Tompkins, Campbell and Green invite you to step into their vision for literacy teaching in the early and middle years of schooling.
Literacy for the 21st Century: A balanced approach is a comprehensive and thoroughly applied text that covers the information new and experienced teachers need to know to teach literacy effectively in Australian classrooms. It includes specific strategies to use in the classroom to develop successful readers and writers.
Part 1: Literacy for the 21st Century
1. Becoming an Effective Teacher of Language, Literature and Literacy
2. Teaching the Reading and Writing Processes
3. Assessing Students’ Literacy Development
Part 2: Components of Literacy Development
4. Working with the Youngest Readers and Writers
5. Cracking the Alphabet Code
6. Teaching the Language Code for Reading and Writing
7. Developing Fluent Readers and Writers
8. Expanding Knowledge of Words
9. Facilitating Students’ Comprehension: Reader Factors and Text Factors
Part 3: Organising for Literacy Instruction
10. Organising for Instruction
11. Differentiating Reading and Writing Instruction
12. Reading and Writing in the Content Areas
Part 4: Compendium of Instructional Procedures
Gail E. Tompkins is Professor Emerita at California State University, Fresno. She regularly works with teachers in their classrooms from kindergarten through to eighth grade and leads staff development programs on reading and writing. Dr Tompkins was inducted into the California Reading Association’s Reading Hall of Fame in recognition of her publications and other accomplishments in the field of reading, and she has received the prestigious Provost’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at California State University. Previously, Dr Tompkins taught at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where she received the Regents’ Award for Superior Teaching, and at Miami University in Ohio, where she taught at the McGuffey Laboratory School and worked with pre service teachers. She was also an elementary teacher in Virginia for eight years.
Dr Tompkins is the author of six other books published by Merrill and Allyn & Bacon, imprints of Pearson Education: Language Arts: Patterns of Practice, 7th edn (2009), Language Arts Essentials (2006), Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product, 5th edn (2008), 50 Literacy Strategies, 3rd edn (2009), and two grade-level-specific versions of the American edition of this text: Literacy for the 21st Century: Teaching Reading and Writing in Pre-Kindergarten Through Grade 4, 2nd edn (2007), and Literacy for the 21st Century: Teaching Reading and Writing in Grades 4 Through 8 (2004).
During the last three decades, Dr Tompkins has also worked with kindergarten through to college level writing teachers at two National Writing Project sites. She directed the Oklahoma Writing Project when she taught at the University of Oklahoma, and more recently she was the director of the San Joaquin Valley Writing Project in California, where she initiated a program to encourage teachers to write for publication. Merrill and Allyn & Bacon, imprints of Pearson Education, have published three collections of classroom-tested teaching strategies and lessons written by teachers in the San Joaquin Valley Writing Project: Teaching Vocabulary: 50 Creative Strategies, Grades 6–12, 2nd edn (2008), edited by Gail E Tompkins and Cathy L Blanchfield; 50 Ways to Develop Strategic Writers (2005), also edited by Gail E Tompkins and Cathy L Blanchfield; and Sharing the Pen: Interactive Writing with Young Children (2004), edited by Gail E Tompkins and Stephanie Collom.
Dr Rod Campbell has taught in Australia and in many countries in Asia, at most levels from early childhood education and primary years to post-graduate tertiary studies and research. He has lectured in early childhood and primary curriculum and teaching practice at two universities for 23 years, been a school psychologist for six years, and taught visually impaired children as a resource teacher in high
schools. His administrative experience includes course coordination in a major university, academic director of a small private college, and principal of another college. He has contributed 25 years to the development of two major professional teaching associations in Australia.
Dr Campbell currently holds an adjunct position as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, from where he gained his PhD in 1996 with the thesis Teaching Grammar. He has continued post-doctoral research in classrooms and has conducted numerous workshops and classroom demonstration lessons on the teaching of English language knowledge for improving the teaching of writing and reading. He will spend 2011–2012 conducting classroom-based research into the teaching of writing, English grammar and reading comprehension in a number of schools, and mentoring teachers and curriculum support personnel in four schools and in one district.
Dr Campbell is co-author, with David Green and Graham Ryles, of 15 books on teaching English literacy and grammar (1996–2011), and has recently contributed significantly to the development of the English language and grammar compendium for the Queensland Studies Authority (2011). He has written accredited courses in early childhood education for Australia (1995) and Singapore (2004– 2005), has developed and conducted intergenerational literacy programs in Brisbane, Wuhan (PRC) and Mumbai, and has contributed to the development of English language education programs in kindergartens in China (1998–2006).
David Green has been a primary school teacher and principal. For 27 years he was an academic at QUT in Brisbane where he taught literacy education and children’s literature. He has also taught literacy education at Griffith University and the Australian Catholic University. He has been an educational consultant to schools, an educational consultant to the Education Department of Queensland,
an executive member of the Brisbane branch of the Australian Literacy Educator’s Association, a leader of the Meanjin Young Writers Camps for over 20 years, a presenter at national and state literacy conferences and, most recently, a learning support teacher at a disadvantaged school in western Sydney. This is his fourth book, having previously published three editions of Literacies and Learners with Rod Campbell in 2000, 2003 and 2006 (Pearson Education Australia).