How teachers would spend their time teaching language arts: the mismatch between self-reported and best practices.

As teacher quality becomes a central issue in discussions of children's literacy, both researchers and policy makers alike express increasing concern with how teachers structure and allocate their lesson time for literacy-related activities as well as with what they know about reading development, processes, and pedagogy. The authors examined the beliefs, literacy knowledge, and proposed instructional practices of 121 first-grade teachers. Through teacher self-reports concerning the amount of instructional time they would prefer to devote to a variety of language arts activities, the authors investigated the structure of teachers' implicit beliefs about reading instruction and explored relationships between those beliefs, expertise with general or special education students, years of experience, disciplinary knowledge, and self-reported distribution of an array of instructional practices.

Accounting for children's orthographic learning while reading text: do children self-teach?

Share's "self-teaching" model proposes that readers acquire most knowledge about the orthographic structure of words incidentally while reading independently. In the current study, the self-teaching hypothesis was tested by simulating everyday reading through the use of real words, analyzing the effects of context, and considering the independent contributions of general cognitive ability, including rapid naming ability and prior orthographic knowledge. A total of 35 first graders read short story passages in English embedded with target words representative of words likely to be known orally but not orthographically.

Disciplinary knowledge of K-3 teachers and their knowledge calibration in the domain of early literacy.

Recently, investigators have begun to pay increasing attention to the role of teachers' domain specific knowledge in the area of reading, and its implications for both classroom practice and student learning. The aims of the present study were to assess kindergarten to third-grade teachers' actual and perceived reading-related subject matter knowledge, and to investigate the extent to which teachers calibrate their reading related subject matter knowledge by examining relationships between actual and perceived knowledge. Results indicated that while teachers demonstrated limited knowledge of children's literature, phoneme awareness, and phonics, the majority of these same teachers evaluated their knowledge levels quite positively.

Orthographic learning during reading: examining the role of self-teaching.

Thirty-four second grade children read target homophonic pseudowords (e.g., slurst/slirst) in the context of real stories in a test of the self-teaching theory of early reading acquisition.