Literacy Blogs

          The National Endowment for the Arts report on reading habits in the U.S. continues to reverberate. This is a report that American journalists are fascinated by. As one reporter explained to me today, he was writing for an audience of literary writers (poets, novelists, and the like), and he indicated that the NEA report was discouraging to that audience. “They wonder if it is even worth writing a novel, if no one is going to read it.”            My skepticism about the NEA report is two-fold: first, I doubt that we are ...

         Oral reading fluency has become a hot topic in the past few years. Of all aspects of reading, it still may be the most neglected, but we seem to be doing somewhat better in providing fluency instruction than we were when the National Reading Report concluded that fluency instruction improved reading achievement. That surprised many people; the idea that practicing oral reading could do more than improve the oral reading seemed strange. Usually we get better at what we practice: so, it would make sense to have kids doing a lot of silent reading rather than ...

I often receive letters from parents or teachers with instructional concerns about reading. I received the follow plaint from a concerned mother: I have a son who had a hard time in Kindergarten and 1st grade. He didn't know his alphabet when he left Kindergarten he went to summer school for 6 weeks in the summer. When he started 1st grade this year he only knew a few of his letters and numbers. In the past few months with extra help from his teachers, at home, I hired a private tutor and bought a computer online program Head Sprout he now knows all of his letters and their sounds so, he now can put ...

Blast from the Past: This entry was first published on December 13, 2007, and was reposted on March 15, 2018. Recently, the publishing industry revealed a big plunge in e-book sales accompanied by steady gains in the sales of traditional books. Much has changed since 2007 when this blog entry was first posted: tablets and larger phones have caught on, batteries have improved, more books are available in digital form and they are easier to buy and access--and, yet, the book hangs in there. I now regularly read both ebooks and paper ones myself, but ebooks are not likely to ...

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 ...

          The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has done a great service by trying to monitor how much young people and adults are reading. http:Although I certainly agree with NEA on the importance of reading--especially extended reading of challenging and worthwhile text, and I suspect that NEA is right students and adults are doing less of such reading these days, I do have some disagreements with them.           One concern is that I think their measurement of amount of reading is likely flawed. People are notoriously bad at reporting how they spend their ...

For several years, I have used a basic framework for guiding my action in the public schools. I have used this framework as a consultant when guiding others to improve achievement, and I used it myself as director of reading of the Chicago Public Schools. The description below lays out some of the basics. This is a piece I wrote for my teachers and principals in Chicago awhile back, to give them a sense of the essential direction that instruction needs to take.             The Chicago Reading Framework emerged from work that I have done in schools ...

Here is one of my most controversial columns as President of the International Reading Association. It upset a lot of people, but it is important that everyone understands that encouraging kids to read effectively isn't as easy as first thought. Does he really think kids shouldn’t read? I’m a new president. And some might wonder about my ability to represent IRA. So, let me begin this first column of my presidency with an appraisal of the IRA mission. IRA has three purposes: (1) to improve the quality of reading instruction, (2) to encourage reading and an interest in reading, and (3) to promote ...