Adapting Basal Instruction to Improve Content Area Reading

Expanding basal reading instruction so that students will develop the ability to read effectively in the content areas is a recognized concern and legitimate goal of middle school teachers. This article offers suggestions on how teachers can achieve that goal by adapting the procedures recommended in their present basal manuals. Specifically, adaptations are suggested in three common basal procedures: setting the purpose, developing a vocabulary, and discussing the selection. Each adaptation can serve as a bridge for helping students apply what they learn in basal reading instruction to content area reading

Teaching the Process of Inferring through a Listening Guide

What follows is a listening procedure for helping even very young children learn how to negotiate meaning from an author\u27s implied statements

The Mnemonic Value of the Picto-Organizer for Word Identification Among Disabled Readers

The present study was designed to compare the effects of a mnemonic strategy which utilized context to facilitate word recognition and identification with a context-free strategy. Specifically, disabled readers were taught to recognize and identify meanings for abstract words either through the mediation of a picto-organizer or through flashcard presentation. The idea of a picto-organizer evolved from an earlier study (Alvermann, 1980) in which students recalled a story using key vocabulary terms schematically arranged to show hierarchical and parallel relationships among words (see Barron, 1969). The picto-organizer provides pictorial clues to word meanings as they are used in the context of a story. This direct meaning-bearing property of the picto-organizer makes it particularly appealing, since much of the criticism leveled again mnemonic strategies in the past has been that they help only with meaningless, rote learning (Bellezza, 1981; Higbee, 1979)

Podcasting practices: Mediators of archival work, ELA teacher education curricula, and digital identities

This paper investigates how a semester-long online course in a language and literacy teacher education department coupled a podcast project with archival pedagogy and restorying to explore how ELA (English Language Arts) teachers (preservice, inservice teachers, and those seeking re-entry) worked collaboratively to enrich understandings of instruction embedded in a high-tech environment. The course was taught in the southeastern United States at the height of a global pandemic. After the semester ended, three graduate students (from a class of 21) joined the instructor to qualitatively analyze data collected during the previous 14 weeks. Data sources included digitally stored videos, archived library objects, class emails, rubrics, asynchronous discussion boards, synchronous Zoom discussions, and student-generated podcast projects. Findings point to the merit of providing agentic-learning opportunities through podcasting practices that mediated students’ archival work, ELA teacher education curricula, and digital identity formation. Implications are drawn for ELA classroom teachers and teacher educators

Dyslexia in SNS: an Exploratory Study to Investigate Expressions of Identity and Multimodal Literacies

The paradigm of neurodiversity provides a theoretical scaffold to challenge the idea of dyslexia as a deficit, by considering how difficulties related to literacy may reflect possible cognitive strengths and opportunities for learning. In this paper we adopt this perspective which associates dyslexia with strengths in visual, oral and three-dimensional thinking. Our goal is to understand if and how the multimodal affordances of SNS mediate participation and new literacies for dyslexic youth, and how these affordances interact with identity work. Seven young people struggling with literacy were interviewed about their use of SNS. Our results show that the visual affordances of SNS enable new forms of participation and expression, furthering our understanding of visual literacies. Nonetheless, despite the pervasive use of visual affordances to perform identity work, we also find that young people's learning differences are not always obviated but re-constructed, or even confronted in SNS