Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: I’ve been hired as a high school reading resource teacher. The school has a lot of commercially prepared intervention programs. Which ones would you use? Any other advice for me? Shanahan response: First things first. I’d look at my data to find out how far behind my students are. High school teachers often tell me that they have beginning readers in their classes, but when we look at the kids’ data, we find that just isn’t the case (most of the time). Not that these students read well. But most high school teachers aren’t equipped to distinguish a fourth-grade from a first-grade reader. Since both ...

Teacher question: It seems there is currently a focus on intervention solely for the word recognition side in the early grades. The explanation is that most students who struggle, struggle with decoding, and I of course agree. However, I would add that many of those also struggle with language comprehension, with language development deficits that are measurable and observationally apparent in conversation with them as preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders. The district’s current assessment model pretty much excludes them any assessment of language comprehension. I was told that one of the main reasons that children struggle later with reading comprehension is from ...