Literacy Blogs

Teacher question:  I’m confused. I’ve worked with Lexiles for years and my district provided us with a chart showing the levels of books to use for each grade level. Then Common Core came along with a different chart that put different book levels with each grade level. I don’t live in a Common Core state, but I’m still not sure which chart to use. Can you help me? Shanahan response:  It’s funny, but no one has ever asked me that before. What makes it funny is that you’re not alone. Most educators have no idea of the reason for those two charts. Let’s start with the ...

Teacher question: Our school district is going wild over Lexiles because they are in the Common Core standards. I think they are overdoing it and don’t feel comfortable with some of the decisions that we are making. What are the weaknesses of Lexiles? Shanahan response: First, Lexiles is only one of several readability measures included in the CCSS. They started with that one, but as studies were completed they added ATOS, SourceRater, and several others. Everyone has to remember that Lexiles (and any readability measure) is a prediction of difficulty, and there since it is a prediction there will be a certain amount ...

Lexiles and other readability measures are criticized these days about as much as Congress. But unlike Congress they don’t deserve it.   Everyone knows Grapes of Wrath is harder to read than predicted. But for every book with a hinky readability score many others are placed just right.   These formulas certainly are not perfect, but they are easy to use and they make more accurate guesses than we can without them.   So what’s the problem?   Readability measures do a great job of predicting reading comprehension, but they provide lousy writing guidance.   Let’s say that you have a text that comes out harder than you’d hoped. You wanted it ...

            When I was working on my doctorate, I had to conduct a historical study for one of my classes. I went to the Library of Congress and calculated readabilities for books that had been used to teach reading in the U.S. (or in the colonies that became the U.S.). I started with the Protestant Tutor and the New England Primer, the first books used for reading instruction here. From there I examined Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller and its related volumes and the early editions of McGuffey’s Readers.             Though the authors of those have left no record of how those books were created, it is evident that they had sound intuitions as to what makes text challenging. Even in the ...

This weekend, there was a flurry of discussion on the National Reading Conference listserv about how to place students in books for reading instruction. This idea goes back to Emmet Betts in 1946. Despite a long history, there hasn’t been a great deal of research into the issue, so there are lots of opinions and insights. I tend to lurk on these listservs rather than participating, but this one really intrigued me as it explored a lot of important ideas. Here are a few. Which ways of indicating book difficulty work best? This question came up because the inquirer wondered if it ...