work together to protect the open Web

You cannot learn Web lit-eracy by separating the competencies contained in these strands from the act of doing (I

“always connected”

In classrooms students are segregated by things like grade level, ability, and skills more often than they are mixed together across the whole continuum of these. E

eaders are resources

not necessarily always fit classrooms,

What all this means is that the player learns in the tutorial just enough to move on to learn more—and more subtle things—by actually playing the game, but playing it in a protected way so that deeper learning can occur through playing. T

earners need to see this type of thing in action, not to be given static rules, if they are really to understand. I

We see clearly how each piece of information we are given and each skill we are learning (and doing) is interconnected to everything else we are learning and doing. W

earning differs from individual to individual, so we need to base our discussions of learning around actual cases of actual people learning. Thi

ith the current return in our schools to skill-and-drill and curricula driven by standardized tests, good learning principles have, more and more, been left on the cognitive scientist’s laboratory bench and, I will argue, inside good computer and video games

ther it is about communicating perspectives on experience and action in the world,

or humans, language, perception (including emotion), and action in the world are all tightly connected together.

I am playing a game when I am being an academic, because I need to make certain sorts of moves to get recognized as being an academic, For example, I have to write and talk in a certain way. I

But once you have one set of links relating various items and actions in your mind, another drops out just as you need it and you’re back to turning pages.

hey have different and specific meanings in different situations where they are used and in different specialist domains that recruit them

he only realistic chance students with poor vocabularies have to catch up to their peers with rich vocabularies requires that they engage in extraordinary amounts of independent reading. F

ultural learning always involves having specific experiences that facilitate learning, not just memorizing words.

production of cakes within the family,

rganization in Leona’s story

is just such texts that children who experience the fourth-grade slump have trouble reading, fo

Second, she adopts a frame that mimics story book reading as it is often done by teachers and other teacherly adults: “

Any variety of a language uses certain patterns of resources, and to know the language you have to be able to recognize and use these patterns. T

ways with words” th

sters (physicists) allow learners to collaborate with them on projects that the learners could not carry out on their own.

instructed process.”

we need to spend billions of dollars on government-sponsored reading initiatives (l

t the majority are poor or come from minority groups whose members have faced a history of prejudice and oppression (

f some of the students are already making well-founded predictions regularly, they do not need this instruction.

found that an interactional read-aloud style resulted in greater gains in amount of vocabulary and reading compre-hension across both grade levels.

present information again.

graphic organizers,

ecome set in stone.

who provide explicit teaching but expect students to independently apply strategies too soon.

will ask each of you to stop and make a prediction. We will talk about your predictions and then read on to see if they come true.”

o accomplish this goal, students are engaged in reading and writing daily, all in the service of learning about the con-ceptual theme

didn’t do this using interesting texts alone.

qually as important are informational genres, whose primary purpose is to convey information about the natural or social world (

In addition to volume as an influencing factor, the quality and range of books to which students are exposed (e.g., electronic texts, leveled books, student/teacher published work) has a strong relationship with students’ reading comprehension

Thus, skilled readers are more readily able to integrate broader arrays of relevant elements from the text base and bring wider and deeper knowl-edge to the task of constructing a situation model.

These new constructs will modify or replace those currently in long-term memory.

read closely to determine what the text says explicitly”

Engage students in discussion.

trong teach-ers of reading comprehension for two consecutive years.

If learning to read effectively is a journey toward ever-increasing ability to comprehend texts, then teachers are the tour guides, ensuring that students stay on course, pausing to make sure they appreciate the landscape of understanding, and encouraging the occasional diversion down an inviting and interesting cul-de-sac or byway.

nasals.

Given that fis a much more familiar letter, stu-dents often choose it to represent the /v/ sound. Ne

Students need hands-on experience comparing and contrasting words by soundso that they can categorize similar sounds and associate them consistently with let-ters and letter combinations. T

eated practice. Un

Even more words areacquired when they are explicitly examined to discover the orthographic relationshipsamong words—their sounds, spelling patterns, and meaning

One key reason for this failure is linguistic. In school, words often take on meaning only in terms of yet other words.

ore advantaged learners have a problem as well (B

ll children,

he literacy skills now necessary to succeed in the 21st century must go beyond decoding and literal meaning to the ability to draw inferences from complex academic texts and use such texts as resources to solve problems,

The young girl becomes a “prosumer

The most important issues are how this time is spent, how the technology is or is not built into a good learning system, whether good mentors are involved, and how the technology is being related to other technologies and other areas of learning.

his can transform our traditional notions of assessment. W

What exactly is the connection between digital media, on the one hand, and literacy, content learning, and complex academic language, on the other?

he old reading gap can only worsen as the high-tech digital world makes larger and more complex demands on literacy and content learning. A

digital gap, between those students who can leverage technical skills and technological “know-how” to learn content, produce knowledge, and develop high-level expertise, and those who cannot (

Many students today, especially from low-income families, do not get the sorts of early language-based preparation for schooling that we have just discussed.

oundations are laid for meeting the demands of comprehending and using academic language connected to content. If

ot just to settle for the ability “to read to learn” s

If children cannot read well, they can hardly master new digital tools to innovate in knowledge domains —

any of our schools into test-prep academies focused on assessing standardized skill sets

Today that proportion has fallen to 14 percent and is continuing to fall (

en today’s U.S. students enter tomorrow’s workforce they will face intense international competition for jobs at every skill lev

it also requires the ability to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words and, eventually, to infer meaning from patterns of information

shark strolling in the park

The Ants Go Marching”

middle sounds

Child-ren appear to be better able to capture and gaincontrol over larger units of sound before smallerunits of sound

purposeful

prioritygoal in kindergarten classrooms.

Because an alphabetic orthography maps speechto print at the level of the phoneme.

honemic awareness is a typeof phonological awareness, that is, the aware-ness of the sound structure of language in gen-eral.

o understand the history of reading research, we need to appreciate theimpact of these varied perspectives on learner and learning that become mir-rored in the research questions posed, the methodologies applied, and the inter-pretations made.

ittle regard for motivation in the form of readers’goals, interests, and involvement in the learning experience (O

e relativedominance of informal knowledge over formal understandings could be becausewhat is learned in a school setting appears of limited relevance and therefore lim-ited value to students (

ere was a shift away from the neurological orphysiological arguments central to that earlier period and more concern fornaturalism in the materials and procedures used to teach reading. O

ssential to unite all manner of language acquisitionand use.

interaction of language as a system and languagein its particular social uses. S

st aschildren came to understand the spoken language of their surrounding communi-ty (Halliday, 1969), they would come to understand its written language givenenough exposure in meaningful situations (Goodman & Goodman, 198

Two communities of theorists and researchers were especially influentialin setting the stage for this period of reading research, linguists and psycholin-guists. On the one hand, linguists following in the tradition of Chomsky (1957,2002) held to a less environmentally driven and more hard-wired view of lan-guage acquisition, and hence of reading. Psycholinguistic researchers, on the oth-er hand, felt that the attention to discrete aspects of reading advocated inbehaviorism destroyed the natural communicative power and inherent aestheticof reading

of these movementsturned attention back inside the human mind and away from the environme

William James (1890) endured in the notion that human thought mattered inhuman action and that introspection and self-questioning were effective tools foruncovering those thoughts.

onics in-struction came to be seen as part of the logical groundwork for beginning toread

The task for this generation of reading researchers, therefore, was to un-tangle the chained links of behavior involved in reading so that learners couldbe trained in each component skill. T