Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: My district has moved into an approach of asking teachers to locate materials for standards-based instruction.  They have opted to create assessments to isolate individual standards to teach/test each standard individually. Each assessment is named by reading standard and is associated with grade-level English Language Arts courses. What thoughts do you have on how I might guide them to move from assessing isolated standards to a more integrated approach?  Shanahan response: Research has made it pretty clear that it is not possible to assess any of the individual standards so spending time on as your district is doing is a fool’s errand. Whatever scores or ratings ...

Teacher question: I currently teach English as a Second Language to grades 6-8. Next year I will have high beginners, many of whose spring MapR reading scores are in the K-1 range (153-165), and many of whom had interrupted education in their home countries. Where I teach your work is cited as the basis for a requirement that we give all students, regardless of their ESOL level, grade-level texts in English in ESOL class.   While I am OK with scaffolding up 3 or 4 grade levels, I think the gap between readers at a K or 1 level and a 7th-grade ...

About the queries: Twice in the past couple of weeks I’ve heard about an article that directly challenges ideas I’ve published on Disciplinary Literacy (Dunkerly-Bean, J., & Bean, T. (2016). Missing the savoir for the connaissance: Disciplinary and content area reading as regimes of truth. Journal of Literacy Research, 48(4), 448-476.) My first contact on that said that I needed to respond somehow. I demurred not thinking it mattered much. Then, this week someone wrote saying that obviously, we don’t need to teach disciplinary literacy since there is no such thing—we can just keep doing what we have been doing with ...

Blast from the Past: This entry first posted July 23, 2017 and re-posted February 27, 2021. This blog posting seemed timely. Many teachers have cut back on the amount of reading instruction due to COVID-19, online teaching, and social distancing. That does not mean that teachers have proportionally trimmed their lessons, just covering less ground with each component of literacy. No, they have tended to drop whole sections of their lessons – and fluency seems to be one that was easy for many to leave behind. I think that repeated reading and similar approaches can continue to work even in ...

Teacher question:  I am interested in understanding how phonemic awareness and phonics can support students who do not have a structure for learning the English language. For example, English Language Learners who have no structure for language in their home language or in English. If you can suggest resources that address this matter, I would be so grateful.   Shanahan response: The research on these aspects of second-language literacy learning is limited. However, the work that has been done indicates that English learners benefit from explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics for English reading (Shanahan & Beck, 2006). That shouldn’t be surprising. No matter ...

Blast from the Past:  This entry was first published June 18, 2017 and was re-posted on October 12, 2019. I thought it would be a good time to re-release this blog entry about practical steps schools could take to address “prior knowledge” for reading comprehension. Recently, Natalie Wexler released The Knowledge Gap, which is getting a lot of well-deserved attention. Although we definitely should not reduce the amount of reading instruction to make way for some new curricular initiative, we definitely should rededicate ourselves to ensuring that kids know a lot about our world and that increases what they know about science, history, geography, literature and so on. Teacher question:   ...

Teacher’s question: Teachers in grades 3, 4 and 5 spend weeks and weeks (like 5-6) reading aloud chapter books to their students. In some classrooms, students have a copy of the book. Is there research that speaks to the effectiveness of a read-aloud over a period of time? Does student interest wane after 2 weeks or so? Are there ways to think strategically about read aloud time ... to incorporate instruction? What do we want students to know and be able to do as a result of a read aloud in this context? How can we structure close reading of passages for struggling ...