Susan Watts-Taffe

Vocabulary: Questions from the classroom

The authors review important research in vocabulary teaching and learning, and then address questions teachers have about vocabulary instruction.

Differentiated Instruction: Making Informed Teacher Decisions.

This article addresses approaches to differentiating instruction to meet the needs of students whose literacy needs, interests, and strengths vary widely. This article was designed to support classroom teachers who understand the importance of differentiating instruction, but are unsure of how best to design and implement differentiation within the parameters of the classroom. The article begins by defining differentiated instruction and discussing its importance, including the role of differentiation with respect to diversity and with respect to Response to Intervention (RTI). The remainder of the article describes in detail two examples of differentiated instruction in classroom contexts. Each example is followed by a discussion of the research and decision-making underlying the teachers approach to differentiation. The article concludes with common characteristics of effective differentiation.

Preparing Teachers to Teach Literacy: Rethinking Preservice Literacy Education

Editorial Assistants Mariko Ventura Vince Caputi NATIONAL-LOUIS UNIVERSITY We were delighted to have the opportunity to guest edit this special issue of JLR devoted to literacy education for preservice teachers. When editors David Reinking, Cyndie Hynd, and Donna Alvermann solicited suggestions for a themed issue at meetings of the JLR editorial reviewboard and the NRC publications committee, as well as on the NRC listserv, the topic of teacher education emerged far more than any other. Indeed, there are a number of reasons preservice teacher education is currently a hot topic. To situate this volume within a broad frame, we present two contexts for the recent interest in preservice teacher education.

Fostering Reader Response and Developing Comprehension Strategies in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

In response to the increasing use of childrens trade books in school reading programs, this article reviews the use of real text, drawing on the application and interaction of two distinct perspectives: reader response theory and comprehension instruction. The authors propose the need to combine knowledge of instruction with the new focus on the role of the reader within response theory and within comprehension research. This article suggests how comprehension instruction and response to literature activities can intersect in the classroom for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Explicit models and instructional strategies are discussed in the framework of this bimodal approach to reading. A sample list of high quality childrens books, including several trade books that feature deaf or hard of hearing characters and issues, is provided as a resource for teachers.