Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: Our school uses XXXXXXX [widely used commercial program] in the primary grades to teach fluency. I don’t like it because so many children can read fluently but don’t understand what they are reading. Wouldn’t it be better to focus on reading comprehension? Shanahan responds: Thanks for your question. I’ll answer it, but I suspect your premises may be wrong. I don’t buy the idea that our instructional choice is fluency or comprehension. We need to teach both. The simple view of reading emphasizes the important role each plays (Gough & Tunmer, 1987), and there is a substantial body of evidence showing the ...

Teacher question: You say that one-quarter or one-fifth of the reading instruction time should be spent on oral reading fluency. But I teach kindergarten and most of my kids can’t read, so fluency instruction doesn’t make any sense. What should I do instead? Shanahan responds: When we talk about oral reading fluency – or what I prefer to call text reading fluency – we’re referring to the ability to read text accurately, with automaticity, and appropriate expression or prosody. As such, text fluency is a mash up of a plethora of applied skills including decoding ability, knowledge of high frequency words, ability to multitask ...

I’m in Chicago in the 10th week of pandemic confinement. Even in states that are opening up, the schools are still closed, and some may remain closed in the fall. One suspects that there may be future extended school closings as well as this insidious virus works its way through our communities. There is no research literature on education and pandemics. But there is an all too extensive body of study focused on the effects of natural disasters (e.g., floods, fires, hurricanes, tsunamis). Such events differ from what we are going through… those causing greater direct loss and trauma. Children who lose ...

Teacher question: I have read the work of researchers like Louisa Moats, Stanislas Dehaene, and Linnea Ehri and have an understanding of how reading works in the brain. I understand the critical role of connecting graphemes to phonemes. My question is what is the true role of the kinesthetic activities promoted in many intervention programs? In a webinar that I watched the speaker mentioned several times how critical it was to have students trace the words because this created neural pathways. What does the research say about this? Shanahan response: The idea of tracing words to improve literacy has been around for a century. You’d ...

Teacher question: When providing fluency instruction, should time, such as the number of words per minute, be an element? Our school has been doing that, but elsewhere I’m hearing that we shouldn’t be doing that. Shanahan response: Fluency is a bit of a mash up and not a pure skill. In fluency, it is important that students read the words correctly. That’s the “accuracy” part of fluency. That obviously depends heavily on decoding skills (and decoding instruction). Unfortunately, many kids can read words accurately but still aren’t fluent readers. (In fact, that’s what got people teaching fluency in the first place—boys and girls who were ...

Teacher’s question: Our school psychologist tests all of our boy and girls for RAN. He says it is the best predictor of reading ability. How can I improve my students’ RAN performance? Shanahan’s response: If someone tells you that you can teach RAN, run! RAN refers to “rapid automatized naming.” Back in the 1970s, researchers wanted to measure cognitive processing speed, so they came up with a variety of RAN measures. Typically, students are asked to name known colors, objects, letters or words, and their performance is timed. The studies showed that rapid naming was a good predictor of reading ability and was an ...

How to Improve Text Fluency in the Middle Schools and High Schools   Teacher question: I teach high school students with reading disabilities, and I use your blog regularly as a source and inspiration. How can I help high school students develop oral fluency? Can you give me specific ways in my classroom to do this with reluctant readers?  Shanahan responds: This is an important question. Too few teachers ask it. Many teachers think fluency teaching is just for the primary or the elementary grades. Of course, most state standards talk about fluency in those grades, but that’s a mistake that even the authors of many of ...