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This study focused on 12th-grade Chilean students’ ability to produce locally coherent persuasive texts and on the cognitive basis that underlies this ability. All the participants wrote persuasive texts and answered a test of recognition of incoherent sequences. A subsample wrote another persuasive text while thinking aloud and had a semistructured interview about the text composed. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze local coherence (LC) in students’ writing and the relation between products and students’ ability to recognize, explain, and self-regulate LC. The majority of students composed texts that were mostly coherent although ideas were presented in long unstructured sequences that did not use the more sophisticated LC resources to construct their reasons and opinions in writing. Findings suggest an association between being able to recognize incoherent sequences, using more sophisticated LC resources in writing, and being able to explain and self regulate LC during writing.

Increasing the vocabulary knowledge of young adolescent and adolescent students has been a focal point of educational research and many teacher professional development initiatives. Yet many teachers continue to use traditional, but generally ineffective, methods of classroom-based vocabulary instruction. Synthesizing the literature around the general topics of vocabulary instruction, classroom discourse, and teacher talk, this review provides a comprehensive and critical examination of instruction that supports vocabulary learning in older students with a particular focus on practices that promote productive discussions of content.

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The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a home repeatedreading intervention on the reading achievement of eight low-performing secondgrade children in an urban school by taking into consideration their need to develop automaticity and the role their parents play in this process. Specifically we posed the following questions: Does participation in a home repeated reading intervention improve children's (a) reading accuracy, (b) reading fluency, and (c) reading skills on an independent reading task? When parents participate in a home repeated reading intervention, (a) what word-study strategies do they use to support their children's reading and (b) how do the strategies they use influence children's subsequent word errors? A multiple-baseline across-subjects design and a pre-post design were used to assess the effectiveness of the intervention. Results indicated that all participants made substantially fewer reading errors during the intervention as compared to their performance on baseline stories. All participants demonstrated decreased error rates from the first to the last reading of stories, and significant fluency gains were evident in all cases when comparing mean baseline fluency with mean intervention fluency. All participants made considerable gains in fluency from the first to the last reading of each story, and all children improved on an independent reading measure. All participants read more than 10,000 words during the home intervention. Parents monitored their children's home reading. Four parents provided substantial word-level support, and the children who received this support made fewer repeated reading errors.

This metasynthesis presents the collective findings based on a small corpus of studies ( n = 28) that examined literacy coaching in elementary and secondary settings from a relational perspective. We frame our analysis using Lysaker’s notions of relational teaching and theorize that, like classroom teaching, powerful literacy coaching is grounded in dialogic, co-constructive interactions in which the coach and teacher jointly develop new knowledge and skills. Our analysis indicates that the realization of co-construction may be influenced by differential patterns related to positioning and dispositions toward coaching: (a) knowledge flow, (b) distributed expertise, and (c) vulnerability. To explicate these patterns, we present evidence of opportunities that enhanced co-construction and obstacles that reduced co-construction. We conclude by discussing how coaches and teachers can develop reciprocity in coach–teacher relationships and move toward more relational coaching approaches. Finally, we provide directions for future research.

Family literacy has been defined in many ways. To some, family literacy is an explanatory concept—a way to describe how parents and children read and write together and alone during everyday activities. To others, family literacy is a program or a curriculum—a construct for teaching parents how to prepare their children for success in school. In the context of most preschool and elementary school settings, both of these meanings are important. In this column, the author introduces the Intergenerational Literacy Project (ILP), a program in the northeastern United States that is dedicated to accomplishing family literacy in both senses of the term. Parents involved in the program attend classes to develop and extend their own English literacy and to support their children's literacy. Findings from the ILP have demonstrated rates of attendance and retention that exceed those of traditional adult basic education, an increase in the parents' use of reading and writing outside of class to achieve personal goals, and an increase in the frequency with which the parents engage their children in the types of literacy events that have been found to prepare children for success in early reading.