Definition of Topic: Middle and high school teachers note that all too many adolescent students are less than proficient in reading and writing - the "twin pillars of literacy." Teaching such students to meet today's tougher educational standards can be a challenge. Emphasizing the important connections between comprehension, communication and learning, this book offers teachers in all content areas a structured approach for enabling students to strengthen their reading and writing competency - and thus boast their potential for academic success. Drawing on the author's extensive experience as a teacher and teacher trainer as well as on relevant theory and research, the book presents an arsenal of instructional strategies aimed at improving comprehension and written expression in all types of students. The approach is motivational as well as practical and features extensive tools and techniques for helping students overcome their reading and writing fears, persist in their practice, build on their success, and finally to share what they've learned. The book features many dozens of teacher-tested activities, lessons, and exercises that can be adapted in any classroom and is abundantly illustrated with examples of student work. Lessons involving literary as well as informational texts are included as are visualization and interpretive exercises aimed at appealing to the less verbally-oriented students. The book also provides extensive guidance and tools for helping students improve their vocabulary, grammar, spelling and other language skills as well as their ability to conduct research and access on-line resources. In addition, a special reference section of the book featuresextensivelistings of web-based instructional tools and curricular resources for teachers to use in planning lessons, activities and assignments. This book will serve as an indispensable resource for teachers seeking to build student skills in comprehension, communication, and learning. Selling Points: 1) Presents a proven instructional framework as well

Service-learning and Writing: Paving the Way for Literacy(ies) through Community Engagement discusses service-learning as a teaching and learning method and its integration with writing. The various authors, from different disciplines and institutions, present service-learning as a means of having students practice writing in real world settings, and they show how relationship-building and partnerships between higher education and diverse communities produce benefits for all involved - the students, faculty, administrators, and the communities themselves. This volume demonstrates how writing instruction and/or writing practice can complement community engagement and outreach at local, national, and international contexts. Through different cross-cultural contexts and academic disciplines, the various authors explore reflection, assessment, internalization, diversity, and multiple literacies and their importance when integrating service-learning in higher education and community literacy.

Reconnecting Reading and Writing explores the ways in which reading can and should have a strong role in the teaching of writing in college. Reconnecting Reading and Writing draws on broad perspectives from history and international work to show how and why reading should be reunited with writing in college and high school classrooms. It presents an overview of relevant research on reading and how it can best be used to support and enhance writing instruction.

Literacy for Learning: A Handbook of Teaching Strategies for Middle and High School Teachers is a collection of proven, effective teaching strategies to promote content area literacy and help teachers incorporate literacy learning as a means of improving learning in all subject areas. The book presents a concise overview of content area literacy research and a rationale for teachers in all subject areas. Those who teach, or are about to teach, middle and high school students, will find a variety of engaging strategies for improving student comprehension and retention of content material. Numerous examples of how the strategies can be used across the curriculum are included. 122 strategies in all are included, plus tips and suggestions for their use. This valuable, handy, and easy-to-use resource contains strategies for teaching reading, writing, and vocabulary. Each section contains numerous strategies for use across the curriculum. An additional section focuses on ways to incorporate technology and multi-media resources into teaching to promote learning. Each strategy presented includes learning objectives, Common Core State Standards connections, a concise overview, and simple, easy-to-follow instructions for implementing the strategies. Teachers can pick up this book and immediately begin using the strategies in their own classrooms. With the implementation of Common Core State Standards, it will become more important than ever for every teacher to be a literacy teacher. This book should find widespread acceptance as a handy tool to help all teachers achieve this goal.

Accessing up-to-date information about general and specific learning difficulties is made easy, with this indispensable reference book. Covering difficulties that relate to children, adolescents and adults, it includes: crucial legislation to keep practitioners 'in the know' useful addresses, telephone numbers and websites It also includes explanations of leaning difficulties including those less than well-known syndromes such as semantic pragmatic difficulties.

"Exciting ideas for teaching writing, editing, illustration and design. This practical resource also features author studies, a guide to author visits, fun ways to celebrate books and more" Cf. Our choice, 2000.

This text explores a number of different perspectives and theories on human learning and motivation. The author gives significant attention to different types of learning across the curriculum and examines effective types of teaching to facilitate different forms of learning. Detailed consideration is given to factors that contribute to common learning problems in school; and many practical suggestions are provided for preventing or overcoming some of these difficulties.

There have been serious debates between historians, novelists and filmmakers as to how best present historical narratives. When writers and filmmakers talk of using historical research with integrity, what exactly do they mean? Integrity and Historical Research examines this question in detail. The first chapter discusses the concept of integrity. The chapters that follow reflect on this philosophical treatment in the light of fiction and film that deals with history in a number of ways. How should writers and filmmakers use lives? Can, and may, people who are now dead and who may have lived long ago, be defamed? The authors include academics, historians, social historians, medievalists, oral historians, literary theorists, historical novelists and script writers. They examine the theoretical influences and practical choices that involve and concern writers and filmmakers who rely on historical research. The desire to be accurate may often conflict with the need to produce a work that goes beyond the mere depiction of events in order to excite the interest of readers and to hold that interest. At the same time there is a developing emphasis on historians, to write well in clear, accessible prose, which may involve using the novelists’ techniques. How much license may be given to writers of fiction and filmmakers in their depiction of historical characters and events? This book begins to answer this question, while inviting further discussion.

Using Charlotte, North Carolina, as a case study of the dynamics of racial change in the 'moderate' South, Davison Douglas analyzes the desegregation of the city's public schools from the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through the early 1970s, when the city embarked upon the most ambitious school busing plan in the nation. In charting the path of racial change, Douglas considers the relative efficacy of the black community's use of public demonstrations and litigation to force desegregation. He also evaluates the role of the city's white business community, which was concerned with preserving Charlotte's image as a racially moderate city, in facilitating racial gains. Charlotte's white leadership, anxious to avoid economically damaging racial conflict, engaged in early but decidedly token integration in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the black community's public protest and litigation efforts. The insistence in the late 1960s on widespread busing, however, posed integration demands of an entirely different magnitude. As Douglas shows, the city's white leaders initially resisted the call for busing but eventually relented because they recognized the importance of a stable school system to the city's continued prosperity.

Digital media presents an array of interesting challenges adapting new modes of collaborative, online communication to traditional writing and literary practices at the practical and theoretical levels. For centuries, popular concepts of the modern author, regardless of genre, have emphasized writing as a solo exercise in human communication, while the act of reading remains associated with solitude and individual privacy. “The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics” explores important cultural changes in these relationships thanks to the rapid development of digital internet technologies allowing near-instantaneous, synchronous, multimedia interaction across the globe. The radical shift in how we author and consume media as an online, electronic transmission effectively resituates the writing process across the liberal arts as less a solitary act of individual enquiry and reflection, and more an ongoing, collaborative process of creative interaction within a multimedia environment or network. Contributions in this anthology demonstrate a robust history and equally diverse contemporary approach to multimedia interaction for literary and artistic ends. Central to all media formats, computation is explored throughout this volume to critically examine how algorithmic procedures in writing help bring forward many key concepts to building creative communities in a digital environment. Each chapter in this book accordingly introduces readers to various new collaborative experiments using a broad range of different digital media formats, including VR, Natural Language Generation (NLG), and metagaming tools. This book will appeal broadly to students, instructors, and independent artists working in the digital arts, while its emphasis on social interactivity will interest theorists and teachers working in theatre, social media, and cyberpsychology. Its secondary focus on computation and media programming as a site of artistic experimentation will also interest programmers and web designers at various professional levels.