Understanding Texts and Readers by Jennifer Serravallo

Understanding Texts and Readers by Jennifer Serravallo

Understanding Texts & Readers makes comprehension make sense. In it, Jennifer Serravallo narrows the distance between assessment and instruction. She maps the four fiction and four nonfiction comprehension goals she presented in The Reading Strategies Book to fourteen text levels and shares sample responses that show what to expect from readers at each.

Jennifer simplifies text complexity and clarifies comprehension instruction. She begins by untangling the many threads of comprehension: Levels, engagement, stamina, the relevance of texts, and much more. Then level by level she:

• calls out with precision how plot and setting, character, vocabulary and figurative language, and themes and ideas change as fiction across levels
• specifies how the complexity of main idea, key details, vocabulary, and text features increases in nonfiction texts
• points out what to expect from a reader as text characteristics change
• provides samples of student responses to texts at each level
• shares progressions across levels to support instructional planning.

Even if you haven’t read the book your reader is responding to, you’ll have the background necessary to make great teaching decisions for all your readers. “Understanding subtle shifts and increases in demands from level to level,” writes Jennifer Serravallo, “can guide what a teacher asks a student, what the teacher expects of the student, and what the teacher, therefore, teaches the student.”

Want to become a master of matching kids to books? Looking to take the difficult out of differentiation? Or do you want to dramatically increase the power and responsiveness of Jen’s Reading Strategies Book? Understanding Texts & Readers shows you how to move forward when students need to make progress.

Samples Preview a sample chapter from Understanding Texts and Readers

Jennifer Serravallo is the author of The Reading Strategies Book, a New York Times bestseller, as well as The Writing Strategies Book, Teaching Reading in Small Groups, and The Literacy Teacher's Playbook, Grades K - 2 and Grades 3 - 6. Teaching Writing in Small Groups (due out in March 2021) and Communicating with Students Online are her newest books, from which she will donate a portion of the proceeds to organizations that help students affected by COVID-19. Understanding Texts & Readers, A Teacher's Guide to Reading Conferences, and the Spanish-language counterparts to her strategies books, El libro de estrategias de lectura and El libro de estrategias de escritura, are among her other recent books. Jen's Complete Comprehension: Fiction and Complete Comprehension: Nonfiction are assessment and teaching materials that build on the comprehension skill progressions from Understanding Texts & Readers and provide hundreds of additional tactics similar to those found in The Reading Strategies Book. Jen is also the creator of the On-Demand Courses Strategies in Action: Reading and Writing Approaches and Content, as well as Teaching Reading in Small Groups: Matching Methods to Purposes, where you may see hundreds of videos of Jen teaching in actual classrooms and participate in a self-guided course with other educators.

Jen is a member of the Parents Magazine Education and Literacy Board of Advisors. She began her career in teaching as a NYC public school teacher before joining Columbia University's Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. She has spent over a decade helping teachers throughout the country establish literacy classrooms where kids are joyously engaged and instruction is meaningfully personalized to students' goals, first through TCRWP and now as an independent consultant. Jen received her BA from Vassar College and her MA from Teachers College, where she also taught graduate and undergraduate courses.

Learn more about Jen and her work by visiting https://www.heinemann.com/jenniferserravallo/, following her on Twitter @jserravallo, or following her on Instagram @jenniferserravallo.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780325108926
ISBN 10	0325108927
Title	Understanding Texts and Readers
Author	Jennifer Serravallo
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pearson Education (US)
Year published	2018-08-30
Number of pages	24
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.