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This study aims to investigate elementary students’ perceptions about women’s roles throughout US history, and the extent to which these perceptions can be challenged or expanded by interactive read-alouds.

Third-grade students participated in interviews designed to investigate their thoughts about women’s historical roles before and after engaging in a series of interactive read-alouds featuring notable women in history. Pre- and post-interviews were analyzed to assess shifts in perception.

The research findings suggest that students initially perceived historical women as insignificant and held stereotypical views about their roles and that this perception was challenged following the interactive read-alouds. Changes were indicated through increased references to women during interviews and through answers that challenged stereotypical views.

This study adds insight about students’ perceptions regarding women’s history and supports the use of interactive read-alouds to challenge stereotypical views of women’s historical roles.

The purpose of this paper is to review published research on using interactive read-alouds in the instruction of English language learners (ELLs). In particular, this paper emphasizes the practical application of research findings to help classroom teachers and other educators make instructional decisions that promote both effective and equitable instruction.

For this literature review, the authors conducted a systematic keyword search of multiple electronic databases to identify relevant research studies. Once studies were identified, the authors used a qualitative content analysis method (Guba and Lincoln, 1981; Holsti, 1969; Lincoln and Guba, 1985) to identify themes.

The findings were grouped into three distinct categories: pedagogy, language and culture. While many aspects of effective interactive read-alouds are similar for ELLs and mainstream students, this paper highlights elements of interactive read-alouds that are different or especially important for ELLs.

This review, unlike the 2,000 potentially relevant studies initially identified, considers the interplay of pedagogy, language and culture when using interactive read-alouds with ELLs. The explicit focus on practical classroom application makes this literature review useful for both researchers and practitioners.

Purpose – To provide differentiated teaching models and a set of instructional reading strategies and materials for current and future classroom teachers to help them enhance the quality of reading instruction for English Learners (ELs).

Design/methodology/approach – The instructional reading strategies and materials and differentiated teaching models presented in this chapter are drawn from a body of current literature on ELs' English language development and on effective reading instruction for ELs. The instructional reading strategies and materials are categorized into five subcomponents of reading instruction: sight words, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Findings – Provides differentiated teaching models and specific instructional strategies and materials that target each of the five specific subcomponents of reading instruction for ELs (i.e., sight words, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension).

Research limitations/implications – Some publications related to instructional reading strategies and materials may be limited to specific ELs in United States who speak a predominate native language (i.e., Spanish). These instructional reading strategies and materials may not be appropriate for ELs speaking another native language.

Practical implications – A very useful source of differentiated teaching models and practical instructional reading strategies and materials for current and future classroom teachers of ELs.

Originality/value – This chapter provides specific information and resources for current and future classroom teachers of ELs to support them in delivering high quality reading instruction.

The purpose of this article is to explain and demonstrate a critical disciplinary read aloud strategy that has both an equity goal and a social studies goal.

The authors begin by explaining background information on read alouds and critical disciplinary literacy. Then, the authors explain the four steps in the critical disciplinary literacy read aloud strategy. As the authors do so, they share important research that supports each of the four steps. Next, the authors offer a sample lesson plan using the informational picture book, Carter Reads the Newspaper.

The lesson plan uses a 5E template to promote critical disciplinary literacy before, during and after reading in such a way that teachers can foster inquiry through the use of social studies read alouds. After reading this article, teachers will understand more about what critical disciplinary literacy means, what it looks like a lesson plan and how to create their own similar plans using the template and resources provided.

The critical disciplinary literacy strategy offers teachers a way to engage elementary students in work that highlights social justice topics and inquiry.

This paper aims to investigate teacher-initiated whole-group oral reading practices in two ninth-grade reading intervention classrooms and how teachers understood the purposes of those practices.

In this qualitative cross-case analysis, a literacy-as-social-practice perspective is used to collaboratively analyze ethnographic data (fieldnotes, audio recordings, interviews, artifacts) across two classrooms.

Oral reading was a routine instructional reading event in both classrooms. However, the literacy practices that characterized oral reading and teachers’ purposes for using oral reading varied depending on teachers’ pedagogical philosophies, instructional goals and contextual constraints. During oral reading, students’ opportunities to engage in independent meaning making with texts were either absent or secondary to other purposes or goals.

Findings emphasize the significance of understanding both how and why oral reading happens in secondary classrooms. Specifically, they point to the importance of collaborating with teachers to (a) examine their own ideas about the power of oral reading and the institutional factors that shape their existing oral reading practices; (b) investigate the intended and actual outcomes of oral reading for their students and (c) develop other instructional approaches to support students to individually and collaboratively make meaning from texts.

This study falls at the intersection of three under-researched areas of study: the nature of everyday instruction in secondary literacy intervention settings, the persistence of oral reading in secondary school and teachers’ purposes for using oral reading in their instruction. Consequently, it contributes new knowledge that can support educators in creating more equitable instructional environments.

To explore the use of video-stimulated reflection during read aloud activities in early childhood to promote self-awareness, reading comprehension, and metacognitive literacy practices.

