Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted on August 13, 2022. There was no incident that led me to repost this on December 13, 2025, just my own sense that it would be a good idea to revisit this much neglected aspect of teaching students to understand text. Originally, there was no podcast of this and now there is, and this updated version includes both a link to that podcast as well as to the original blog that elicited 23 thoughtful comments. What Teachers Need to Know about Sentence Comprehension Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit ...

Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit teaching of sentence comprehension. With schools aiming to expose kids to complex text, it would seem that such instruction would be de rigueur. Texts are often complex because they include complicated sentences and experience tells me that students often fail to grasp the meaning of individual sentences – undermining their ability to identify main ideas, make inferences, draw conclusions, or answer any of the other question types.   Given that comprehension lessons tend to focus on “prior knowledge,” vocabulary, text reading with follow-up questions, comprehension strategies, the lowly sentence gets ...

“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost; For the want of a shoe the horse was lost; For the want of a horse the battle was lost; For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost;-- And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”                         -James Baldwin This oft used litany reminds me of reading: For the want of phonemic awareness the decoding was lost; for the want of phonics the fluency was lost… you get the idea. The abilities that comprise reading are hierarchical, each nested in the other (though it is not as linear as the horseshoe nail formula—we don’t completely ...