Literacy practices interviews are informal assessments that elicit information on students' reading and writing activities, including their free-time reading habits, their access to books, and their attitudes toward reading and writing. Use the interviews in one-on-one or small, focus group-like settings.

Engaging all students in a themed study or unit is a challenge that teachers can resolve by using materials that match students' independent or instructional reading levels (Robb 1994, 2000). When students face textbooks that are above their reading levels, teachers can help them access the required information by filling their classrooms with multiple texts that vary in readability level. Multiple texts improve students' application of reading-thinking strategies, build confidence, and develop the motivation to learn. Through the use of multiple texts, all students have the opportunity to learn new information and make meaningful contributions to discussions. Moreover, varied texts provide multiple perspectives that help students rethink events and issues that impact everyone and deepen their knowledge of literary genres.

Thematic pairings of novels/short stories with movies can help students access difficult texts and can lead to deeper comprehension and lively classroom discussion. This article suggests pairings for some commonly assigned middle and high school texts for several important themes.

Pre-reading activities can engage student interest, activate prior knowledge, or pre-teach potentially difficult concepts and vocabulary. They also offer a great opportunity to introduce comprehension components such as cause and effect, compare and contrast, personification, main idea, and sequencing.

Textbook previewing strategies focus not only on the structure of the text - such as the table of contents, index, chapter introductions, and so forth - but on a content overview, which focuses on the concepts and questions covered in the chapter and their interrelationships.

This article answers four common questions teachers have about vocabulary instruction, including what words to teach and how well students should know vocabulary words.

Students need to learn the purposes and methods of narration in order to understand the narrative framework and to eliminate frustration when they read. When students know the narrative elements, they can more easily follow the story line and make successful predictions about what is to occur. In addition, understanding these elements develops higher-level thinking skills.

Comprehension strategies are conscious plans - sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension. The seven strategies here appear to have a firm scientific basis for improving text comprehension.

Social support strategies that sustain the preparation and success of all students are critical to improving academic achievement, raising expectations, and increasing the college-going rates of underserved students.

Many areas of instruction can have a rippling effect for the expansion of readers' repertoire of skills, including pre-reading, predicting, testing hypotheses against the text, asking questions, summarizing, etc. Literacy-rich, content-area classrooms include a variety of instructional routines that provide guidance to students before, during, and after reading.

The most effective vocabulary instruction teaches word meanings as concepts; it connects the words being taught with their context and with the students' prior knowledge. Six techniques have proven especially effective: Concept Definition Maps, Semantic Mapping, Semantic Feature Mapping, Possible Sentences, Comparing and Contrasting, and Teaching Word Parts. RI.9-10.4 word meanings/impact of choice

It's a misconception that writing teachers simply tell students to write and wait to see what happens. Teachers should provide instruction in and exposure to various elements of writing to help students understand what good writing is.

To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one. RI.9-10.10a&b text complexity

It is possible for educators to make better choices about how and when to teach to the test than the alarmist newspaper articles and editorials would seem to suggest. This article from the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement aims to help readers think beyond simple compliance with federal law or basic implementation of programs.

The more a new vocabulary word is associated with ideas from students' own experience, the more likely the word will become well 'networked' and a permanent part of memory. Making these links involves elaborating definitions of new terms. This article offers teachers several ways to facilitate elaboration.

Effective vocabulary instruction begins with diverse opportunities for word learning: wide reading, high-quality oral language, word consciousness, explicit instruction of specific words, and independent word-learning strategies. This article explains how these opportunities can be created in the classroom.

The social and economic implications of America's high dropout rate are staggering. In addition to the waste of human potential, the costs of dropouts include lower tax revenues from lower paying jobs, higher crime rates, higher demand for social services, and the loss of global economic competitiveness.

When you continue your studies after high school, should you tell the school and instructors about your learning disability? This article will help you decide when and how to disclose your disability to obtain accommodations.

Given that teachers often have too much to teach and too little time, teacher Dana Dusbiber suggests an alternative approach to teaching literature for secondary ELLs: the introduction of more multicultural literature in the classroom.

How can you help high school students get ready for post-secondary education? Review these recommendations from the Department of Education and find out how to help students understand their disabilities, explain their disabilities to their professors well enough to obtain accommodations, and develop the computer and time-management skills required of college students.