Children's literate development is mediated by classroom talk. That same talk also mediates children's emotional, relational, self-regulatory, and moral development. Consequently, the discourse of some literacy teaching practices may be important for shaping the course of human development, and those dimensions of human development can play…

Technology-Facilitated Oral Homework (TFOH) is an umbrella term for the use of digital technologies that enable learners to record themselves speaking the target language and submit recordings to their teachers from outside the formal classroom environment. The goal is that this practice could lead to a decrease in debilitative Foreign Language…

Reading and thinking need to go hand in hand for students to become successful learners. The processes involved in thinking while reading must be modelled, practised, and infused into everyday instruction in all levels of education. There needs to be a balance between learning to read and reading to learn. Teachers are responsible for finding the…

Learning to read begins at home through everyday parent-child interactions, long before children attend school. Parents' continuing support of literacy development throughout elementary school positively affects their children's reading ability. Many recent efforts to motivate parents to be involved in their child's literacy development involve…

The purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of providing reading interventions that are differentiated and aligned with an individual student's most foundational reading skill need. The authors present profiles of different readers and suggest three principal areas for support: decoding words, reading at an appropriate rate, and…

Vowel teams such as vowel digraphs present a challenge to struggling readers. Some researchers assert that phonics generalizations such as the "two vowels go walking and the first one does the talking" rule do not hold often enough to be reliable for children. Others suggest that some vowel teams are highly regular and that children can…

By the time students enter the fourth grade, it is expected that they possess the basic literacy skills needed to read and learn content. It is the general belief that in the early grades, students are taught foundational literacy skills that make them proficient readers by the time they become adolescent learners. For many, this assumption is…

To be an effective communicator, students need to learn how to select the appropriate means of communication and be aware of potential obstacles. The model of communication process can be an effective framework for students to understand many pitfalls of the communication process. The described activity enables students to experience communication…

The prevalence of children with autism spectrum disorders appears to be on the increase and educators are becoming more aware of their educational and social needs. In particular, many students with high-functioning autism have a deficit in reading comprehension. As a consequence, there is now a greater determination by educators to design the…

This Study Snapshot highlights key findings from a study that examines up-to-date information about evidence-based practices that are essential for early childhood educators and policymakers as they support preschool children's language and literacy development. The study used a process modeled after the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) methodology…

Evidence based reading instruction and intervention are essential for students with disabilities. The authors recommend that elementary special education teachers emphasize both code-based and meaning-based skills as part of delivering intensive reading interventions, including providing explicit and systematic decoding and vocabulary instruction.…

The ability to use written language to communicate receptively (i.e., reading) and expressively (i.e., writing) is important in school, work, and independent living. Students who struggle early with reading have difficulty catching up with their peers as they move through school and in academic areas that rely on reading proficiency. Individuals…

There are 26 letters in the English language. These letters, in various combinations, represent the 44 sounds in the language. Teaching students the basic letter-sound combinations gives them access to sounding out approximately 84% of the words in English print. There needs to be equal amounts of time need to be spent on teaching the meanings of…

Reading comprehension is a complex task which depends on a range of cognitive and linguistic processes. According to the Simple View of Reading, this complexity can be captured as the product of two sets of skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. The Simple View explains variance in reading comprehension and provides a good framework to…

Reading is more than just decoding the letters on a page--although that is critically important. It is drawing meaning from text and making connections to the outside world. These are the critical thinking skills that determine success both in and outside the classroom. In past years, far too many of Tennessee's students have passed through…