Struggling Adolescent Readers in the Middle Grades Within the United States (US), the middle-grades level encompasses grades 5-8. As students move from the elementary level into the middle grades, they encounter more complex forms of literature, which require well-developed literacy skills with which to interact with these materials. In these grade levels, classroom instruction moves […]

It is imperative that those responsible for teaching children to read have a deep understanding of a theoretical framework supporting this process, along with the content knowledge, and instructional strategies that sustain this development in young children. In fact, studies have highlighted consequences for students placed in classrooms of teachers who lack critical content knowledge […]

In recent years, the number of students enrolling in distance education courses in United States degree-granting higher education institutions has significantly increased. In fact, according to the Distance Education Enrollment report (2017) the number of higher-education students taking at least one online course surpassed six million, with significant increases occurring in private non-profit institutions. To […]

Have you ever stopped to think about the awesome gift we have as God’s children in our ability to express ourselves both orally and through the written word:  our gift of language? Language is what we use to tell our stories. Language is the reason that we are able to understand God’s work in our […]

Most recognize Martin Luther for his posting of the 95 theses on the Church doors in Wittenberg, Germany. This column will discuss another contribution, his belief that men, women, and children should be literate. With this conviction, Luther translated the Bible into German so that everyone—poor and rich, male and female, boys and girls—would be […]

Teachers play a vital role in the literacy development of students, especially in Lutheran schools. I believe it is important to consider all approaches to literacy instruction, including multiliteracies. I have been especially intrigued by the New London Group’s (1996) proposal to teach multimodal representations of meaning, another term for multiliteracies, including the linguistic (words), […]