William H. Teale

Beginning Reading Instruction in Urban Schools: The Curriculum Gap Ensures a Continuing Achievement Gap.

Addressing beginning reading instruction in urban schools, this article proposes that a curriculum gap exists in many K–3 classrooms that operate under the guidelines of the No Child Left Behind Act and Reading First. The authors make a case for the inclusion of systematic and sustained instruction in comprehension, content knowledge, and writing in the early grades as well as attention to the Reading First emphases on phonological awareness, decoding, word recognition, and reading fluency.

Raising urban students' literacy achievement by engaging in authentic, challenging work

The In2Books program has been used in one urban public school system to improve students’ literacy. In the program, students correspond with adult pen pals to discuss books they have read.

Where Is NELP Leading Preschool Literacy Instruction? Potential Positives and Pitfalls

This article discusses the potential positive and problematic influences of the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP; 2008) report on prekindergarten and kindergarten classroom instructional practice. The authors support the instructional importance of the majority of the foundational skills identified in the NELP report as having “clear and consistently strong relationships with later conventional literacy skills” but also detail a number of concerns about NELP-influenced instructional recommendations drawn to date, arguing that the NELP report is both insufficiently clear and overly narrow with respect to what preschool teachers should be focusing on instructionally in early literacy.

Assessing vocabulary learning in early childhood

There is widespread agreement with in the field of early childhood education that vocabulary is important to literacy achievement and that reading aloud can support vocabulary growth. However, there are unexplored and significant problems with the ways we assess young children’s vocabulary learning from read-alouds. This paper critically reviews the forms of vocabulary assessment commonly used with young children, examining the benefits and drawbacks of each. This review found: (a) general vocabulary measures are not practical, meaningful measures for vocabulary learning of specific words from books read aloud, (b) researcher-developed measures for specific words from books read aloud that mimic normed general vocabulary measures include serious threats to validity and reliability, and (c) other forms of measurement, such as soliciting definitions from children, are difficult to score reliably. This critical review of existing vocabulary assessments of word learning from read-alouds concludes that researchers and practitioners should carefully consider their needs for assessment data so as to choose, design and balance the uses of assessments to meet their needs for meaningful, reliable data.

Redesigning Teacher Education Programs: How High Can We Fly?

This column brings to the attention of RT readers the hot topic of redesigning teacher education programs. Featured are interviews with professionals involved in a statewide redesign initiative in Tennessee, the Ready2Teach (R2T) program. The interviews highlight major changes in how teacher education programs are being transformed to prepare teachers to be ready to teach effectively on the first day they enter the classroom. Putting words into action, the Tennessee redesign initiative extends clinical experiences, utilizes problem-based learning, prepares preservice teachers to contribute to better utilize the databases that inform school programs, all with the promise of greatly enriching the literacy experiences and successes of the urban learner.

An Online Learning Community as Support for At-Risk Students’ Literacy Growth: Findings, Implications, and Challenges

In2Books is an online learning environment that brings together 9–12-year-old students in American elementary schools with adult mentors for the purpose of reading, responding to, and writing about children’s books in order to promote higher-level thinking and achievement related to literacy. Over the 10 years of its development, In2Books has focused especially on helping children from economically at-risk home backgrounds. This chapter discusses a series of three studies that have examined program impact on student achievement and engagement, as well as a variety of factors involved in constructing an online environment that is designed to be both user-friendly and educationally impactful. It addresses especially five crucial issues that have arisen in this process that we feel are instructive for future development related to online learning environments that intend to promote literacy skill in elementary school-age children.