Literacy Blogs

Recently, I received a query from some high school teachers at a charter school. They had been using Read 180 with their "remedial readers" and were generally happy with it, except for the really low kids--high school students reading below the third-grade level and they wanted to know if there were better choices for those kids. I don't have a lot of experience with high school phonics, but what do you do if a student is 7-9 years behind in their reading skills. Ignoring the decoding problems does not make much sense, but what works? So, when confronted with a question that I know not the answer of, I went ...

Blast from the Past: First posted December 27, 2009; reposted on January 11, 2018. Often on this type of blog entry, I later want to update it. However, I wouldn’t change a word in this one, though it is more than 8-years-old. These would be great resolutions for teachers in 2018. Mrs. Jones knows the National Reading Panel (NRP) found that teaching comprehension strategies give kids a benefit, so she wants to teach reading comprehension strategies. However, Mrs. Jones also knows that the NRP was controversial and, and not being a researcher herself, she isn’t entirely sure that she should follow it. She has ...

Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on November 29, 2009, and was reposted on May 30, 2020. These days there is a great deal of interest in the science of reading. That science certainly makes it clear that students need to learn to perceive sounds, decode words, and connect those orthographic-phonemic units with word meanings. While that might reassure teachers about what to teach, many are still uncertain as to the sequence of instruction recommended by a science of reading. Though this entry was published more than a decade ago, it is still up-to-date with regard to the ...

  I received two recent letters asking similar questions. Both correspondents noticed that I make a big deal about amount of instruction and they wanted to see the research that I rely on when I encourage schools to maximize time. Although there are lots of studies of time and its role in student learning — not just in reading, but in education generally — these studies aren’t always easy to find. If you look up time or amount of instruction in ERIC, there are studies, but you’ll miss out on some of the best examples. You probably won’t find the research on full-day kindergarten there, but are such studies ...

If you type “reading comprehension observation” into Google, you get 462,000 hits. Not all of those pages will be instruments for observing how teachers and classrooms support reading comprehension development. But a lot of them are. Some of these instruments are famous, like the CIERA one that Barbara Taylor and P. David Pearson made up awhile back. Others are the brainchildren of small companies or school districts. And t0hey all are supposed to be useful checklists for determining whether a classroom has what it takes. Studies on such instruments suggest that they work—too some extent. What I mean is that many of the checklists ...