This article from Educational Leadership was more of a meta-analysis than an actual research piece; the authors combed through a bunch of papers for strategies found to be successful in promoting literacy among older students, then compiled the ones that were the most consistently useful here in this paper. By their very nature, meta-analyses deal in generalities, so there isn't a lot of "meat" here, but it's a good overview for teachers who want to promote literacy in their classroom.
The key thing that I took away from this article was that literacy promotion requires a comprehensive, integrated approach across subjects. Teachers need to work together to coordinate comprehension training; students need to work together in teams so that the stronger readers can assist the weaker ones; school libraries need to have a diverse mix of reading material across subject areas; multimedia techniques need to be incorporated with more traditional methods, so that students can successfully use the forms of literacy needed in the 21st century (including navigation of hypertext and cross-correlation of text, sound and video). Everything needs to work together with everything else in a way that is purposeful.
It really brought home to me how much work we still need to do at ARISE on interdisciplinary integration. Willi, Paul and I do talk about our plans and try to hit on similar themes in our classes, but ultimately we each have our own little worlds inside our classrooms, and there isn't a lot of integration between them. That's something we're going to need to do better at in coming years if we want to give our students the best literacy support possible.
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Yes, I too understood that teachers need to work together to "coordinate comprehensive training" as you said. But how and when could this be donetaught to teachers?...and if so, do you really think that all teachers will follow through with this?
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