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Poetry can help develop in students a love for reading, writing, and playing with language, yet it is often a neglected literary form in many reading curricula. Those who see the value of poetry recognize it as the perfect genre for teaching phonics, fluency, and a love of language. The rhyming, rhythmical language of poetry provides the perfect backdrop for teaching word families (rimes/phonograms). Poetry also helps young readers develop fluency through the use of beautiful, melodic language that begs to be read repeatedly, which helps develop prosody and a lifelong love for literacy. The thoughtful selection of words also provides the right context for vocabulary development and critical thinking. However, for teachers who love poetry, the most important reason to use this text type may simply be that it works!

The Common Core State Standards suggest that an appropriate goal for secondary education is college and career readiness. Previous research has identified reading fluency as a critical component for proficient reading. One component of fluency is word recognition accuracy and automaticity. The present study attempted to determine the word recognition accuracy and automaticity indicators for incoming college students and to examine the relationship between oral reading rate and ACTscores. Knowledge of such performance may provide secondary literacy educators with another tool for assessing reading proficiency and college readiness. Eighty-one students were asked to read a college-level narrative passage. Mean student accuracy and automacity scores were determined, as well as correlations between accuracy, automacity, and students’ ACTscores. Results suggest a moderate and significant relationship between measures of automaticity and both the ACTreading subtest and ACTcomposite scores.

Phonics and fluency have been identified as two essential elements in the effective teaching of reading. Although normally considered two distinct elements of the reading curriculum that are separate, through the use of rhyming poetry both phonics and fluency can be taught in a synergistic and authentic manner. In this article, the authors explore how the repeated reading and performing of rhyming poetry can help children learn to read words accurately, automatically, and with appropriate and meaningful expression.

What teaching strategies must teachers of reading be able to perform and how are these strategies applied effectively in teaching children to read? This article attempts to answer these two important questions.

Necessary prerequisites for and at the same time powerful predictors of children's success in beginning reading are the development of phonemic awareness and concepts of print. Students who are learning to read need to be taught how to consciously attend to phonemes and to develop an understanding regarding concepts about print. This study was two-fold. First, we examined demographic characteristics that included gender, socioeconomics, preschool experience, and race to determine how these factors related to phonemic awareness and concepts of print development for kindergarten students. It was concluded that low SES children and Latino children were at greater risk of not developing phonemic awareness and concepts of print in kindergarten. Further data were collected and analyzed to examine low SES and Latino children's knowledge of phonemic awareness and concepts of print development. The study found that, along with maturation, a diagnostic approach that guides phonemic awareness instruction and concepts about print enhances kindergarten students' phonemic awareness and concepts of print development.

Preservice and inservice reading teachers' knowledge about literature and their skill in analyzing literature appropriate for middle and upper grades was assessed. Twenty-two undergraduate preservice teachers and 11 graduate inservice teachers were tested on the definitions of 45 common literary terms, their ability to state and explain the theme of a short story, their ability to interpret and explain a common poem, and their ability to answer inferential questions on the poem. Results indicated that on average the undergraduates knew about half of the literary terms and were unable to analyze either the story or poem adequately despite their relative simplicity. The graduate students fared predictably better, but few achieved the highest scores on any of the measures. Correlational analyses suggested that literary ability occurs in levels from basic definitional knowledge through inferential ability to analytical ability. This study contributes to a growing body of research indicating that teachers may have insufficient knowledge of literature to deliver a literature-based reading curriculum.