Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: I attended one of your recent presentations. You cited the Hart & Risley canard that there is a 30 million-word gap. Aren’t you aware that study has been rejected? There is no word gap. Poverty kids have as much language support as other kids. Shanahan response: Research can get things wrong. That’s why researchers—unlike practitioners and policymakers—are usually so interested in the methods of a study. Study a problem one way, you get one answer. Study it another way, perhaps a different answer emerges. Try to understand why the two studies diverged and youstart to gain a deeper understanding of the problem. That’s ...

Teacher question: Please share your thinking as well as research referencing the occasional use of decodable texts for small group reading instruction in grades K-2.  Shanahan response: This is not a highly researched topic. There have been only a handful of studies into the effectiveness of decodable texts since the term was first used back in the 1980s. And, truth be told, they are kind of mess; with little evident agreement about what decodable text is, what it should be compared with, and what outcomes we should expect to derive from it. Research has less solved the problem—is it helpful to use decodable texts with beginning readers—than demonstrated how complicated even simple ideas ...

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted only a little over a year ago. However, it raised such a debate that I thought it wise to re-post at the start of the new school year. It would seem that nothing would be so agreeable as the teaching of ABCs to new readers, but that is certainly not the case. Not only are there ardent (and at times strident) opponents to teaching letter names, but even those who champion the practice rarely articulate an explanation for why we should do it that way. See what you think. Teacher question:  Should we teach letter names or letter sounds to ...

It happened again this week. Awhile back I was a member of the National Reading Panel (NRP) that reviewed instructional research on the teaching of reading at the request of the U.S. Congress. One of my roles was to serve on the “alphabetics committee” that reviewed the research on phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Since then it has happened numerous times, like it did this week. Some self-proclaimed phonics authority attributes findings to the NRP that we didn’t actually find (usually because they didn’t actually read it). The one this week has been one of the more frequent misclaims. He claimed that the NRP found synthetic phonics instruction to be more effective than ...

Teacher question: I’ve collected some data on first-grade writing. I developed a plan for getting 6-year-olds to write arguments and I have a rubric designed to allow me to figure out how well my supports help them to write effective arguments (evaluating whether they took a clear position on the topic, and how much evidence they used). I tried it out and gave the kids plenty of time but was surprised to find that they didn’t write much; I’m having trouble evaluating the quality of this writing given how few words they produced. Any ideas on how to better evaluate the impact of what I did?  Shanahan’s response: The specifics of ...

Teacher question: My question is about disciplinary literacy. Should we be guiding teachers to integrate social studies or science and ELA or having our ELA teachers teaching disciplinary literacy for these subjects? Our curriculum focuses on overarching concepts and essential questions. Shanahan response: You raise two separate issues here: curriculum integration and who has responsibility for the disciplinary literacy standards. Let me take them one at a time. I don’t oppose integrating social studies or science and literature, but I’m definitely cautious about such combinations. We want our students to develop a clear appreciation of what literature is, how it’s read, what it brings to the table, and so on. We ...

Teacher question: We are trying to raise our third-grade reading scores. What do you think of “platooning” to help us meet that goal? Shanahan response: Platooning, or what in my time was called “departmentalization,” is apparently on the rise in America’s primary grades. Schools like yours are hungry to raise reading and math achievement, and this looks like an inexpensive way to do it. It costs nothing to have classrooms departmentalized rather than self-contained: it requires no additional teachers; there are no added professional development costs; there are no added textbook, computer, or other instructional materials costs; and many teachers love the idea of no longer being responsible for subjects that ...