Literacy Blogs

This is the time of year when thoughts turn to compassion, and when Shanahan on Literacy encourages generosity towards literacy-oriented charities. Each year I identify all of Charity Navigator's 4-starred national charities that support book distribution and other literacy initiatives. I have no connection to any of these organizations, and please remember your local literacy charities, too.  We’ll soon be back to providing the best research-based literacy information possible, but for now, let’s remember all the ways that we can contribute to promoting literacy. Be generous and have a wondrous and literate holiday. Links to these 6 worthy charities are on my website year round: https://shanahanonliteracy.com/charities Books for Africa.  Founded in 1988, ...

It’s been a bad week for fluency instruction. I started getting emails questioning me on whether I supported the fluency ideas that my friend Tim Rasinski was advocating. These messages seemed to fall into two categories: those who were honestly horrified that Tim would offer something beyond what they believed to be part of the “science of reading” and those who hoped to bait me into publicly taking a rhetorical swing at Tim’s claims. I found out Tim had been on Amplify’s Science of Reading podcast (probably why I was being contacted so much), and that he had argued for using techniques like “assisted reading” and “repeated reading” to ...

Teacher question:   Some of my ELA teachers have been talking about dyslexia fonts lately. Is there any merit to this? Shanahan response: This question takes me back to graduate school. I was fascinated with print and its impact on reading. That led me to study the work of a psychologist named Miles Tinker. He published scads of research and reviews of research on the impacts of print on reading and learning to read and on print itself (his 1963 book, Legibility of Print, is still a standard work). Tinker made me a skeptic concerning the supposed benefits of print design alterations, eye movement training, and the like. He provided several ...

Teacher question: I've attached a Student Work Analysis tool that we are using. I have read that you oppose attempts to grade students on the individual reading standards. Although this tool is not used for grading students, it is a standard-by-standard analysis of the students’ work, and I wonder what you think of it? [The form that was included provided spaces for teachers to analyze student success with each of their state’s math standards]. Shanahan response:  In the blog entry that you refer to, I spoke specifically about evaluating reading comprehension standards (not math or even the more foundational or skills-oriented decoding, vocabulary, or morphology). A common error in reading education ...

Teacher question: What does research say about early literacy and when to begin? I am aware that kids may reach the stage of development where they're ready for reading at different times. What does the research say about the "window" for when a kid can learn to read? What are the consequences if they haven't started reading past that time?  Shanahan response: Oh, fun. The kind of question that generates strong scholarly (sounding) opinion, with no real data to go on. The advocates on both sides will bloviate about windows of opportunity, developmentally-appropriate practice, potential harms of early or later starts, and how kids in Finland are doing. Despite the impressive citations that show ...

Teacher question: I know phonics should be taught explicitly and we have looked through several sources to determine the patterns to teach in first grade. I have been pouring through leveled texts and have found a high concentration of blends, digraphs, long vowel/silent 'e', and predictable vowel teams in text as low as levels 4 and 6. We are not teaching these patterns until well into the year, but expect our incoming first graders to read Level 3/4.  We are usually about 10 weeks into the year before even starting blends. At that point the text level expectation is around an 8. So, we keep flagging kids for more ...

Teacher question: What does it mean that something has research support? I’ve been a teacher for years and I’ve taught hundreds of children to read. Now I’m being told that in our district we are expected to teach in some new way that has research behind it. I like how I teach reading and I don’t want to change. Why should I? Shanahan response: I suspect that there are a lot of teachers who agree with you. Someone like me claims that a particular approach is essential, but they see learning proceeding well without this supposedly indispensable element. Why trust some researcher who doesn’t even know your kids, when you can trust your own ...

Blast from the Past: This entry was first published September 28, 2019 and was re-issued on October 17, 2020. As a young man, I set out to improve my vocabulary since I knew it would improve my chances of getting into graduate school. Over a period of about a year, I learned about 400 new words (all recorded on index cards for practice). This was not a research study, I really needed to master these words. My personal impression: I couldn't believe how much my reading and listening comprehension improved during that period; things that I "kind of" understood previously ...

Blast from the Past: First released on September 21, 2019; re-issued January 22, 2022.  This blog entry was met by a great deal of controversy with some teachers agreeing with me and others arguing that you can deeply engage a text even if you haven't read it. Of course, since this was released we have been immersed in a COVID crisis that has greatly reduced the amount of reading instruction that children are receiving. The reading conference method might seem more useful to some in this unfortunate climate. We definitely want to encourage kids to replace some of that lost schooling ...