Literacy Blogs

Two very interesting reports came across my desk yesterday--within minutes of each other.   The first one was an Education Week story that said the House Appropriations committee intended to kill off Reading First. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43budget_web.h27.html?print=1 This is no surprise since Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., is the chair of that committee and he has shown a strong penchant for using his power for political reasons with little regard for educational needs. He has been anti-Reading First for a long time (mainly, I suspect, because it was proposed by a Republican), and the unfortunate management problems along with the recent interim report (see my earlier ...

I was talking with Dick Anderson today. For those who do not know, Dick is an outstanding scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was the director of the Center for Reading during the years when the best research on reading was coming from there. His comprehension research is great. Dick is not anti-Reading First in my opinion, but I think it is fair to say he isn’t exactly a big Reading First fan. He isn’t against phonics, but tends to think Reading First makes too much of phonics. He feels the same about fluency and phonemic awareness (and, ...

A recent research report said Reading First failed to improve students’ reading scores. I was disappointed given the hard work of so many teachers, but the study was far from perfect. The Department of Education was more efficient in getting Reading First underway in the schools than it was in getting the study off the ground, so they couldn’t carry out a nationwide randomized controlled trial. Unfortunately, the study only looked at reading comprehension scores and not at performance in any of the underlying skills that support comprehension (so you can’t tell whether the program impacted those skills or not). Far more ...

Although I have designed instructional programs for teaching reading to older students who lag in learning, I have never tried to design a beginning reading intervention for such students. My AMP program skips phonics and phonological awareness not because I don't think these are critically important reading skills, but because most students in middle school and high school won't lag seriously in these skills. (I didn't say no older students struggle in these areas. A small percentage, maybe 1 in 7 of struggling secondary school readers, still will need help with alphabetics. But even low middle school readers usually can read ...

One thing I learned when I was director of reading for the Chicago Public Schools was that teachers’ appetites for resources, support, and professional development in reading were insatiable. No matter how much we tried to provide for them, they always seemed to want more. That is not a criticism of teachers, but praise. The men and women who were teaching in Chicago wanted to do a good job, so their eyes were always open for new resources.   Since then, I’ve tried to keep my eyes out for stuff that would help them and their counterparts elsewhere. Especially free stuff. I’ve ...

Blast from the Past: Do you ever wonder what the difference is between skills and strategies? Originally posted March 20, 2008; re-posted on September 28, 2017.    Recently Peter Afflerbach, David Pearson, and Scott Paris published a nifty article, “Clarifying differences between reading skills and reading strategies” in the Reading Teacher (February 2008, pp.364-373). They did a great job of that. Below I have summarized some of their major points, added some explanation of why you should care about the distinction, and showed the differences in assessment and instruction for strategies and skills. 1. There are no widely-accepted definitions of strategies and skills. To ...