Language and Literacy Guides for Special Education Students
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Language and Literacy Guides for Special Education Students
Below are nearly a dozen guides to help parents and teachers improve reading among their sixth through eighth grade students with disabilities. They were created by researchers at the Language and Literacy Research Center at the College of Education in partnership with the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk on a project called PACT Plus. Pact Plus implements a tiered approach to improve reading among sixth- through eighth-grade students with disabilities in public schools. One of the goals of the project is to provide evidence-based technical assistance, professional development, and publications on effective models and their successful implementation for secondary students with disabilities.
Resources for Parents
How Can I Help My Middle Schooler Read Multisyllabic Words?
How Can I Help to Improve My Child's Reading Comprehension?
How Can I Help My Child With Content Area Reading at Home?
How to Motivate Children to Do Their Homework?
How Can I Support My Adolescent’s Development as a Writer?
How Do I Engage in Partner Reading With My Child?
Resources for Teachers
Adolescent Literacy Resource Menu: A Guide for Instructional Leaders
This guide is organized by commonly experienced challenges (e.g., lack of modeling) to teachers implementing evidence-based adolescent literacy practices with fidelity. Also provided are an explanation of each challenge and resources from established organizations and research centers that instructional leaders can use to address these challenges. Some of these resources are brief documents that a teacher can quickly scan; others are lengthier and may require more time to read and make sense of. Many of the resources are free (e.g., online resources), and some have an associated cost (e.g., books). This guide provides an estimate of the cost and time associated with each resource
Turn and Talk: An Evidence-Based Practice – Teacher’s Guide
Turn and talk is an instructional routine in which students use content knowledge during a brief conversation with a peer. Students are provided with a short prompt to discuss content or a skill. Students turn to their predetermined partner and answer the prompt while their partner listens. Then, the partners switch roles to allow the second student to address the prompt. The turn-and-talk routine can be used across all content areas and at any grade level. This guide explains the routine, and provides evidence of its effectiveness, sample lessons using the routine, and solutions to common challenges.
Partner Reading: An Evidence-Based Practice – Teacher’s Guide
Partner reading is an instructional routine that incorporates peer modeling into reading text. In the routine, one partner reads a text that is slightly challenging while the other partner corrects errors and checks for understanding. It is most effective to pair students so that one partner is a slightly more skilled reader than the other. Partners take turns being the reader and listener. The more skilled reader reads first, modeling fluent reading for the listener. While following along, the listener is exposed to any difficult words and essentially rehearses the text before reading it aloud. The partners switch roles, and the new reader reads aloud the same text while the new listener provides feedback and checks for understanding. This flexible routine can be used with any content area text in any grade level.
For more information and resources from PACTPlus go to https://www.meadowscenter.org/projects/detail/pact-plus
About the Language and Literacy Research Center
The Language and Literacy Research Center (LLRC) at the College of Education is an interdisciplinary center within the College of Education that brings together faculty and students from different perspectives. The mission of the Language and Literacy Research Center is to create long-term, productive partnerships amongst researchers, students, and educators in order to further develop our understanding and support of language and literacy development and instruction across the lifespan. The LLRC acts as the educational arm of the Language Science Center.
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Featured Faculty
Jade Wexler
Dr. Wexler is currently the principal investigator (PI) of an IES funded research project, Project CALI (Content Area Literacy Instruction). Dr. Wexler has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as two books on adolescent literacy and related topics. She has also delivered many presentations and professional development workshops across the country and abroad and often consults with federally funded centers such as the National Center on Intensive Intervention.
Prior to coming to the University of Maryland, she was a Research Assistant Professor and Dropout Institute co-Director at The University of Texas at Austin Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk. Dr. Wexler has directed large-scale intervention studies funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, The Meadows Foundation, and The Greater Texas Foundation. She greatly values her partnerships with local school districts and believes it is essential to work together to bridge the research to practice gap. Thus, her work is affiliated with the University of Maryland Language and Literacy Research Center (LLRC), an interdisciplinary center that focuses on language and literacy issues in education.
Dr. Taboada Barber studies reading comprehension from a cognitive and motivational perspective. Her work centers on studying the influence of specific motivational variables (e.g., autonomy support, self-efficacy) and cognitive variables (e.g., executive function skills; inference making) on the literacy and language development of elementary and middle school students. She is interested in studying reading comprehension within classroom instructional contexts as well as an individual difference variable. As a former English as a Second Language teacher in full language immersion settings, Ana's work in reading comprehension development is principally concentrated within the population of English Learners (ELs) or emergent bilinguals within the United States. More recently she has extended her focus to include Spanish-speaking students in South American countries (e.g., Chile and Argentina). Ana has also turned her attention to the possible roles that executive function skills (i.e., working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility) as one component of a larger system of self-regulation, play in the reading comprehension of English Learners and monolingual speakers.
At UMD, Ana is the co-director, together with Jade Wexler, of the Language and Literacy Research Center (LLRC) which aims to promote collaborative research among experts and students interested in literacy and language within the College of Education and local education agencies. Ana is also affiliated with the Language Science Center (LSC) which seeks to advance the science and study of language as a University-wide endeavor.
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