An AEP Award winner, this teacher-friendly guide integrates a variety of reading skills and strategies into your content-area instruction to improve comprehension of textbook reading and other informational text. This resource provides multiple strategies and ready-to-implement best practices to help students develop their reading, writing, and oral communication skills. Packed with creative teaching methods and techniques, up-to-date research-based theory and practical applications, this book is perfect for new and experienced educators.

Based on interactive elements that apply to every reading situation, the authors explain instructional strategies that work best in the subject areas and how to optimize those classrooms for reading, writing, and discussion.

Discusses the premises that guide the teaching of reading in content areas, the vast array of reading strategies available, and how to use this information to impact all learners.

What does it mean to teach reading in the context of the middle and high school classroom? Don’t students already know how to read by the time they get to secondary school? And how can a busy teacher take time away from the packed curriculum of science, history, mathematics, or language arts to teach reading? This book presents a linguistic approach to teaching reading in different subjects; an approach that focuses on language itself. Central to this approach is a view that knowledge is constructed in and through language and that language changes with changes in knowledge. As students move from elementary to secondary schools, they encounter specialized knowledge and engage in new contexts of learning in all subjects. This means that the language of secondary school learning is quite different from the language of the elementary years. While in the elementary years the subject matter of reading materials is often close to students’ everyday life experiences, the curriculum of secondary school deals with knowledge that is removed from students’ personal lives and everyday contexts. The language that constructs this more specialized knowledge thus tends to be more abstract, technical, information-laden, and hierarchically organized than the more familiar and “friendly” language that students typically encounter during the elementary years. Students need to develop specialized literacies (literacy relevant to each content area) as well as a critical literacy they can use across subject areas to engage with, reflect on, and assess specialized and advanced knowledge. This functional language analysis approach is shown using actual secondary social studies, science, and math textbooks and using a literary text.

"We often hear middle and high school teachers are frustrated because their students can′t understand the textbooks or can′t write effectively about their particular content. This book will provide both the framework for solving this dilemma and the specific, practical classroom practices that teachers can use each day to help students become more competent readers and writers." -Douglas Johnson, Assistant Superintendent Kane County Regional Office of Education, IL "Every middle school and secondary teacher should have a copy of this book. It not only provides the theoretical basis for each strategy, but it also provides effective instructions for use of the strategies in the classroom." -Dorothy Giroux, Program Director, Initial Teacher Preparation Program School of Education, Loyola University Chicago Eager for proven methods to strengthen your students′ content literacy? Then this book is a must-have for your classroom! Using a step-by-step approach that makes the strategies easy to understand and implement, the authors provide updated research-based strategies that will help increase your students′ reading comprehension, strengthen their writing skills, and build vocabulary across content areas. Expanded coverage of content literacy, additional reading and writing strategies for exploring content, and suggestions for working with struggling readers are included in this revised edition. This rich resource also offers: Tips for using trade books in the classroom Graphic organizers to help students recognize text structures Assessment tools Technology activities in every chapter Real classroom examples of how the strategies have been implemented More ways to evaluate the "readability" of textbooks Over 40 ready-to-use reproducibles Whether you are getting ready to begin teaching or are a veteran teacher, this accessible, invaluable handbook will give you the tools you need to help your students become lifelong learners!

Grade level: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, p, e, i, t.