Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: In the current era of readily available teacher-created materials through open marketplaces, and given the critical importance of print materials for beginning readers—particularly for multilingual learners and students with disabilities—what does current research indicate are the best practices regarding the optimal amounts of extraneous visuals to truly support their literacy development effectively?   Shanahan responds: I hope most teachers are not spending a lot of time “creating” instructional materials. Some do, of course, but they tend to be a tiny minority. I’d rather their time be spent on figuring out students’ learning needs. Of course, there are those cut-and-paste artists who create “new” ...

Blast from the Past: This blog first appeared on August 14, 2021, and was reissued with minor revisions on September 20, 2025. Reading education – like the lengths of skirts and the widths of neckties – tends to be trendy. That’s unfortunate for those kids who happen to be in school when phonics isn’t cool and learning styles are. I often reissue these entries when I sense renewed interest in a topic. This time it is just the opposite. I’m not hearing much interest in this lately, and I think this neglect is a serious problem for kids. Maybe this ...

  Teacher question: Middle school reading scores are either stagnating or dropping in my state, and they are looking at things they can do to help students improve. I’ve read the materials on the need for kids to reach a certain level of decoding to succeed in the upper grades. What do we do from here? What interventions should schools/states add to help these kids catch up on what they missed? Shanahan responds: The most likely reason middle school scores are down in your state probably has little to do with phonics instruction. Most phonics is provided in grades K-2. Doing a better job with ...

Teacher Question At our school, we test students oral reading fluency three times a year (aimswebPlus), and we teach fluency in both our Tier 1 and Tier 2 programs. I believe that I have a good understanding of how to teach fluency using repeated reading. However, one step in that process that I’m unsure of is modeling. How much fluency modeling should a teacher do and how is that best accomplished? Shanahan responds:Since the National Reading Panel (2000) determined fluency instruction to be beneficial, I’ve been queried often about it. Those questions have focused on text difficulty, amounts of fluency practice, role ...

Blast from the Past: This entry first appeared on November 6, 2021 and was re-issued on August 2, 2025. We’re at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year. Reading scores haven’t recovered from the COVID debacle, too many kids and teachers are missing school, and many states have adopted laws or policies aimed at beefing up decoding instruction. Concerns about the “science of reading” continue to arise in media coverage and policy debates, so this earlier published article still has relevance. This blog argues that the reform of reading instruction should depend on instructional studies rather than on computer simulations ...

Blast from the Past: This piece first appeared on June 4, 2022, and was re-released on July 26, 2025. I continue to feel strongly that speech-to-print is the best way to go when it comes to beginning phonics instruction, yet as this entry admits – that is not yet proven. That hasn’t changed over the past few years, and yet data continue to accumulate on that side of the ledger. For example, Yan, et al. (2024) demonstrate the importance of a neurological speech-to-print convergence in reading, something that suggests the potential value of such instructional approaches. Likewise, there is more ...

Whole Books or Excerpts? Which Do the Most to Promote Reading Ability Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several inquiries about the importance of whole book reading within reading instruction. And no wonder. Social media has been aflame with righteous claims about this purported and purportedly damaging shift to having students read excerpts within reading lessons rather than taking on whole books. I say “purported” because the claim seems to be that in the past teachers were teaching their kids to read books, and now they aren’t. I’ve been around quite a while, and I don’t remember the past that way. I ...

Teacher’s Question: Dear Dr. Shanahan, I have been searching for research around student testing. Could you point me in the direction of relevant research: Does testing time of the day make a difference? Does it matter if the testing proctor is that student's teacher for that subject? What effect does testing over several days in short bursts have?   With the state test, all grades are tested on the same day at the same time. But our benchmark tests are different. We give those three times a year (a test with four passages and 35 questions, taking about two hours to complete). Students are tested within their ELA or Math ...