As schools shift to the Common Core, many English language arts teachers are left with questions about how their classrooms should look. Is fiction out? Can I still do strategy instruction? Does close reading mean deliberating on each word? Finally, there’s a resource with all of these answers and more. In Focus on Text, bestselling author Amy Benjamin provides practical guidance on how to realistically implement the Common Core reading standards. Part I of the book examines misconceptions about the standards and what’s really required. It also takes you inside classrooms to see how teachers are modifying their instruction. Part II tackles each reading standard for grades 4-8. You’ll learn how to teach the standards with literary and informational texts and how to use them as a springboard for instruction in writing, language, speaking, and listening. Topics include... • Defining close reading and how is it different from word-by-word reading. When and how do students need to go over a text meticulously? • How to use scaffolding through background knowledge to help students with challenging texts • The best instructional practices to help students increase their range of reading and level of text complexity • Ideas for teaching key concepts such as text structure, point of view, theme, stated and implied meanings, and the progression of ideas and characters • Tweaking your assessments to better align with the Common Core--how to create reading check quizzes, unit tests, and cold reading tests to see if students are growing as readers. • And much, much more! Throughout the book, you’ll find teaching tips and practical resources to use with students, such as question starters and sentence stems. You’ll also get a wide variety of classroom examples at different grade levels and with different texts. Whether you’re experienced with the Common Core or just getting started, this book will give you exciting new ideas for making them work in your own classroom so your students grow as readers!

This two-part writer's handbook will take your student from high school into college. Part 1 is a course in essays and arguments (helpful for debate, too) with topic-sentence outline models and much more. Part 2 is a traditional reference guide to grammar, style, and usage. You will find yourself using the Handbook almost daily for instruction, reference, and evaluation.

This popular series provides a balanced English program based on the main text types studied in primary schools.Focus on Texts 3 introduces students to the basic types of text and enables them to develop a wide variety of essential English skills within the context of each text type. It also includes extension activities for further development and practice and provides answers for activities.Each unit of work on a particular text type covers: comprehension writing spelling and word

"Focus on Speaking is an introductory text on teaching speaking to adult second language learners. It examines different theoretical perspectives on spoken language and offers practical suggestions for teaching." -back cover.

"Pebble Plus is published by Capstone Press."

Discipline-Specific Writing provides an introduction and guide to the teaching of this topic for students and trainee teachers. This book highlights the importance of discipline-specific writing as a critical area of competence for students, and covers both the theory and practice of teaching this crucial topic. With chapters from practitioners and researchers working across a wide range of contexts around the world, Discipline-Specific Writing: Explores teaching strategies in a variety of specific areas including science and technology, social science and business; Discusses curriculum development, course design and assessment, providing a framework for the reader; Analyses the teaching of language features including grammar and vocabulary for academic writing; Demonstrates the use of genre analysis, annotated bibliographies and corpora as tools for teaching; Provides practical suggestions for use in the classroom, questions for discussion and additional activities with each chapter. Discipline-Specific Writing is key reading for students taking courses in English for Specific Purposes, Applied Linguistics, TESOL, TEFL and CELTA.

Few applied disciplines are more sensitive to cross-cultural issues than marketing and consumer psychology. The chapters prepared for this volume reflect awareness of both similarities and differences within and across cultures. They include analyses of methodological issues, theoretical investigations of cultural and social values and their implications for marketing specialists, studies of gender- and sub-culture specific advertising, and investigations of advertising efforts in several different international markets. The scholars and advertising professionals who contributed these chapters will have much to say to consumer psychologists and marketing specialists alike.