Learning, especially build-ing the Web, involves constructing new content.

history’s first generation of “always connected” individuals do not have the knowledge and skills to critically explore, build, and connect online

pick up these practices through joint action with more advanced peers, and advance their abilities to engage and work with others in carrying out such practices

Computer and video games have a built-in advantage in the creation of motivation for an extended engagemen

Shortening and dumbing games down is not an option, since most avid players don’t want short or easy games.

The examples will be familiar to many. They are things like children doing pretend readings of books, that sound like the child is reading a real book, or children reporting at dinnertime on their day in a fashion that sounds like a school report. Some families encourage their children to do these things, while others don’t—some, in fact, wouldn’t be caught dead doing some of these things.

what I have called a cultural learning process is how the vast majority of young people today learn to play computer and video games

So does this mean, as the traditionalists argue, that reading is an instructed process? Does learning to read require lots of overt instruction? Not necessarily.

So what is it about school that manages to transform children who are good at learning (witness Pokémon), regardless of their economic and cultural differences, into children who are not good at learning, if they are poor or members of certain minority groups?

You simply have to feel unaffiliated with school and formal schooling for any of a variety of reasons.

A Tool for Evaluating Your Fostering and Teaching of Reading Comprehension

1) when, why, and how to apply strategies, and (2) that by being able to pull out just the right tool to get over a hurdle at just the right moment, students become smarter, more effective, and more strategic readers.

We certainly want readers to have opportunities to read texts that are not difficult for them, but we also want readers to have access to texts that challenge them.

n providing exposure to a range of texts, one important dimension to consider is the genre of the text, particularly its communicative purpose.

not only represent beginning,middle, and ending sounds within words, but they also learn to deal with more am-biguous sounds

This typeof writing issemiphonetic

What students do correctly—an independent or easy level2.What students use but confuse—an instructional level where instruction is mosthelpful3.What is absent in students’ spelling—a frustration level where spelling concepts aretoo difficult

Designing a word studyprogram that explicitly teaches students necessary skills and engages their interest andmotivation to learn about how words work is a vital aspect of any literacy program

, the Bag Game, described here forphoneme manipulation, can be used for syllablemanipulation

Make a Word (letters)

qualityof instruction and the responsive-nessof the instruction to the individuals in theclassroom that should have greater considerationthan the amount of time

their location in the word (middle sounds aremore difficult to attend to than initial or finalsounds)

A sequence for phonemic awareness instruction

Phonemicawareness development is not meaningful in andof itself. It is important only in the context ofcomprehensive reading instruction.

“learning to read” and “reading to learn” stages (Chall, 1995) is shifting to a moreintegrated and developmental perspective.

teachers played the essential role of facilitator or guide (Rogoff &Gauvain, 1986; Vygotsky, 1934/1986), with the scaffolding provided by theteacher diminishing in proportion to the students’ increasing knowledge, interest,and strategic abilities in a particular area (e.g., Alexander, 1997b; Brown &Palincsar, 1989), so that students could develop self-direction and autonomy(Deci & Ryan, 1991)

schooling, at least, was a social and cultural phenomenon,

multitude of “knowledges.”

Many students failed to benefit from the explicit instruction in strategies or com-ponents of reading that was intended to improve their text-based learning. Forsome students, there were no improvements produced by this instruction, whilefor others, the benefits did not endure or transfer

Rosenblatt contended that, depending on the goal of the learner and theinstructor, an individual’s response to a literary work falls along a continuumfrom an efferent to an aesthetic stance. Those assuming a more efferent stanceseek to uncover the “truths” voiced by some invisible or anonymous author

the focus was more on how those process-es and procedures could be best represented symbolically and transferred intocomputer programs that could approximate human performance (Fodor, 2001).In effect, these individuals were interested in creating “intelligent machines” thatmimicked the problem solving of intelligent humans

did not focus on identifying and eradicating thesource of readers’ errors. Rather, the goal was to ascertain how the unexpected re-sponses readers produced were reflective of their attempts at meaning-making

Language, as with other innatehuman capacities, was to be developed through meaningful use, not practiced tothe point of mindless reaction, as behaviorists proposed.

One of the qualitative changes was a seeming rise in the number of children expe-riencing difficulties in learning to read. Such reading problems, although nothingnew to teachers, took on particular significance in the age of Sputnik, as America’sability to compete globally became a defining issue