Literacy Learning: A Life Skill

We are pleased to present this literacy-themed issue with article developed under Dawn Rowe. Literacy skills are life-changing. Think about how often we take our own literacy skills for granted. From sharing text messages with our friends to communicating our needs, literacy affords opportunities to share our lives with others.

This issue begins with an article by Brock, who reminds readers that families are students’ first teachers. For families of children who are Deaf or hard of hearing, coaching as a provision of service can help families learn how to support their child’s language development. Next, Li and colleagues illustrate how to use minimal pairs to help emergent bilingual students with disabilities discriminate between phonemes. Sound walls are a feature of many primary classrooms, and Novelli and Sayeski provide a practical application. In their article, they remind readers that practicing reading and spelling leads to improvements in both areas. Thus, they suggest integrating decoding and spelling practice using sound walls as visual support to link orthographic and phonological information.

Chandler et al. aver that constructing sentences is a foundational writing skill that’s especially important in the early grades. In their article, they explain an explicit instruction plus content application framework and six sentence-writing instructional exercises to support sentence writing. Datchuk and colleagues also write about sentence writing for students with learning disabilities. They suggest explicit instruction and sentence fluency practice as a meaningful way to help support sentence writing. Together, these two pieces provide support for early writers.

Ray and Fitzpatrick turn our attention toward preparing secondary teachers to teach self-regulated strategy development (SRSD). Special education teachers have opportunities to provide professional learning opportunities to colleagues as they learn practices that will support students with disabilities in general education classrooms. This piece includes support to design professional development for SRSD for colleagues that includes ongoing support and coaching.

Next on our literacy journey, we turn toward reading instruction. Capin et al. provide practical support to secondary teachers who provide reading instruction within multitiered systems of support. Suggestions are included for each tier, including example lesson plans and strategy protocols. Stewart and Swanson provide a resource for supporting the reading comprehension of intermediate students with inattention. Using the before, during, and after reading framework, their suggestions support directing students’ attention to what’s important. Shelton and Wexler illustrate how to support middle school students with intellectual disabilities to identify the main idea in a text using an adapted version of the “get the gist” strategy developed by Klingner et al. (1998). Finally, we close this issue with a piece that uses children’s literature to counter ableist perspectives toward disabilities. Yu and Meyer provide support for families and teachers to collaborate to develop meaningful collaboration around reading disability literature. They provide specific suggestions to counter three predominant concerns.

In our previous column, we mentioned we have been working on something special for our readers. We are pleased to announce the launch of the TEACHING Exceptional Children podcast. We are interested in connecting our authors and readers as we work toward bridging the research to practice gap. Please drop us a line to let us know your thoughts. We are grateful for your engagement with TEC.