About Teaching Reading
Teaching reading is a complex process. The best teachers develop an extensive knowledge base and draw on a repertoire of strategies for working with struggling students. To dig deeper, visit other sections of the website, including Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension.
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Effective Reading Programs for Middle and High Schools: A Best Evidence Synthesis
Many reading programs claim to boost student performance, but how is that measured? Johns Hopkins University examined more than 200 published studies to create this quick guide to programs.
Explicit Comprehension Strategy Instruction
Use explicit strategy instruction to make visible the invisible comprehension strategies that good readers use to understand text. Support students until they can use the strategies independently. Recycle and re-teach strategies throughout the year.
How Can Instruction Help Adolescent Students with Motivation?
Teachers have an important role to play in influencing and supporting students' motivation for learning. This article highlights four classroom strategies that educators can use to engage students with texts.
Intensive, Individualized Interventions for Struggling Readers
Because the cause of adolescents' difficulties in reading vary, interventions may focus on any of the critical elements of knowledge and skill required for the comprehension of complex texts, including fundamental skills such as phonemic awareness, phonemic decoding, text reading fluency, vocabulary-building strategies, and self-regulated use of reading comprehension strategies.
Extended Discussion of Text Meaning and Interpretation
Teachers should provide opportunities for students to engage in high-quality discussions of the meaning and interpretation of texts in various content areas as one important way to improve their reading comprehension.
Recommendations for Improving Adolescent Literacy
In its practice guide Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices, the Dept. of Education offers five recommendations for increasing the reading ability of adolescents. Those recommendations are summarized in this checklist.
The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study: Early Impact and Implementation Findings
While much has been learned about literacy in the elementary grades, less is known about programmatic approaches that help struggling adolescent readers acquire the skills they need to succeed in high school. The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study tests the effectiveness of two supplemental literacy interventions targeted to ninth-grade readers with reading comprehension skills that are two to four years below grade level. The interventions studied are (1) Reading Apprenticeship for Academic Literacy from WestEd and (2) Xtreme Reading from the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning.
