Literacy Blogs

Teacher Question: I know you say students learn more when taught with grade level texts than texts at their reading levels. That may be true but won’t frustrating kids like that make them hate reading? Shanahan responds: I don’t want to undermine anybody’s motivation or love of reading. Though reading experts have long labeled some texts as “frustration level,” I hope you won’t take that moniker too literally. To be fair, your concern does seem justified according to some studies. For instance, middle school students say that when texts are difficult, their interest declines (Wade, 2001). Correlations among reading comprehension and affective variables like ...

Blast from the past: Originally posted February 2, 2013; re-issued October 12, 2024. Over the past 15 years, I have issued several blogs concerning the value of teaching students to read more challenging texts than we have used in instruction in the past. Despite a growing body of evidence showing that teaching students at their “instructional reading level” provides no learning benefits – and that sometimes it limits learning – most teachers continue to avoid challenging text by moving kids to easier text, reading texts to the students, or replacing texts with other sources of information (e.g., videos, teacher presentations). ...

Teacher question: I'm looking for help with information or resources about text types for early readers. We have decodable text, text with high-frequency words, and predictive text. It seems like a reasonable strategy to provide our fragile readers with more opportunities to read these low-complexity texts while we shore up issues with phonological awareness. Many teachers over the years have complained to me, an instructional coach, about a lack of available texts to meet the need of students as they proceed through the year and the text complexity increases. Even with popular curriculum programs, teachers usually have very limited options with beginning reader texts, and it isn't clear how the different types are ...

"Summertime and the living is easy, fish are jumping, and the cotton is high..." It is summer and not a good time for a long blog on literacy teaching. So, I took the time to write a short one. I didn't want to get worked up in the summer heat, so have provided a pithy critique of 5 popular myths about reading instruction. 1.  No, the fact that you do not use a textbook to teach reading does not make you a good teacher. The idea that good teachers don’t follow a program and weak ones do has been around since ...

While in graduate school, I worked with Jack Pikulski and became interested in the theory of instructional level. That’s the idea that text has a particular level of difficulty and that students learn best when they are matched with text in a particular way. If text is too hard, they won’t learn to read and if text is too easy they won’t make any progress. The difficulty levels in between those extremes (and there are usually levels and not a single level), are thought to be the levels at which instructional progress would be optimum.   It makes logical sense. If text ...