In an affinity space no one is stopped from gaining intensive knowledge because someone else thinks they are “my low students” or “struggling.”

Furthermore, rarely is the core generator (e.g. the textbook or the curriculum guide) modified (“patched”) in an ongoing way based on student desires, pleasures, displeasures, actions, and interactions.

Many children are exposed to language and other symbols connected to modern technologies and media (e.g. the Internet, video games, text messaging) that seem more compelling and motivating than school language.

ensuring that people feel like they belong to and are a valued and accepted part of the social group within which their learning takes place

The teacher heard her as rambling.

What we are dealing with here is talking and thinking about the (internal) design of the game

He ended up reading on the Internet, in books, and in his video games much more complicated and much more academic-like language than he read in his first-grade school texts.

Some planets that are near the sun are hot; others that are a little farther away are warm.

What is happening here is that a little girl, who cannot yet “really” read, is learning and practicing non-vernacular forms of language associated with school and schooling.

All human beings acquire their first language well, and about equally well as everyone else

Poor children do it as well as rich, if they have access to the cards, games, or figures.

comprehension instruc-tion be conducted in small groups or individually based on students’ needs

The model we recommend for teaching any comprehension strategy is the gradual release of responsibility

teachers were assigned at random to introduce a set of strategies briefly and then quickly move students to applying or juggling multiple strategies simultaneously, which resulted in students with stronger performance on some measures.

For example, it is a rare day when a book about shark attacks or one by Steven Jenkins does not garner great interest in many students.

teachers will have to employ a variety of instructional strategies, such as partner reading and collaborative strategy use, to pro-vide the extra measure of scaffolding needed to support students’ com-prehension of more challenging text

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

replaces literacy instruction with a two-hour block of inte-grated science–literacy instruction.

comprehension of the expository text, in contrast to the narrative text, was significantly related to the student’s amount of world knowledge

Skilled readers are also more motivated and engaged readers, reading more actively and more voluminously, thus further developing their knowledge and skill

integration of the text base with relevant prior knowledge from readers’ store of knowledge in long-term memory.

We use our knowledge of the world, along with our knowledge of how language and text work, to make all the local inferences required to connect the sentences to one another—to build, if you will, a coherent representation of what the text says.

We must more proactively integrate language, literacy, and content learning in the early grades and, indeed, later on, as well.

Let them, beginning at an early age, play the game of one or more of these professions.

Indeed, the Internet requires a good deal of technical reading for a student to fully leverage its possibilities for learning and knowledge production, or even to access, assess, and modify the plethora of information it makes available

But such “catch-up” interventions, which immerse children in school-based language as it applies to the world and to problem-solving, must continue from kindergarten through middle school to be effective

It means being able to use such facts and information, as well as various technologies and practices, to solve problems.

“Tier 2 words”

This breadth of vocabulary is created by parents talking to children, answering their questions, reading to them, modeling their own pleasure in reading, and offering their children a wide variety of experiences in the world.

synchronyof reading, writing, andspelling development

Knowing the stage of spelling of each of your students will determine your choices of ap-propriate word study activities.

Sim-ply put, we must teach to where a child “is at.”

One unique quality of word study as we describe it lies in what we believeis the critical role of differentiating instruction for different levels of word knowledge.

The purpose of word study, then, is to examine words in order to reveal consistencieswithin our written language system and to help students master the recognition,spelling, and meaning of specific words.

The most effective instruction in phonics, spelling, and vo-cabulary links word study to the texts being read, provides a systematic scope and se-quence of word-level skills, and provides multiple opportunities for hands-on practiceand application.

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.

differentiate

During word study, words and pictures are sorted in routines that re-quire children to examine, discriminate, and make critical judgmentsabout speech sounds, word structures, spelling patterns, and meanings.

We believethat this word study is well worth the 10 to 15 minutes of time daily.

students expand their vocabularies by comparing one concept with another.

Students need hands-on opportunities to manipulate word features in a way that al-lows them to generalize beyond isolated, individual examples to entire groups of wordsthat are spelled the same way

Itmay be helpful to increase the use of concreteobjects or other cues to represent sounds and toprovide more phonemic awareness instructionthat includes familiar letters. Also, by focusingon sounds that can be elongated, teachers aremore likely to draw students’ attention to thosesounds

Someof them also may be used with older children.

In linguistically rich classrooms, phonemicawareness activities will be incorporated inten-tionally into literature sharing experiences, musicexperiences, movement experiences, and otherexperiences throughout the day.

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

the difficulty of the task depends inpart upon the number of sounds (fewer soundsare easier than more), which sounds they are(liquids are typically easier than nasals or stops),and their location in the word (middle sounds aremore difficult to attend to than initial or finalsounds).

They may be asked toblend sounds together to form a word (e.g., Whatword would we have if we put these sounds to-gether? /j/-/u/-/m/-/p/). They may be asked tosegment words into their constituent parts (e.g.,Tell all the sounds you hear in the word dog).

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

Adams andBruck (1995), for instance, submitted that songs,chants, and word-sound games are ideally suit-ed toward developing young children’s sensitiv-ity to the sound structure of language. Beck andJuel (1995) posited that time spent on word play,nursery or Dr. Seuss rhymes, and general expo-sure to storybooks contribute to phonemicawareness. Mattingly (1984) encouraged class-room teachers to provide their students with lin-guistic stimulation in the form of storytelling,word games, rhymes, and riddles in order to fa-cilitate phonemic awareness.

Such domain-specific or task-specific qualifi-cation of student ability added to the conditionality of learning.

Schools clearly functioned as social institutions centeredaround the interactions of students and teachers.

The goal of learning was no longerseen as the development of an individually held body of knowledge, but rather thecreation of a mutual understanding arising in the social interaction of particularindividuals in a particular context at a particular time.

aspectrum of general text-processing strategies, including summarization, map-ping, self-questioning, and predicting

There was little, if any, consideration of sociocultural or contextual influences onthe processing of linguistic information

Text-based learningwas about knowledge, which was organized and stored within the individualmind, and resulted from the input, interpretation, organization, retention, and out-put of information from the individual’s environment

his new perspective held littleregard for the innateness or naturalness of reading and little interest in the amal-gamation of literacy fields

miscue analysis

Learning to read was not so much a matter ofbeing taught, but a matter of arriving at facility as a result of a predisposition toseek understanding within a language-rich environment.

human beings were biologicallyprogrammed to acquire language under favorable conditions

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

Such perceptual activities included the identification of visualsignals; the translation of these signals into sounds; and assembly of these soundsinto words, phrases, and sentences

developingand validating diagnostic instruments and remedial techniques

effectiveness of phonics-based techniques over those that relied on a whole-word approach

often linked with theapplication of carefully chosen rewards and punishments,