Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted on November 3, 2018, and was reposted in revised form on March 14, 2026. The original title was, “The Whys and Hows of Research and the Teaching of Reading.” As you can see, I’ve retitled it. The term “science of reading” is both widely used and widely misunderstood today, so I have provided considerable revision here – though the overall points are the same. If you want to see the original, it is linked at the bottom (along with the more than 50 comments it elicited). I talk a lot about research in ...

Teacher question: One of the most important activities in my class is guided reading. Not the “Guided Reading” program (we use a textbook) but group work with the children reading under my guidance. Some of our teachers do this with the whole class. I think it works better the way I do it, with small reading groups. The students read the text and I ask questions and we talk about it. In my experience that is helpful. Is there any research supporting that?RELATED: Does Literature Count as Knowledge? Shanahan response: First, let’s set aside the term “guided reading.” It now appears to a be ...

Teacher question: Recently, I saw results of a meta-analysis that showed phonics instruction to have a much smaller effect size (.19) than many other approaches to reading instruction. Doesn’t that mean that we are overdoing phonics? If we want to improve reading comprehension it looks like it would make more sense to emphasize motivation, fluency, and inferencing than teaching phonics.RELATED: Which Reading Model Would Best Guide Our School Improvement Efforts? Shanahan responds: In 1986, Gough and Tunmer presented a model indicating that reading comprehension was the product of decoding ability (the ability to translate written or printed text into oral language – that is, ...

Recently, I wrote about the science of reading. I explained how I thought the term should be defined and described the kind of research needed to prescribe instruction. Today I thought I’d put some meat on the bone; adding some details that might help readers to grasp the implications of a scientific or research-based approach to reading. What does it mean when someone says an approach to reading instruction “works”? The term “it works” has gnawed at me for more than fifty years! I remember as a teacher how certain activities or approaches grabbed me. They just seemed right. Then I’d try them ...

The literacy field has long been beleaguered by generic terms that no one seems to understand – or more exactly, of which nobody agrees on the definitions. Terms like whole language, balanced literacy, direct instruction, dyslexia, sight words, and guided reading, are bandied about in journals, conference presentations, newspaper articles, and teacher’s lounges as if there was some shared dictionary out there that we were all accessing. Even terms that seem like they would be widely understood like research or fluency often turn out to be problematic. This plague of vagueness is exasperating, and I think it prevents productive dialogue or ...

Last week, I posted five literacy education pet peeves. I whined about the lack of balance in balanced literacy; calls to end the reading wars that fail to address their root cause; the use of research to cover one’s tracks rather than to support sound decisions; the use of drive-by conferencing in place of deep discussions of text; and instructional schedules tuned to teachers’ comfort levels rather than kids’ learning needs. As promised, here are five more. Pet Peeve #6:  Research claims based on the wrong kinds of research. Recently, a claim of mine was challenged on Twitter. Someone pointed out that there ...

First, here is my favorite joke about pet peeves: What’s your biggest pet peeve? People who ask a question just so they can answer it. Yep, I’m the punchline. I’m asking this question only so I can answer it. Though I hope this stimulates you to add your own. Pet peeves are, by their very nature, complaints. Of course, no one wants to hear a lot of whining these days. If they did, they’d be on Twitter or the U.S. Senate. Given that, I’ve split this rant into two parts. Yep, I’ll provide 5 pet peeves about reading education this week, and the remainder next ...

Teacher’s question: I agree with you about the need for basing what we do on research.  But what do you do for the things for which there is no or limited research? For example, what about Orton-Gillingham instruction, what is the best way to sequence phonemes for teaching, or how specifically should background knowledge be taught? What about research that is evolving so that we do things a certain way and then refine these (say with Ehri's & Gonzalez-Frey's recent work in SSR) -- what about all the time that we did the practice the other way? There are some topics with so ...