Literacy Blogs

Our preK-5 school has a number of struggling readers, and we were told yesterday that we should focus only on fluency and accuracy, not comprehension or vocabulary. We were also told that we really shouldn't be using our grade level reading materials or complex texts in the classroom until students are fluent and accurate. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what we do when we have large numbers of struggling readers. I get lots of questions about the sequence of instruction. In this case the issue is fluency versus comprehension; more often it is about phonics, both about the sequence ...

Blast from the Past: First posted April 12, 2014, re-posted on November 1, 2017. This issue of how much reading students should do in class continues to be a hot issue. Today, I'd go even further than I did then. I now counsel that 50% of reading comprehension time should be spent reading (and, similarly a big chunk of the time devoted to social studies and science text should be spent that way, too). I'd call for the same thing in phonics/decoding time (spending about half the time decoding and encoding words), fluency (about half the time reading aloud), and ...

Teacher question: I am a Reading Specialist at a parochial school.  I wonder if you can give me some advice regarding one of my 4th grade students. She reads very fluently, however, her comprehension is poor.  We have worked extensively on vocabulary and visualization skills.  Can you make any recommendations? Shanahan response: Let’s assume your description of the student is correct (that is not always the case: sometimes teachers tell me that a student is fluent, but what they mean is that the student reads the words accurately, though often too slowly and without it proper prosody or expression).  If she is a fluent ...

Recently, I came across some interesting stuff in Jay Mathews’s “Class Struggle” column in the Washington Post.   http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/04/should_high_schoolers_read_alo.html?referrer=emaillink"   Mr. Mathews explains that he noticed oral reading taking place during a high school classroom observation and he wondered whether this was a waste of time or a good idea. Various teachers chimed in, on both sides, with valuable insights. The column is worth a read—in fact, it would make a great kickoff to teacher discussions.   I’ve been in the field of reading education for a long time (I started tutoring inner city kids in reading 40 years ago). For that entire time, the professoriate ...

Here is an FAQ on teaching oral reading fluency. Do all students need work with fluency? No, not all students need work with fluency, but most elementary students do. Some students are so good with fluency that they apparently can read almost any book so well that it sounds like they can understand it. As a population of students goes through school, an increasingly large proportion of them will be fluent at the highest levels. This means that fewer students will need fluency work as time goes on. Our students are getting low scores in reading comprehension. Why aren’t we focusing on that ...

What a great week... I just got back from a very pleasing visit to Dublin, Ireland. My Irish friends invited me over to see if I could provide any help to their wonderful "youngballymun" project. Ballymun is an area of Dublin that is economically challenged. Ireland has one of the world's best education systems and among the highest literacy levels, but everything isn't what it should be in Ballymun.   As in major cities all over the U.S., the kids who live in economically-challenged neighborhoods (with the worst housing, the most serious health problems including drug abuse, etc.) do worst in school. ...

What’s the relationship between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension? Does fluency instruction automatically lead to comprehension? Are reading comprehension and fluency independent processes? Reasonable questions like those abound about this aspect of learning to read. However, if you are seeking answers to such questions in the recent article on fluency and reading comprehension that appears in The Reading Teacher (RT, March 2009, vol. 62 (6), pp. 512-521), don’t bother.   The problem is that the authors, M. D. Applegate, A. J. Applegate, and V. B. Modla, have made up a straw man (um, straw person) argument implying that someone out there ...

The winter issue of The California Reader includes a spirited response by Glenn DeVoogd to an article that I published in that outlet this fall. Nothing wrong with differences of opinion, so I’ll not use this space to try to argue that I’m wrong and he’s right on those issues. However, I will address some egregious errors in his claims. Glenn says the National Reading Panel (NRP) promoted “a more skills-based approach to reading rather than a meaning-based approach focusing on comprehension” (p. 5). In fact, NRP looked at 205 studies on the teaching of reading comprehension, all with reading comprehension ...

         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 ...

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 ...