and individuals the way that yearbook writers direct attention to each other. Ask students to write down memories and simply, joyfully share them. As yearbook writing usually does, insist on a sense of tomorrow.
APPLEBY, JON. 2001. "The School Yearbook: A Guide to Writing and Teaching." The Voice (6) 3.
29. Use home language on the road to Standard English.

Eileen Kennedy, special education teacher at Medger Evers College, works with native speakers of Caribbean Creole who are preparing to teach in New York City. Sometimes she encourages these students to draft writing in their native Creole. The additional challenge becomes to re-draft this writing, rendered in patois, into Standard English.

She finds that narratives involving immigrant Caribbean natives in unfamiliar situations - buying a refrigerator, for instance - lead to inspired writing. In addition, some students expressed their thoughts more proficiently in Standard English after drafting in their vernaculars.
KENNEDY, EILEEN. 2003. "Writing in Home Dialects: Choosing a Written Discourse in a Teacher Education Class." The Quarterly (25) 2.
30. Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.

Jim Wilcox, teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma Writing Project, requires his college students to volunteer at a local facility that serves the community, any place from the Special Olympics to a burn unit. Over the course of their tenure with the organization, students write in a number of genres: an objective report that describes the appearance and activity of the facility, a personal interview/profile, an evaluation essay that requires students to set up criteria by which to assess this kind of organization, an investigative report that includes information from a second source, and a letter to the editor of a campus newspaper or other publication.

Wilcox says, "Besides improving their researching skills, students learn that their community is indeed full of problems and frustrations. They also learn that their own talents and time are valuable assets in solving some of the world's problems - one life at a time."
WILCOX, JIM. 2003. "The Spirit of Volunteerism in English Composition." The Quarterly (25) 2.
© 2003 by the National Writing Project
All rights reserved

Compiled and edited by Art Peterson.
Designed by Karen Karten.

3: "Romance in the Classroom: Inviting Discourse on Gender and Power" by Diane Waff is reprinted from The Voice of the Philadelphia Writing Project (3) 1. Copyright © Winter 1994.

11: "A Place for Talk in Writers' Workshop" by Erin (Pirnot) Ciccone is reprinted from The Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project Newsletter (21) 2. Copyright © 2000.

12: A version of "Getting Real: Can a Writing Prompt Be Authentic?" by Patricia Slagle first appeared in The Louisville Writing Project Network News.

20: "Sentence as River and as Drum" by Kim Stafford is reprinted from The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft. University of Georgia Press: Athens, Georgia. Copyright © 2003 by Kim Stafford. All rights reserved.

30: "The Spirit of Volunteerism in English Composition" by Jim Wilcox is reprinted from Write Angles III: Still More Strategies for Teaching Composition. Copyright © 2002 by the Oklahoma Department of Education.

Related Resource Topics

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Summary: Few sources available today offer writing teachers such succinct, practice-based help-which is one reason why 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing was the winner of the Association of Education Publishers 2005 Distinguished Achievement Award for Instructional Materials. The National Writing Project's 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing offers successful strategies contributed by experienced Writing Project teachers.

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Doing it Differently: Tips for Teaching Vocabulary

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Doing it Differently: Tips for Teaching Vocabulary

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Some of the tips that the author offers related to teaching vocabulary are so useful in the classroom. Specifically, I love how Robert Marzano's process of explicit/direct vocabulary instruction is included, as explicit vocabulary instruction is extremely important for Deaf learners who do not have always have access to incidental learning opportunities to build vocabulary knowledge.

Alber, R. (2010). Doing It Differently: Tips for Teaching Vocabulary. Retrieved June 22, 2017, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/vocabulary-instruction-teaching-tips-rebecca-alber

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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The Four Keys to Motivating Struggling Readers

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The Four Keys to Motivating Struggling Readers

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There are four main factors that  motivate students: competence, autonomy, relatedness, and interest/value. This article provides instructional examples of how to better meet students' needs for these things in the classroom and also what not to do when trying to increase student motivation in the classroom and thus foster students' love for reading.

Hurst, S. (2013, January 23). The Four Keys to Motivating Struggling Readers. Retrieved June 22, 2017, from http://www.readinghorizons.com/blog/post/2013/01/23/four-keys-to-motivating-struggling-readers

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During a recent 'organization spree', my mom unearthed from the depths of the basement, a pile of report cards from my elementary through high school years. On my first-grade report card my teacher had written, "Stacy can do anything that she puts her mind to." I am sure that as a first grader, I took that as a compliment. As a teacher, I now understand it to mean that motivation was an issue. This supposition was supported by a comment written on one of my high school report cards, "Stacy is capable of more. Prod her a bit." I am pointing out the obvious here, but all of us would probably agree that whatever is required of us is more enjoyable (and more likely to be completed) when we are motivated.

