Literacy Blogs

Recently, I heard about an idea being entertained by government officials in Indiana: improve reading by flunking more kids. The idea is that if a youngster reaches third grade and isn’t reading well enough, you hold the child back to give them the time to catch up.   As you might know, I’m a big supporter of the idea of increasing the amount of teaching that we provide kids: longer school days, longer school years, and, yes, even more school years. So, what of this plan to give more teaching to third-grade laggards?   Well, you also know that I believe in following the ...

I just received this request for information from a friend: The question being posed is, "how many minutes of literacy instruction is  recommended for early childhood, ages such as preschool and kindergarten?" The amount recommended in our district for grades 1-8 is 120 minutes, so we obviously need to rethink our message to the early childhood program. I'm not sure if you are familiar with or if this is relevant, but the early childhood program (preschool - kindergarten) uses Creative Curriculum, which incorporates center choices with whole group reading and writing instruction.  Thank you in advance for your advice! My response: There are no data that I am aware of on that ...

For many years, reading comprehension wasn't taught at all. American students read text aloud for much of the 19th century without a lot of discussion. Early in the 20th century, Thorndike found that if readers were asked questions about what they had read, they understood and remembered more. Soon after, publishers created teacher’s guides (an innovation of the ‘20s and ‘30s), and they all included questions for teachers to ask to facilitate comprehension.   Things began to change again in the 1960s: the idea that we could guide students to think about text more effectively, not just by rehearsing after reading (e.g., ...

For 20 years, my speeches and writing have been heavily oriented towards time--amount of instruction. I have made a big deal that schools with longer school days tend to do better as do countries with longer school years; that summer school programs increase achievement as do many after school programs; that snow days lower school achievement, as do student absences; that extended school years and all-day kindergartens work; that classrooms differ in how much instruction they provide and that these differences are related to student learning, and that guiding teachers to use time better improves achievement.   A policymaker recently pointed out ...

I've wanted to write this blog for sometime. I've was so interested in the role of the brain in reading so I studied it in graduate school. One of my first blogs touted the wonderful book, Proust and the Squid (and it is still on my recommended books list in the right hand column). And I worked with Sally Shaywitz, a famous brain/reading researcher, on the National Reading Panel, and we always got on great. My wife even used to do that kind of work.   Recently, Mark Roth published the article (linked below) about how brains change as they learn to read. Researchers ...

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 ...