How Portuguese and American teachers plan for literacy instruction.

This study explored American and Portuguese elementary teachers' preferences in planning for literacy instruction using the Language Arts Activity Grid (LAAG; Cunningham, Zibulsky, Stanovich, & Stanovich, 2009), on which teachers described their preferred instructional activities for a hypothetical 2-h language arts block. Portuguese teachers (N = 186) completed Portuguese versions of a background questionnaire and LAAG electronically, in Survey Monkey; American teachers (N = 102) completed identical English measures using paper and pencil. Results showed that teachers in both groups usually addressed comprehension and reading fluency on their LAAGs and that they also allocated the most time to these two areas. However, American teachers were more likely to include teacher-directed fluency activities, whereas Portuguese teachers were more likely to include fluency activities that were not teacher directed. Significantly more American than Portuguese teachers addressed phonics in their planning, whereas significantly more Portuguese than American teachers addressed writing processes such as revision. Both groups of educators demonstrated large variability in planning, with many teachers omitting important components of literacy identified by researchers, for writing as well as reading. The study highlights the importance of providing teachers with comprehensive, research-based core literacy curricula as well as professional development on key components of literacy. Study findings also suggest significant relationships between orthographic transparency and teachers' instructional planning.

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. They found that teachers' implicit beliefs were not significantly associated with their status as a regular or special education teacher, the number of years they had been teaching, or their disciplinary knowledge. However, it was observed that subgroups of teachers who highly valued particular approaches to reading instruction allocated their time to instructional activities associated with other approaches in vastly different ways. It is notable that the practices of teachers who privileged reading literature over other activities were not in keeping with current research and policy recommendations. Implications and considerations for further research are discussed.