The recent call for secondary reading instruction to move away from a focus on generic literacy strategies to discipline-specific language and literacy practices presents new challenges for secondary teacher preparation. This column identifies some of the roles literacy teacher educators can play in helping address these challenges.

Tour Across America is an interdisciplinary, project-based, multimodal (IPM) activity where students get the opportunity to apply what they learn to a real-life situation while illustrating the interdisciplinary nature of literacy. It provides students with a high-interest, creative platform to review, reinforce, and integrate learned literacy…

Young children who are learning to negotiate print experience emerging literacy. For adults who are beginning entrance into the navigation and negotiation of print literacy, the term "burgeoning" is selected as a more accurate portrayal of the nature of literacy extension into adulthood. This phenomenological case study investigates the…

This research investigated oral reading fluency as a predictor of silent reading fluency at the secondary and postsecondary levels. Several measures were used, including the Gray Oral Reading Test, the Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency, the Test of Silent Contextual Reading Fluency, and the Reading Observation Scale. A total of 223 students…

The annual What's Hot, What's Not in Literacy Survey has helped to define the literacy agenda and highlight topics receiving attention in the field over the last 15 years. The ebb and flow of the field of literacy often shifts with changes in legislation, policy, and curricula. As a result, what was formerly hot may subsequently receive…

The Common Core State Standards highlight the need to read--independently, closely, and proficiently--increasingly complex texts. However, they do not specify how such reading is to be done. This column provides a brief critique of text complexity and close reading and offers some concrete ideas for operationalizing these two concepts in secondary…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) require literacy instruction for secondary students across content areas, but they also recommend that this instruction account for the discipline-specific nature of academic texts. Since English language arts (ELA) teachers and literacy specialists are also responsible for teaching students to read across…

Those who teach literacy usually accept the idea that reading, writing, and study strategies are developmental. Youngsters develop their literacy from birth on, and, to some teachers, dividing literacy education into steadfast designations such as early childhood, elementary, middle, secondary, and college learning (which may have pragmatic value)…

This article presents the author's response to Rafael Heller's critique of her commentary on foregrounding the disciplines in secondary school literacy teaching and learning. Heller challenges the idea of approaching secondary literacy instruction from a disciplinary perspective by arguing that rather than teach young people the literate practices…

This article explores how third space theory might be used within literacy classrooms as a means of better understanding student learning resistance and devising ways to overcome it. The author uses vignettes from an 11th-grade student's efforts to contest spatial use within his language arts class as springboards to further consider how third…

As the knowledge that students have to learn becomes more specialized and complex in secondary schools, the language that constructs such knowledge also becomes more technical, dense, abstract, and complex, patterning in ways that enable content experts to engage in specialized social and semiotic practices. In order to effectively engage with the…

Nancy L. Shanklin, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, is the former director of the Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse, a joint project of the International Reading Association and National Council of Teachers of English. She advocates secondary-school coaching programs that apply what can be learned from experienced coaches…

Graphic novels can be used in the secondary school classroom as part of a multiliteracies approach to help develop critical literacies of English-language learner (ELL) students. One particular graphic novel, "Maus," is discussed as a possible teaching resource. Intellectually substantive graphic novels that foreground racism and immigrant…

Issues related to the long-term problems of the teaching and learning of secondary ESL students are described and discussed. It is concluded that the National Literacy Panel rationale for selecting approved research demonstrates a significant misunderstanding of the realities of secondary teaching and learning. The paper concludes with the…

Although a growing body of research and practice in reading strategy instruction in secondary education has identified specific and successful methods for encouraging metacognitive awareness, there is little published research connecting these findings to post-secondary literacy education. Consequently, a gap remains in the conception, and…