Description: The latest from well-known author and literacy expert Dr. Richard Allington is intended as the first step in preparing future teachers to provide early adolescents with high-quality literacy instruction. What Really Matters for Middle School Readers: From Research to Practice looks at the areas that struggling adolescents find most difficult-meaning, vocabulary, (especially academic words), and inferential comprehension-and focuses on ways to foster accelerated growth. Dr. Allington stresses that through expanding the volume of high-success reading that students experience each day, as well as through the wide variety of additional classroom strategies and methodologies included in the text, middle school students can achieve a working literacy proficiency.
Review Quotes: This book is a very good resource for novice teachers. The material is well organized, up-to-date, and accurate. One of its strengths is the inclusion of current facts about struggling readers and how the shift in education strives to keep a grip on them as they improve...I agree that literate conversation is not a method used very often in middle school classrooms, but the author has done a good job in sharing explanations and examples of this effective methodology. -- Middle School Teacher from Memphis, TN
I was absolutely riveted and engrossed in the material at the beginning of the first chapter...The information presented should be the very first in-service teachers receive at the beginning of the school year. Everything from the changing demographics to the lack of reading instruction in the middle years, to the effective teaching strategies should be sung from on high in every district of America. -- Theresa Barone (Derby Middle School)