Teaching Language and Literacy Preschool Through the Elementary Grades

Facilitating children’s reading, writing, speaking, and listening development in pre-K through grade 5 is the focus of this highly respected text, now updated in a new Fifth Edition. In it, the authors show how teachers can effectively promote the development of oral and written language and describe numerous scientifically-based instructional practices that have been proven to be successful in supporting children’s reading, writing, speaking and listening development.

In the first part of the book the authors present a solid foundation of language and literacy learning; look in depth at children’s oral language development; discuss family literacy and what children learn about reading and writing in the early years; show how to provide opportunities for reciprocal conversation and discussion; provide additional content on promoting oral language in the elementary grades and present a new section that focuses on vocabulary instruction for young children.

The second part of the book discusses language arts instruction at the pre-K and kindergarten levels, and Part 3 focuses on elementary-grade reading and writing instruction and assessing older children’s literacy performance.

And in this new edition—

• Teachers learn ways to support the Common Core Standards in language and literacy instruction.
• Aligning with the standards , the scope of this edition’s grade level has been reduced from pre-K to grade six, to pre-K to grade five.
• A new author, well-known literary researcher and scholar Kathleen Roskos, has completely revised the chapters on elementary reading. (Chapters 8 and 9)
• Many new references have been added and outdated ones deleted, keeping readers up to date on the latest research.
• Many new Trade Secrets illustrate how to apply the book’s teaching strategies to specific situations, and how real teachers deal with practical problems that arise in the course of daily life in the classroom.
• More practical, hands-on examples and activities help teachers put research and theory into practice.

How children acquire language and literacy knowledge in many different contexts—and how teachers can effectively promote the development of oral and written language—is the focus of this highly regarded resource. Readers get an authoritative look at how children acquire language and literacy in a variety of contexts and how teachers can effectively promote development in oral and written language.

Teaching Language and Literacy integrates a constructivist/emergent literacy perspective with scientifically-based instructional practices that are successful in supporting children’s reading, writing, listening and speaking development. This new edition features the work of a new author, Kathleen Roskos, and includes numerous up to date references, examples, and hands-on activities for putting theory into practice in today’s classrooms.