The increasing visibility and accessibility of video recording devices across learning environments is the cause for investigating their potential utility as effective instructional tools. This chapter outlines a pedagogical approach to the implementation of video reflection in early childhood education. Grounded theory is used to build an understanding of how video can support effective emergent literacy and metacognitive strategy instruction.

Video recordings facilitated students’ reflection. Common reflective themes include revisiting the recorded event in reflective discussion, elaboration on story elements toward increasing comprehension, and explaining students’ own thinking. These findings indicate students’ ability to engage in emergent practices fundamental to a disciplinary literacy perspective.

The use of tablets as a video device in early childhood can be utilized to promote reading instruction and metacognition. Video reflection can leverage practices that are necessary for disciplinary literacies.

Purpose – This chapter argues that classroom teachers need to be more effective and efficient in order to meet the needs of all students and support their grade-level achievement. Given the challenges of contemporary schools – mandated curricula, intensive monitoring and intervention, high-stakes testing, and increased student diversity – teachers are expected to incorporate research-based practices in sophisticated ways. This chapter challenges teachers to assess and enhance their instructional effectiveness.

Approach – This chapter explores ways for teachers to make literacy assessment and instruction more appropriate, productive, and successful, which requires that teachers expand their repertoire of methods and consider ways to deliver instruction expeditiously.

Content – Examples of inefficient practices preface a discussion of some common hindrances to more streamlined instruction. The chapter demonstrates the use of literacy assessment to support more flexible instructional activities, focusing on literacy delivery modes that align with increasingly more difficult text. Subsequent discussion details numerous literacy experiences, including variations of teacher-led, collaborative, guided, partner, and student-led reading. Seven guidelines are presented. The conclusion summarizes an example of how a reading coach used assessment to synthesize an effective intervention to support the marked improvement of a third-grade reader.

Implications – The chapter's goal is that teachers consider ways to combine experiences that increase effectiveness, efficiency, and engagement. Readers can explore ways to use assessment to improve their instruction. Numerous suggestions and activities accompany the discussion.

Value – The chapter content challenges teachers to streamline and sophisticate their literacy instruction and demonstrates ways to combine literacy experiences that foster student achievement and engagement.

Each year, our university’s small community welcomes 200 refugees. Many refugee children’s schooling is interrupted due to long waits in refugee camps, so they need additional educational opportunities. Families from the refugee community and representatives from the Church World Services, a local refugee-resettlement agency, partnered with James Madison University to create a summer program that provides children from the refugee community with more support in English and reading. Creativity And Reading Education (CARE) is a summer program for Pre-K-3rd grade children in the refugee community that integrates creativity and English/literacy development by utilizing community-based field trips for real-world connections and applications. Pre-service teachers in this six-credit experience planned and facilitated morning meetings, integrated literacy/creativity activities, read aloud sessions, and vocabulary focused on field trips. We partnered with the schools and recruited 16 pre-service teachers, 30 children, and 10 parents to participate in the three-week program. This chapter explicates how CARE was conceptualized and implemented during its pilot year. We highlight our community partnerships, illuminate challenges and lessons learned, and explain next steps as the subsequent iteration of the CARE program that evolves to serve more students and families.

Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students’ schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander and Ehret, 2019). This article, taking up the notion of affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the in-betweenness among people, objects and material and discursive contexts, examines how two US Latinx teachers and their young bilingual students co-constructed affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds with a bilingual text that centered their culturally rooted ways of knowing and being.

Drawing on data from a larger practitioner research study that aimed at developing teacher candidates’ culturally and linguistically sustaining literacy instruction, the authors took a discourse analytic approach to examine how the two teachers created curricular opportunities for affect and play in designing the translanguaging read-alouds and how bilingual children and their teachers playfully engaged with the bilingual text during the read-alouds.

The analysis indicated that the teachers’ intentional selection of the Spanish–English bilingual picturebook Niño Wrestles the World created opportunities for the children to leverage their full linguistic repertoire and funds of knowledge to engage with the text. During the read-alouds, the children and the teachers co-constructed affect and playfulness through embodied performance and translanguaging.

This study contributes to the research and practice of literacy instruction of bilingual children by illustrating how affect figures into the process of literacy instruction and how translanguaging read-alouds can afford bilingual children opportunities to playfully engage with the text that centers their cultural epistemologies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why reading aloud (RA), both by teachers and students, is such a common practice in high school classrooms. In particular, this investigation considers students’ views of why RA is practised and what are its effects.

The paper presents the results of two small focus group discussions, in which high school students were given the opportunity to express their responses to the notion of RA in the classroom. Their responses are considered in the context of theoretical views of RA: pedagogical, reader-response and social/vocational.

Analysis of responses revealed acknowledgement that RA is not only a useful skill but also that it is in the classroom, a site of anxiety and even conflict.

The sample is small and of very circumscribed generalisability. The students’ responses indicate further questions that might usefully be asked about the purpose and value of RA, in school and in society.

The findings have implications for teachers’ practice, particularly in terms of the extent to which and the conditions in which students’ RA can develop confidence.

Although much has been written about the use of RA with young children, it remains under-researched in mainstream high schools.