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Articles & Reports

Alliance for Excellent Education: Reading Next
Reading Next is a cutting-edge report that combines the best research currently available with well-crafted strategies for turning that research into practice. Written by five of the nation's leading researchers, Reading Next charts an immediate route to improving adolescent literacy. The authors outline 15 key elements of an effective literacy intervention, and call on public and private stakeholders to invest in the literacy of middle and high school students today while simultaneously building the knowledge base.
www.all4ed.org/publications/ReadingNext/

Twenty Online Resources on Reading with Comprehension and Engagement offers two goals: serve as an information broker, culling 20 excellent resources from among the many that are posted on the web about this topic; and to draw attention to the wealth of resources that Reading Online and other professional journals and organizations are making freely available through the Internet. These articles focus on comprehension and engagement in reading.
www.readingonline.org/editorial/edit_index.asp?
HREF=/editorial/may2001/index.html

A 20th Century English Teacher Educator Enters the 21st Century: A Response to Pope and Golub provides an excellent overview of ways to use technology in the classroom.
www.citejournal.org/vol1/iss1/currentissues/english/article3.htm

A Portrait of Popularity: An Analysis of Characteristics of Novels from Young Adults' Choices for 1997 offers a complete picture of what young adults look for in selecting literature.
scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall99/chance.html

A Summary for Understanding Literature offers a concise yet useful description of Judith Langer's Envisionment of Literature.
www.mcps.k12.md.us/departments/oipd/mspap/
reading/LiteratureSummary.pdf

Acting Up across the Curriculum: Using Creative Dramatics to Explore Adolescent Literature is an ALAN article describing reasons and suggestions for ways to use drama with adolescent literature.
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/
spring97/s97-42-Kaplan.html

Adolescent Development describes the developmental and psychological tasks of adolescence.
ils.unc.edu/%7Esturm/yaliterature/adoldevelopment.html

Are Journals a Part of Four Blocks? is a brief article describing the reasons and uses for journal writing for the middle school level.
teachers.net/gazette/DEC01/sigmon.html

"At-Risk" Adolescents: Redefining Competence Through the Multiliteracies of Intermediality, Visual Arts, and Representation is an article with suggestions for using alternate media for at-risk students.
www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/
newliteracies/obrien/index.html

But Does it Work? Recent Research on Literature Circles offers a readable overview of recent research on the value of literature circles.
www.literaturecircles.com/research.htm

CES National Web Site—Assessment provides a description of using alternative assessment.
www.essentialschools.org/pub/ces_docs/
resources/cp/assess/assess.html

National Reading Panel
This report articulates the most effective approaches to teaching children to read, provides current research on reading and ready-to-use instruction practices for teachers, and provides a plan to rapidly disseminate the findings to teachers and parents.
www.nationalreadingpanel.org/

Creating Drama with Poetry: Teaching English as a Second Language Through Dramatization and Improvisation is an article focusing on creating drama with poetry.
www.cal.org/ericcll/digest/gaspar01.html

Dancing with YA Lit: Review of a Year's Work summarizes Don Gallo's criteria for selecting YA Literature and provides links to useful web sites.
scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall94/ResCONN.html

Eric Digest Portfolios: Assessment in Language Arts provides a readable description of why to use Portfolios in Language Arts.
www.indiana.edu/~reading/ieo/digests/d66.html

Evaluating Internet-based Information: A Goals-based Approach
This article describes the need for a goals-based approach to acquiring information online. It offers a rationale for evaluating resources based on the goals of the specific project and provides an Internet evaluation form that student researchers can use to collect and evaluate information.
www.landmark-project.com/evaluation/

Learner Centered Assessments for Pre-service Classroom Teachers offers a glossary of reading assessment terms, a description of anecdotal records, and lists of criteria for assessing classroom practice.
msit.gsu.edu/handbook/PART6%5Ctierney_lawson_marshall%5
Ctierney_lawson_ marshall.htm

