ABSTRACT
The beginning scenario describes a classroom in which students are engaged and motivated to learn. Motivating factors include the teacher giving students choices, assigning tasks that match students’ cognitive ability, integrating literacy with other content areas, and inviting students to use new information in authentic ways, including opportunities to teach concepts to younger students. When teachers differentiate instruction, as this teacher did in the scenario, every student has the opportunity to succeed. In order to engage students in meaningful literacy activities, teachers need to understand students’ background experiences, their interests, and their literacy skills.
This chapter then explains topics that teachers must understand in order to scaffold students’ literacy learning. The first topic is the language systems (syntactic, semantic, graphophonic, and pragmatic) that readers use to comprehend texts. Next, the three levels of text (independent, instructional, frustration) are explained. Independent reading level is when students can read a passage with 95 percent to 100 percent accuracy; the instructional level ranges from 90 percent to 94 percent accuracy; and the frustration level is below 90 percent accuracy.
This chapter also discusses the various ways books are leveled (e.g., age, grade, gradient, Lexile scale). The Common Core State Standards use the Lexile, and the Lexile bands for each grade are listed.
