Literacy Blogs

Teacher Question: I'm looking at finding a spelling program for my school.  What are the elements that should be in a good program?  Should the lists of words be based on phonics/spelling patterns like silent e, later expanded into multisyllable words with the same pattern for upper grades + later study on affixes etc.? Should the spelling words be embedded in stories or articles that the students read as part of their word study? Should there be word and sentence dictation?  Should there be vocabulary related activities such as filling out sentences with missing spelling words that are included in a word bank? How many words per week? Shanahan responds: Can you spell ...

May 14, 2022, I published what I thought would be my last word on Reading Recovery (RR) http://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/me-and-reading-recovery. Fat chance. RR, if you don’t know, is a remedial reading program for first graders. It started in the 1970s in New Zealand and was widely adopted throughout the United States. Over the years, it has been both widely lauded and decried by reading authorities. From its inception, it was the focus of lots of research – much of which seemed to support its effectiveness, though I had expressed concerns about this (Shanahan, 1987; Shanahan & Barr, 1995), as had others (Iversen & Tunmer, ...

Blast from the Past: This blog entry posted first on February 22, 2020, and was reposted on March 21, 2026. The major update to this piece is the inclusion of a reference list, only one of the studies included in it would not have been available in 2020. Aside from that and a few minor wording changes, this is the same blog entry that originally generated 26 comments. That version is linked here for those who want to the reaction. Teacher question:  Everyone says reading and writing are connected. But our school focuses on only reading. We have a reading program (we ...

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted on November 3, 2018, and was reposted in revised form on March 14, 2026. The original title was, “The Whys and Hows of Research and the Teaching of Reading.” As you can see, I’ve retitled it. The term “science of reading” is both widely used and widely misunderstood today, so I have provided considerable revision here – though the overall points are the same. If you want to see the original, it is linked at the bottom (along with the more than 50 comments it elicited). I talk a lot about research in ...

Teacher Question As my teachers continue learning together about text-centered planning, I would love your help with a quick reflection. When you sit down to plan a unit: How do you decide which comprehension standards the anchor text naturally requires? What steps do you take to analyze the text before identifying standards? How does the text guide the sequence of lessons and questions? Shanahan Responds: I’ll answer your questions. But before I do, let me try to fend off some of the defensive comments my response is sure to elicit. First, yes, I understand that teachers are busy and can’t design every lesson themselves in depth. No, I ...

Teacher question: I saw that Mark Seidenberg was complaining that there is now too much phonics instruction. What do you think of that? Shanahan replies: I have great respect for Dr. Seidenberg’s work but have long been critical of his tendency to ignore research on reading instruction. In his wonderful book, he argues for the teaching of phonics with barely a nod to any of the studies of phonics teaching. Being an experimental psychologist, he was convinced of the value of phonics based on computer simulation studies. I, being a teacher, am more persuaded of the value of phonics because of the many studies ...

Teacher question: I am a literacy interventionist at an elementary school, and we use DIBELS for our progress monitoring. While I recognize the value of DIBELS as a screening tool, I have concerns about the appropriateness of the current fluency benchmarks my school has adopted. I have found some research that identifies fluency goals calibrated to reading comprehension. Studies by O'Connor (2017) and Cogo-Moreira et al. (2023) identify specific words-per-minute benchmarks to establish a cut-off point for reading speed and accuracy to obtain minimum values for comprehending texts. These wpm goals are much lower than our fluency goals. If the ultimate ...

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted on August 13, 2022. There was no incident that led me to repost this on December 13, 2025, just my own sense that it would be a good idea to revisit this much neglected aspect of teaching students to understand text. Originally, there was no podcast of this and now there is, and this updated version includes both a link to that podcast as well as to the original blog that elicited 23 thoughtful comments. What Teachers Need to Know about Sentence Comprehension Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit ...