and literacy expert Richard Allington is intended as the first step in preparing future teachers to provide early adolescents with high-quality literacy instruction. What Really Matters for Middle School Readers: From Research to Practice looks at the areas that struggling adolescents find most difficult--meaning, vocabulary, (especially for academic words), and inferential comprehension--and focuses on ways to foster accelerated growth. Dr. Allington stresses that through expanding the volume of high-success reading that students experience each day, as well as through the wide variety of additional classroom strategies and methodologies included in the text, middle school students can achieve a working literacy proficiency.