Supporting Struggling Readers and Writers

For most students, the intermediate years provide the last opportunity to prevent continued failure in reading and writing. These years are a critical bridge to the middle grades where the tendency is to be less personalized and focused on individual needs.Supporting Struggling Readers and Writersprovides teachers, administrators, and staff developers with the best research-based practice on the literacy learning and teaching of low-achieving intermediate students.Drawing on a combined forty years of classroom teaching experience, the authors explore the factors that contribute to success and failure in literacy and provide systematic and ongoing approaches for helping students who are most at risk. You will find: effective teaching practices for all the key aspects of literacy instruction that can be realistically implemented in the context of the classroom teacher's many demands; recommendations for motivating low-achieving students; suggestions for working with English Language Learners; strategies for small-group instruction, word study, reading comprehension, and writing; clear descriptions and numerous vignettes that illustrate teaching practices in action; an emphasis on differentiated instruction, and ideas for integrating interventions for struggling students with regular classroom instruction; ways of helping students perform better on standardized tests.The extensive Strategy Bank provides over twenty step-by-step practices, each with three sections: What It Does, How to Do It, and What to Look For. The Resources section provides extensive lists of children's books and sources of books, organized by purpose.Supporting Struggling Readers and Writerswill help you improve the reading and writing development of the most perplexing and needy children in your classroom.

Dorothy S. Strickland is the State of New Jersey Professor of Reading at Rutgers University.