Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: Our school district is going wild over Lexiles because they are in the Common Core standards. I think they are overdoing it and don’t feel comfortable with some of the decisions that we are making. What are the weaknesses of Lexiles? Shanahan response: First, Lexiles is only one of several readability measures included in the CCSS. They started with that one, but as studies were completed they added ATOS, SourceRater, and several others. Everyone has to remember that Lexiles (and any readability measure) is a prediction of difficulty, and there since it is a prediction there will be a certain amount ...

This entry was first published on October 11, 2015; and it was issued again on March 11, 2023 (it was also reblasted on August 24, 2017). Last week, Nell Duke, issued a Tweet that encouraged the teaching of literacy to young children. Judging by some of the responses you'd have thought my esteemed colleague was encouraging child abuse. Some of the responses claimed there was no value to early teaching since the kids in Finland do so well -- and they don't receive reading instruction at school until the kids' reach age 7. This blog entry is relevant to that ...

Last week I replied to some of the remarks about text complexity that were made on the Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post column. Here are a couple more. Fountas and Pinnell are stating what is their take on what the Common Core standards say. What the standards say and what their supporters are advocating are not necessarily the same thing. I think this statement is fully in agreement with what I have said above.   "But standards do not usually prescribe that students must spend all their time reading texts that are extremely hard for them, with no access to books that will help ...

Our preK-5 school has a number of struggling readers, and we were told yesterday that we should focus only on fluency and accuracy, not comprehension or vocabulary. We were also told that we really shouldn't be using our grade level reading materials or complex texts in the classroom until students are fluent and accurate. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what we do when we have large numbers of struggling readers. I get lots of questions about the sequence of instruction. In this case the issue is fluency versus comprehension; more often it is about phonics, both about the sequence ...

Blast from the Past: This posting originally appeared on August 30, 2015 and reposted August 19, 2023. Issues about whether students should be taught at grade level or instructional level continue to plague the field of reading education. Since this first posted, more research has accumulated showing that it is important -- for the sake of learning -- that we give students opportunity to learn to read harder texts than we dared in the past. Sadly, many advocates of guided reading continue to misinterpret the "challenging text" requirements of their state standards. Here i explain why the instructional level theory ...

Teacher question: I am confused. You claim that independent reading has almost no benefit, but another article I just read says, "In one of the most extensive studies of independent reading yet conducted, Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988) investigated a broad array of activities and their relationship to reading achievement and growth in reading. They found that the amount of time students spent in independent reading was the best predictor of reading achievement and also the best predictor of the amount of gain in reading achievement made by students between second and fifth grade." Which is correct? Shanahan's snappy response"  Oh, that's an ...

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted August 16, 2015, and was reposted on September 25, 2021.This blog entry is an evergreen. What I mean by that I didn’t need to change a word. What it took to teach vocabulary effectively was as true then as it is now. It is important that students develop rich vocabulary. This is both an issue of knowledge of the world and language, since vocabulary is the connection between these key reading assets. This blog entry straightforwardly addresses what it takes to develop this resource in our students. Teacher question:  What do you recommend is ...