Literacy Blogs

Recently, the Washington Post published an article about the latest hostilities in the “reading wars.” Washington Post Article. I noticed it because the columnist, Jay Matthews, quoted from this blog. The column did a good job of surfacing the disagreements, but what really caught my eye was the comments section. More than 50 readers had weighed in – defending phonics or trying to clothesline it. As a longtime phonics advocate, I was especially sensitive to the illogical arguments against decoding instruction. They were mostly the same arguments I’ve heard for the last 50 years of my career. I might think these to be illogical arguments, but they appear to be persuasive ...

Teacher question: When working with state educational standards are the expectations for the student to be able to accomplish each of the standards with grade level text. Some of us believe that if a fourth-grade student can determine the main idea in a second-grade text that the student has mastered that standard. Please help us settle this argument. Shanahan response: Actions like identifying a main idea or summarizing a text or comparing characters’ traits are considered to be skills. Text levels (like fourth-grade text or Level L or 950Lexiles) are degrees of text difficulty or complexity. Readers have to implement their reading skills within texts of varying levels of complexity. If a ...

Interesting question. Before I answer, let me ask one:  What keeps Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, up at night? You know Amazon, the trillion-dollar corporation that delivers something like a 5 billion packages a year. I’m at a professional meeting. The chair asks what “levers” we have for improving reading achievement in the U.S. It’s an easy question. There are so many possibilities. The first one most folks think of is, the teacher. If teachers did better kids would do better. There are a lot of alternative levers: school administrators, politicians, bureaucrats, publishers, universities, assessments, standards, curricula, media, screens, mom and dad… As these discussions go, this one isn’t bad. Lots of ...

Teacher Question: I’m a big phonics promoter. Recently, someone challenged me saying that the fact that Reading First didn’t work shows that emphasizing phonics is a bad idea. Can you help? Shanahan replies:  In 2001, the President and the U.S. Congress agreed on the creation of a $5 billion program to enhance reading instruction K-3 in especially low performing Title I schools. That program was called Reading First. Every state got a portion of the funds based on their poverty statistics and there was a list of schools and school districts that were eligible for this money based on reading performance on their state tests (3rd grade scores). The grants were sizable, ...

Blast from the Past: First published on January 4, 2020. Usually my Blasts from the Past are older than this one. However, it seems worthwhile to reissue this now for two reasons. First, Schutz & Rainey, 2020 published a wonderful analysis of modeling (Reading Teacher) about the same time this blog first appeared. They emphasized showing, situating, and abstracting -- with a strong focus on the "invisible parts" of reading (what we do inside our heads). Nice piece of work. Second, and, perhaps, more urgent is the fact that with so much distance teaching going on modeling appears to be ...

I hope you, your families, and communities have a happy holiday season.  May you all have a more literate New Year!

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 ...