Literacy Blogs

  Teacher question: Middle school reading scores are either stagnating or dropping in my state, and they are looking at things they can do to help students improve. I’ve read the materials on the need for kids to reach a certain level of decoding to succeed in the upper grades. What do we do from here? What interventions should schools/states add to help these kids catch up on what they missed? Shanahan responds: The most likely reason middle school scores are down in your state probably has little to do with phonics instruction. Most phonics is provided in grades K-2. Doing a better job with ...

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 ...

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 June 4, 2022, and reposted on August 17, 2024. Recently, I received a couple of similar inquiries, so thought it might be worth reposting.  A quick review of recent research revealed studies focused on the importance of cognitive flexibility in phonics development (Boldrini, et al., 2023; Vadasy, et al., 2023) which suggest to me that adding spelling to the phonics regime may contribute to a stronger understanding of the conditional nature of decoding patterns. Since speech-to-print and print-to-speech are not just reverse processes, grappling with both may contribute to the necessary ...

Teacher question: Our local school district still teaches "sight words." I know that people mean various things when they call words "sight words"-- words that kids don't have the phonics principles for yet, words that are high frequency, and words that "are not decodable." I also understand that brain research says memorizing whole words is a poor practice, and I know that "sight words" is a term that is being phased out in order to communicate that 80% of words are decodable, and emphasizing helping kids flexibly solve words using the parts that do follow predictable phonics rules. Will you please weigh in?RELATED: My state is banning instructional practices… or, how to look like you are teaching effectively… Shanahan responds: I know of no ...

Teacher: I keep hearing about the science of reading and that I need to teach phonics (I’m a second-grade teacher). I’m okay with that but there is a lot to teach in reading. How much of the time should I spend teaching phonics?  Shanahan’s response: Man was I surprised. I’d already spoken to the principal about the school curriculum. He’d given me an overview and assured me that what his teachers needed was training in academic language and how to ask high level comprehension questions. The speaker at a professional conference had stressed the importance of those in high poverty schools and ...

Teacher question: I teach kindergarten. Our school recently purchased the XXXX program for teaching decoding. I don’t like it as much as the program we had. One of the ways our previous program was better than XXXX is that it included pictures for each of the phonemes. The new program does not have those pictures and I think that is a real problem. Is there any evidence that I’m right that I could take to my principal? The other teachers agree with me. Shanahan response: I hate that question and I wish you hadn’t asked it. Oh, sure it’s a practical question. And as ...

Teacher Question: What are your thoughts on teaching syllable division patterns? I recently came across some new research from Devin Kearns and it made me start thinking about if all the time programs spend teaching syllable division patterns is really justified. If teaching syllable division is not time well invested, what type of instruction would you recommend replacing it with?  Shanahan response: I was training for a 500-mile bike trip. Three of the days’ rides would be centuries (100 miles plus). The practice was making my back ache and my knees hurt, but I felt no closer to being able to accomplish those distances. They seemed absolutely impossible. I was ...