Literacy Blogs

        Any suggestions as to how raising text levels will work for students that are learning English? Are the same ideas relevant? I suspect that it isn’t that different across languages in terms of how this works generally or how well it will work. What needs to be scaffolded might differ, however. Usually second language learners will need more vocabulary support or grammar support than will be needed by native speakers (but there can be a lot of individual variation in this). Second language experts have long expressed concerns about text placements that under shot ELL students’ intellectual ...

            When I was working on my doctorate, I had to conduct a historical study for one of my classes. I went to the Library of Congress and calculated readabilities for books that had been used to teach reading in the U.S. (or in the colonies that became the U.S.). I started with the Protestant Tutor and the New England Primer, the first books used for reading instruction here. From there I examined Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller and its related volumes and the early editions of McGuffey’s Readers.             Though the authors of those have left no record of how those books were created, it is evident that they had sound intuitions as to what makes text challenging. Even in the ...

Originally posted July 31, 2012; re-posted September 7, 2017. Although I posted these comments 5 years ago, these questions continue to come up frequently at my presentations, particularly with regard to how large a gap can we scaffold with older students. Theoretically, the answer is that there is no reading gap that can’t be scaffolded, but there are practicalities that impose such limits in regular classroom life. I recently received the following letter and thought you might be interested in my responses: “I found your August 21, 2011, blog post on "Rejecting Instructional Level Theory" eye-opening and helpful.  I'm a high school ...

Blast from the Past: First posted November 21, 2007; re-posted July 26, 2018. Advice on reading books with kids. I means this advice mainly for parents, but it is relevant to teachers in terms of how and what they should read to kids. Since Common Core such advice has become more common, but this was first issued years before CCSS.         I'm frequently asked about reading to children. Obviously reading to kids is a good idea, though this is one of those satisfying times when the research literature actually supports the good idea. Research clearly shows that reading ...