Recently, efforts to improve student achievement have been focused on providing our schools with better reading curriculum and instructional materials, more highly qualified teachers, and standards that clearly define what students are expected to learn. Even IF all of these things are in place, gains in student achievement will be difficult to show if students are not motivated to learn. Motivation can make the difference between learning something temporarily and being able to 'own' and apply what they have learned permanently. One study showed that students who are motivated to read, spend 300% more time reading than students who are not motivated to read ( Tweet!) (Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997). Student motivation is not only linked to higher levels of achievement but it is also linked to satisfaction with school, positive self-esteem, social adjustment, and lower dropout rates.

Motivation to read is only one piece of the reading puzzle but it is a necessary piece, especially if we, as parents and/or teachers, want students to develop a habit of reading that will benefit them throughout their lives. There are various aspects of motivation, but researchers agree four factors are critical for motivating students: competence, autonomy/control, interest/value, and relatedness ( Tweet!) (Bandura, 1996; Dweck, 2010; Pintrich, 2003; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Seifert, 2004).

Here is a brief description of each and how it relates to reading:

Four Factors of Motivation

Competence

Students need to feel that they are capable of accomplishing what is being required of them. We have all seen students whose motivation takes a nosedive when a book is too hard or they haven't been taught the necessary strategies to become skilled at reading. If we, as teachers, fail to balance competence and motivation in reading, we will see students who are too discouraged to read or students who can read but have no interest.

Autonomy/Control

Choice is an important aspect in improving reading ability. If students are given a choice of what to read, at least during some point of the school day, they will be more motivated to read. Remember college? How much fun was it to spend large amounts of time reading things that you were required to read? Answer: no fun at all.

It is also important for students to see a correlation between effort and outcome. Students who put a lot of effort into reading and don't see improvement will lose motivation pretty quickly. If achievable goals are set, students are more likely to see this correlation.

Interest/Value

When we are interested in a task or see the value in completing it, motivation is high. How much more fun was it to spend time reading books in a subject that you were interested in? Answer: way more fun.

Most suburban 16-year-olds, regardless of their reading ability, are more interested in studying to get a driver's license than in studying for... well, most anything else, simply because they see the value of a driver's license. As teachers, we can help students to see the value in being literate. Many students who don't struggle with reading are becoming aliterate; that is, they can read but they choose not to because they do not value reading or they are more interested in other pursuits such as video games and TV.

Relatedness

Relatedness is the need to feel a part of a group and to act appropriately when interacting with that group. There are major social rewards with this factor of motivation. My little brother, who was a struggling reader, was motivated to read the first Harry Potter book because all of his friends were talking about it and he wanted to be a part of the conversation. Sadly, when the movies were released, the books lost value to him because he could still be part of the discussion without reading the books. I imagine that is one reason Round Robin Reading is less than effective; students who can't read as well as their peers lose that sense of relatedness to the students who can read well.

Most teachers recognize what is not reflected in school reform efforts; student motivation is vital to the learning process. The good news is that teachers who are motivated to motivate students will have more success and fulfillment in their teaching careers than teachers who don't believe that motivating students is part of their job. It seems to me that most students can be motivated by any teacher who cares about them as an individual.

I know I learned more from teachers who motivated me. One look at my high school report card will quickly identify which teachers motivated me and which teachers did not. My high school AP English teacher, Mrs. Earl, motivated me to read books that I normally wouldn't choose to read because she taught me the value in expanding my horizons and learning new things even if I didn't want to initially (a skill that was very useful in college, as you can imagine). Did you have a teacher that was particularly motivating to you? What have you learned about motivating students to learn? What other factors do you believe are involved in motivation?

References

Bandura, A. (1996). Social cognitive theory of human development. In T. Husen &T.N. Postlewaite (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd ed. (pp5513-5518). Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Dweck, C.S. (2010). Mindsets and equitable education. Principal Leadership, 10 (5), 26-29.

Guthrie, J.T., Wigfield, A., Humenick, N.M, Perencevich, K.C., Taboada, A., & Barbosa, P. (2006). Influences of stimulating tasks on reading motivation and comprehension. Journal of Educational Research, 99 (4), 232-245.

Pintrich, P.R. (2003). A motivational science perspective on the role of student motivation in learning and teaching contexts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95 (4), 667-686.

Ryan, R.M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55 (1), 68-78.

Seifert, T.L. (2004). Understanding student motivation. Educational Research (46)2, 137-149.

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The Four Keys to Motivating Struggling Readers

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During a recent 'organization spree', my mom unearthed from the depths of the basement, a pile of report cards from my elementary through high school years. On my first grade report card my teacher had written, "Stacy can do anything that she puts her mind to."

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Best Practices in Spelling Instruction: A Research Summary

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Best Practices in Spelling Instruction: A Research Summary

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An overview of research related to the phonemic approach, whole word approach and the morphemic approach to teaching spelling is provided in this meta-analysis of spelling research.The findings highlight the importance of explicit/ direct spelling instruction in the classroom which include sequences lessons, cumulative review and systematic error connection. In addition, some spelling programs are highlighted which might be useful to consider using in the classroom for spelling instruction.

Simonsen, F., & Gunter, L. (2001). Best Practices in Spelling Instruction: A Research Summary. Journal of Direct Instruction, 1(2), 97-105.

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Best Practices in Spelling Instruction A Research Summary