This unique book focuses on how to provide effective instruction to K-12 students who find writing challenging, including English language learners and those with learning disabilities or language impairments. Prominent experts illuminate the nature of writing difficulties and offer practical suggestions for building students' skills at the word, sentence, and text levels. Topics include writing workshop instruction; strategies to support the writing process, motivation, and self-regulation; composing in the content areas; classroom technologies; spelling instruction for diverse learners; and assessment approaches. Every chapter is grounded in research and geared to the real-world needs of inservice and preservice teachers in general and special education settings.

This unique book focuses on how to provide effective instruction to K-12 students who find writing challenging, including English language learners and those with learning disabilities or language impairments. Prominent experts illuminate the nature of writing difficulties and offer practical suggestions for building students' skills at the word, sentence, and text levels. Topics include writing workshop instruction; strategies to support the writing process, motivation, and self-regulation; composing in the content areas; classroom technologies; spelling instruction for diverse learners; and assessment approaches. Every chapter is grounded in research and geared to the real-world needs of inservice and preservice teachers in general and special education settings.

Focusing on reading and writing ability/disability from an interactive perspective, this text emphasizes the importance of understanding and addressing learner’s difficulties in relation to the instructional context. Extensive, in-depth treatment of current research and best practices make this text a 'must-have' addition to any current or future teacher's library. Section I (Chs. 1-3) provides readers with a strong, comprehensive knowledge of reading/writing research and an introduction to an assessment-instruction process that is described in-depth in the second, third, and fourth sections of the text. Section two considers the foundations of literacy with a strong emphasis on language development along with detailed information on evaluating the instructional context. Section three focuses on procedures for evaluating the learner, including both classroom-based and standardized assessments. Section four stands alone as an important chapter examining the relationship between the instructional context and learner’s strengths and weaknesses by means of diagnostic teaching. Section five is devoted to instructional practices designed to improve reading and writing instruction for struggling students. Chapters on word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension-composition, and “high-utility strategies” address the major components of literacy development. In the final section (Ch. 16), issues related to professional standards and written reports are addressed.

Writing is a challenging task for many children. To address this issue, many educational researchers advocate for schools to implement a multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) model where struggling writers can be detected as early as kindergarten and provided with intervention programming to improve their skills and hopefully not need long-term placement in special education. Traditionally, schools have employed the wait-to-fail model where children were offered the opportunity to learn to read, write, and do math in the first few years of elementary school; if they still struggled at the end of third grade (age eight), then they would be assessed for special education. The problem with this was not only a delayed assessment timeline, but also the standardized tests not having an adequate set of questions to assess early-elementary grade skills, as well as the ethical problems and racial/ethnic biases of test questions. MTSS provides educators with a renewed emphasis on early intervention and progress-monitoring assessment once or twice a week to monitor each student’s skills and make instructional changes to promote success. This book offers a description and case examples of how schools and teachers can apply MTSS concepts for writing.

Highly practical and accessible, this indispensable book provides clear-cut strategies for improving K-12 writing instruction. The contributors are leading authorities who demonstrate proven ways to teach different aspects of writing, with chapters on planning, revision, sentence construction, handwriting, spelling, and motivation. The use of the Internet in instruction is addressed, and exemplary approaches to teaching English-language learners and students with special needs are discussed. The book also offers best-practice guidelines for designing an effective writing program. Focusing on everyday applications of current scientific research, the book features many illustrative case examples and vignettes.

This book has been replaced by Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Third Edition, ISBN 978-1-4625-3796-9.