Literacy Blogs

          Recently, I was asked to make some presentations. I suggested a session on close reading and another on teaching with complex text. The person who invited me said, “But that’s just one subject… the close reading of complex text. What else will you talk about?”             Her response puzzled me, but since then I’ve been noting that many people are confounding those two subjects. They really are two separate and separable constructs. That means that many efforts to implement the so-called Common Core standards may be missing an important beat   ...

Blast from the Past: This posting originally appeared on August 30, 2015 and reposted August 19, 2023. Issues about whether students should be taught at grade level or instructional level continue to plague the field of reading education. Since this first posted, more research has accumulated showing that it is important -- for the sake of learning -- that we give students opportunity to learn to read harder texts than we dared in the past. Sadly, many advocates of guided reading continue to misinterpret the "challenging text" requirements of their state standards. Here i explain why the instructional level theory ...

Blast from the Past:  This entry was originally published on May 17, 2015 and reposted on July 13, 2017. Between the two publication dates much has occurred in the world of challenging text. Various authorities who tout schemes for matching kids to texts have made changes to how they do the matching. In other words, they took criteria for identifying the instructional level and changed the numbers so that kids would be in somewhat more difficult text. That's a good thing as it means more kids will now get opportunities to read materials at their interest levels or their intellectual ...

        Any suggestions as to how raising text levels will work for students that are learning English? Are the same ideas relevant? I suspect that it isn’t that different across languages in terms of how this works generally or how well it will work. What needs to be scaffolded might differ, however. Usually second language learners will need more vocabulary support or grammar support than will be needed by native speakers (but there can be a lot of individual variation in this). Second language experts have long expressed concerns about text placements that under shot ELL students’ intellectual ...