The acquisition and maintenance of literacy is of pressing interest and concern to educators and educational policy makers worldwide. What are the common themes, the common questions, and the unique circumstances and initiatives that spring from this interest and concern? To address these questions, Understanding Literacy Development: A Global View brings together leading experts from around the world to explore ways to best provide teaching and learning opportunities, tailored to specific educational needs, to help all children become better readers. The premise is that current generic "one-size-fits-all" approaches are inappropriate for many children and can lead to underachievement and failure. The contributors write from a stance that reflects not only their own particular expertise and experience, but also sheds light on literacy development across cultures, countries, and circumstances. Taken together, chapters in this volume target a wide and comprehensive set of literacy issues, and offer an extensive exploration of the complexities of literacy development, including issues related to early literacy, school instruction, family literacy, adolescent and adult literacy, and teacher development. At a time when education is burdened by increasing economic pressure to do more with less, it is imperative that educators and decision makers at all levels have access to current, broad-ranging, and in-depth information and evidence to inform their choices. This volume, compiling critical research on a wide spectrum of literacy concerns, is an invaluable tool for scholars, teacher educators, professionals and graduate students in the fields of literacy education, early childhood education, educational psychology, educational policy, and related areas.

This book specifies the foundation for Adapted Primary Literature (APL), a novel text genre that enables the learning and teaching of science using research articles that were adapted to the knowledge level of high-school students. More than 50 years ago, J.J. Schwab suggested that Primary Scientific Articles “afford the most authentic, unretouched specimens of enquiry that we can obtain” and raised for the first time the idea that such articles can be used for “enquiry into enquiry”. This book, the first to be published on this topic, presents the realization of this vision and shows how the reading and writing of scientific articles can be used for inquiry learning and teaching. It provides the origins and theory of APL and examines the concept and its importance. It outlines a detailed description of creating and using APL and provides examples for the use of the enactment of APL in classes, as well as descriptions of possible future prospects for the implementation of APL. Altogether, the book lays the foundations for the use of this authentic text genre for the learning and teaching of science in secondary schools.

This book specifies the foundation for Adapted Primary Literature (APL), a novel text genre that enables the learning and teaching of science using research articles that were adapted to the knowledge level of high-school students. More than 50 years ago, J.J. Schwab suggested that Primary Scientific Articles "afford the most authentic, unretouched specimens of enquiry that we can obtain" and raised for the first time the idea that such articles can be used for "enquiry into enquiry". This book, the first to be published on this topic, presents the realization of this vision and shows how the reading and writing of scientific articles can be used for inquiry learning and teaching. It provides the origins and theory of APL and examines the concept and its importance. It outlines a detailed description of creating and using APL and provides examples for the use of the enactment of APL in classes, as well as descriptions of possible future prospects for the implementation of APL. Altogether, the book lays the foundations for the use of this authentic text genre for the learning and teaching of science in secondary schools.

Science education at school level worldwide faces three perennial problems that have become more pressing of late. These are to a considerable extent interwoven with concerns about the entire school curriculum and its reception by students. The rst problem is the increasing intellectual isolation of science from the other subjects in the school curriculum. Science is too often still taught didactically as a collection of pre-determined truths about which there can be no dispute. As a con- quence, many students do not feel any "ownership" of these ideas. Most other school subjects do somewhat better in these regards. For example, in language classes, s- dents suggest different interpretations of a text and then debate the relative merits of the cases being put forward. Moreover, ideas that are of use in science are presented to students elsewhere and then re-taught, often using different terminology, in s- ence. For example, algebra is taught in terms of "x, y, z" in mathematics classes, but students are later unable to see the relevance of that to the meaning of the universal gas laws in physics, where "p, v, t" are used. The result is that students are c- fused and too often alienated, leading to their failure to achieve that "extraction of an education from a scheme of instruction" which Jerome Bruner thought so highly desirable.

The acquisition and maintenance of literacy is of pressing interest and concern to educators and educational policy makers worldwide. What are the common themes, the common questions, and the unique circumstances and initiatives that spring from this interest and concern? To address these questions, Understanding Literacy Development: A Global View brings together leading experts from around the world to explore ways to best provide teaching and learning opportunities, tailored to specific educational needs, to help all children become better readers. The premise is that current generic "one-size-fits-all" approaches are inappropriate for many children and can lead to underachievement and failure. The contributors write from a stance that reflects not only their own particular expertise and experience, but also sheds light on literacy development across cultures, countries, and circumstances. Taken together, chapters in this volume target a wide and comprehensive set of literacy issues, and offer an extensive exploration of the complexities of literacy development, including issues related to early literacy, school instruction, family literacy, adolescent and adult literacy, and teacher development. At a time when education is burdened by increasing economic pressure to do more with less, it is imperative that educators and decision makers at all levels have access to current, broad-ranging, and in-depth information and evidence to inform their choices. This volume, compiling critical research on a wide spectrum of literacy concerns, is an invaluable tool for scholars, teacher educators, professionals and graduate students in the fields of literacy education, early childhood education, educational psychology, educational policy, and related areas.