NCTE Positions and Guidelines—Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing provides the complete NCTE standards for assessing reading and writing.
www.ncte.org/about/over/positions/category/assess/107609.htm

Questioning Tool Kit, by From Now On, The Educational Technology Journal offers seventeen different kinds of questions for use with fiction and nonfiction, such as inventive, unanswerable, provocative. Question types are recommended for teaching different questioning techniques.
www.fno.org/nov97/toolkit.html

Questions Derived from the Different Perspectives on English Teaching, by Charles Morgan provides a system of questions based on the specific teaching of literature texts. Includes questions based on personal growth, cultural heritage, and functional and critical literacy. Morgan gives practical insights into creating a classroom climate of thinking about literature questions.
www.discover.tased.edu.au/english/askquest.htm

Reading Design for Middle Level Schools summarizes criteria for good curriculum development.
www.wsra.org/committees/positions/ml-reading.php

Reading: Instructional Philosophy and Teaching Suggestions presents an overview of different processes and activities of reading with a "developmental stages of reading" chart.
www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/mla/read.html#respond

Reading for the 21 Century: Adolescent Literacy Teaching and Learning Strategies
This paper, released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, examines the research that exists on how to improve the literacy of children in grades 4-12. Specifically, it reviews information related to teaching and learning strategies, prevention of reading difficulties, components of effective reading instruction, and reading comprehension. It also looks at literacy and English-language learners, computers and adolescent literacy, teacher professional development and the infrastructure for reading instruction in secondary schools.
www.all4ed.org/sitemap.html#Literacy

Responding to Literature sums up the recent research on response to literature.
www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/lit_ins3.html

Responding to Text and Context is an extensive article dealing with responding to text, sharing responses, revisiting text, assessment, rubrics and alternate response strategies.
www.learning.gov.ab.ca/k_12/curriculum/
bySubject/english/ela10/4_respond.pdf

Using Literature to Teach about Hate and Violence describes the processes, goals, and strategies for using YAL to foster bibliotherapy in teens.
forbin.qc.edu/ECP/LITERACY/special/literature&violence.html

Serious Play: Reading Poetry with Children provides two articles about teaching poetry. Kenneth Koch describes his popular teaching methods of students writing poetry after reading classical poets. Jim Telease describes practical suggestions for" real ways" for students to respond to poetry.
www.poets.org/exh/Exhibit.cfm?prmID=10

Shooting the Canon: Student Approaches to Literature offers a general overview of responding to literature. Make sure to see Dramatic Reponses to Literature.
ksumail.kennesaw.edu/~jcope/Presentations/NCTE2001/
Creating%20Life-long%20readers.pdf

Strategies for Teaching Reading, from Every Child Reading: An Action Plan describes a number of popular methods of questioning that can be applied at different stages of the reading process. www.state.tn.us/education/ci/cistandards2001/
la/cilarstratteachread.htm

Teaching Reading Assessment provides a thorough overview of assessment techniques is provided at this site.
www.scottforesman.com/educators/letters/reading/afflerbach.pdf

The Web—Teaching Zack to Think
Written by Alan November, this article describes a process for helping students determine the accuracy and credibility of Internet resources.
www.anovember.com/articles/zack.html

YA: FAQ (We're Glad You Asked!) provides a concise yet insightful overview of YAL and the purpose of using it in the classroom.
scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v28n1/faq.html

You Gotta Be the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents reviews this book and provides a brief description of some of the classroom suggestions.
www.elan.on.ca/jfolder/Alex%20review.htm

Gallo, D. (1984). "What Should Teachers Know About YA Literature for 2004?"
English Journal, 73(7), 31-34.

Rochman, H. (1993). Against Borders: Promoting Books for a Multicultural World. Chicago: American Library Association.

Rochman, H., Rudman, M. K., & Stanley, D. (1994). "Is That Book Politically Correct? Truth and Trends in Historical Literature for Young People."
Journal of Youth Services in Libraries, 7(2), 159-175.

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