Literacy Blogs

Regular readers of this blog know I get lots of questions. I do my best to answer them. Occasionally, I have no idea the answer. If a topic is straightforward, I investigate and usually can craft a response that I hope manages to be both informed and helpful. Other times, I may decide that a query that puzzles me may not be worth the candle. Not that the topic isn’t important to the questioner. Only that even a terrific answer would hold little value for a wider audience. And then, there are those times when an interrogative has the three I’s. It’s ...

This blog first posted on January 8, 2022, and was re-issued on May 3, 2025. These days there is much interest in reading fluency, but writing fluency has an important role to play in literacy development, too. As I predicted in this piece, new research would eventually demonstrate that writing quality depends greatly on writing fluency (Kim, 2024). In fact, without writing fluency, you are not likely to see much good writing. If students cannot effortlessly get their words onto paper, they will struggle to write well. This blog provides several practical recommendations for making this happen and it cites ...

I don’t get it. We don’t teach that many sight words to young readers. Why is there so much attention to sight words? Think of any of the models of reading – the Simple View, Scarborough’s Rope, the Active View, and so on. Every one of those models highlights the importance of decoding or word recognition. Unless you can translate the marks on the page into language you can’t read. The whole point of learning to decode or to recognize words is to develop an extensive sight vocabulary. As Linnea Ehri (1995) has written: One of the great mysteries confronting literacy researchers is ...

Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on September 10, 2017, and reposted April 12, 2025. Blasts from the Past make blogs available to new audiences and afford me the opportunity to reiterate points or to reconsider my earlier claims. This site is dedicated to improving reading instruction through a close consideration of research. But research is an ongoing enterprise. Anyone who takes a principled stand based on science had better be prepared to dine on crow occasionally. This is one of those times. Accordingly, I have not rewritten this entry but hope to correct it with new prefatory ...

Previously, I discussed two observational studies (a landmark from the 1970s and a valuable recent effort). Both aimed to determine the amount of reading comprehension instruction in American schools. That’s an endeavor that requires clear definitions. According to the older study conducted by Dolores Durkin (1978), comprehension instruction included any action teachers took to help children “understand or work out the meaning of more than a single, isolated word.” The newer study, this one by Philip Capin and colleagues (2024), didn’t provide a definition as much as a list of acceptable actions: teaching word meaning knowledge, developing background knowledge, selecting texts ...

Recently, Philip Capin and his colleagues published a valuable study in Scientific Studies of Reading. This research combined data from 66 observational studies of reading. Capin and company found that 23% of reading instruction was devoted to reading comprehension, and that this amount has increased since 2000. However, they also identified some unfortunate trends. In the 1970s, Dolores Durkin shocked the reading world when she reported the results of her landmark observational study. She revealed an appalling paucity of comprehension teaching. Her team observed almost 75 hours of reading instruction in upper elementary classrooms but only found about 20 minutes of ...

  Parent question: My son is 11 years old, and he suffers from dyslexia. I’ve been told you oppose accommodations for dyslexic children. That is irresponsible. I don’t think you understand how these children suffer.RELATED: Eight Ways to Help Kids Read Complex Text Shanahan responds: I do oppose some – though not all — accommodations for students with dyslexia. The purpose of accommodations is to enable people with disabilities to access and participate in activities, jobs, and learning. An accommodation is an alteration to an environment that increases individual access. Examples of accommodations that I fully support are modifications to curbs to allow those who depend ...

Years ago, I posted a blog that recommended teaching “text structure” (March 17, 2019). Such instruction can improve reading comprehension – as proven by copious numbers of rigorously designed research studies carried out with a wide range of students (e.g., across the grades, English Learners, kids with learning disabilities). Texts are not just lists of sentences. Authors organize what they have to say so that readers can follow the discourse and remember the information For example, stories depend on plot structure or story grammar. Characters have goals and confront problems in trying to achieve those desired outcomes. Accordingly, stories include one or ...