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How Important is Reading Rate? | Shanahan on Literacy

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This blog entry explains why speed of reading is an important indicator of quality both in silent and oral reading.

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ASDoha - Reading Focus Group - Sept 2024 (1)

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Email: jenny@erinkentconsulting.com

Linked In: Jenny Killion

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All ASD teachers have access!

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EKC Community Resource Recommendations for ASDoha HS ELA

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Barcelona in November or Bangkok in March!

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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Barcelona Nov. 23-24 | Erin Kent Consulting (EKC)

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ASDoha - Writing Focus Group - Sept 2024

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ASDoha - Writing Focus Group - Sept 2024 (1)

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ASDoha - Writing Focus Group - Sept 2024 (2)

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ASDoha - Writing Focus Group - Sept 2024 (3)

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ASDoha - Writing Focus Group - Sept 2024 (4)

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Login to Erin Kent Consulting community via email or SSO today.

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1. Analysis in the Wild

2. Toward a New Understanding of Analysis

3. The Essential Tools of Analysis

4. Exploring Passion

5. Exploring Ideas

6. Exploring Structure

7. Exploring Authority

8. Movie and Television Analysis

9. Music Analysis

10. Sports Analysis

11. Video Game Analysis

12. Literary Analysis

13. Gathering Your Own Resources

This book is written to help you plan instruction that supports the development of writers, specifically writers who are analyzing texts. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 is an immersion into analytical writing that is current, authentic, and relevant to the students we teach today. We'll use the language of exploration to frame a new way of thinking about analysis. This process of analyzing a text is not unlike an explorer setting sail in search of a new land-a metaphor we'll draw on throughout this book to emphasize the discovery that is possible when students analyze texts of their own choosing. Sections 2 and 3 each begin with their own introduction. Section 2 is your lesson book - your guide to helping students find and explore and write about texts they love. Section 3 promises to be dog-eared and worn by the time you're finished with it. Each chapter is jam-packed with our absolute favorite mentors, mentor texts, and "cheat sheets" for supporting students who are analyzing texts you've never heard of.

With samples throughout the book, you will see what students of all levels and experiences can do when they're invited into the world of authentic analysis and supported with mentor texts, targeted writing instruction, and the opportunity to write about their passions.

This book is for teachers who want to revive the art of analytical writing in their classrooms-from teachers of middle-grade writers who are making their first foray into analytical writing to teachers of experienced twelfth-grade writers who are looking ahead to college where their professors will expect much, much more. In this book, we invite you to explore your teaching of analytical writing from a new perspective. To open your mind to the real world of analytical writing and challenge traditional notions about what students should be analyzing and how they should write. In short, we invite you to arrive where you started and know it for the first time-and to share this journey with your students and celebrate the writing that is born where passion and analysis meet.

- Introduction

"English teachers have been waiting for this book since...well...forever. Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell breathe new life into that semi-comatose assignment-the analytic essay. They ask us to totally reimagine it, to examine how analysis works "in the wild" -on blogs, web sites, Internet reviews, and to expand the range of "texts" students can analyze (music, video games, sports teams, movies). Then drawing on their own classroom work, they show how students can use the lessons from mentor texts in their own writing. A groundbreaking and absolutely essential book." -Thomas Newkirk, author of Embarrassment and Minds Made for Stories

"Are you ready for a mind-bending journey into analytical writing? This book holds a new vision for student engagement grounded in current, authentic, and relevant texts. I guarantee it will upend your understanding of analysis. Full of sentence and passage studies that ignite student voice, mini-lessons that clarify the intent of organizational structures, and a deep understanding of how best to learn from a mentor text, this book will make you a better writing teacher. It's simply brilliant."-Penny Kittle, author of Book Love and coauthor of 180 Days

"Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell take the dusty skeleton of literary analysis and transform it into a responsive, sophisticated, magical genre of writing that we can teach our students to develop and to adore. Using this book will produce the writing that you and your students will cherish most - these are the pieces they will keep, the ones they will publish. Marchetti and O'Dell's work brings relevance, voice, and life to a form that feels crusty and brittle with directions, templates and redundancy. This book will make your students better writers - but it will also help them to enter into the world they encounter with greater passion and insight than ever before."-Kate Roberts, author of A Novel Approach and coauthor of Falling in Love With Close Reading

"As tour guides to a brave new world, Rebekah O'Dell and Allison Marchetti reject the well-worn path of literary analysis and guide teachers to a vibrant new analytical landscape. By reframing the idea of text as anything that has a beginning, middle, and end, O'Dell and Marchetti entertain a "bigger vision for analysis," that helps students find their passion, explore their ideas, assert authority, and build solid structures for writing. Divided into three sections, the book offers an inquiry into traditional analysis, a compendium of practical lessons, and an exploration of sub-genres, such as writing about movies, music, sports, and video games. In addition, this book is chock full of dynamic mentor texts and classroom-ready techniques that will free your students to explore the vistas vital to their lives."-Liz Prather, author of Project-Based Writing

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This book is for teachers who want to revive the art of analytical writing in their classrooms-from teachers of middle-grade writers to teachers of experienced twelfth-grade writers who are looking ahead to college. We invite you to explore your teaching of analytical writing from a new perspective.

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Back to Results

Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

John Warner

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and...

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing.

There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong.

Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules-such as the five-paragraph essay-designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments.

In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.

Reviews

That title sounds as if it will be a grumpy polemic, but it's actually an inspiring exploration of what learning to write could be, framed by an analysis of why it so often is soul-destroying for both students and their teachers.

Articulates a set of humanist values that could generate rich new classroom practices and, one hopes, encourage teachers, parents, and policymakers to rethink the whole idea of School and why it matters to a society. Warner is pragmatic, not programmatic, and hopeful without being naïve... I hope teachers, parents, and administrators across the United States read his trenchant book. We are the reformers we have been waiting for.

Why They Can't Write dissects the underlying causes of why so much writing instruction fails in the American system and it provides tested, practical solutions for doing better. The book is more than a how-to-teach guide, however. It diagnoses several important structural problems in American education, including standardized testing, the allure of educational fads, the abuses of technology-driven solutions, and cruel working conditions for teachers.

I wanted direction on how to better teach writing, and I got it-sample assignments that I can tweak to fit my classroom and discipline in marvelous ways. But I got so much more. I closed the book feeling energized and motivated to go back to the classroom and make changes. In fact my first reaction, as I finished, was 'I have to go write about this!' Which so perfectly encapsulates so much of what John would like to see us do as learners that I couldn't help but laugh.

What is to blame for students' bad writing? According to Warner, the entire context in which it is taught. He rails against school systems that privilege shallow "achievement" over curiosity and learning, a culture of "surveillance and compliance" (including apps that track students' behaviour and report it to parents in real time), an obsession with standardized testing that is fundamentally inimical to thoughtful reading and writing, and a love of faddish psychological theories and worthless digital learning projects.

Read More

See All Reviews

Book Details

Part I: Introduction
Our Writing "Crisis"
Johnny Could Never Write
The Writer's Practice
The Five-Paragraph Essay
Part II: The Other Necessities
The Problem of Atmosphere
The Problem of Surveillance
The

Part I: Introduction
Our Writing "Crisis"
Johnny Could Never Write
The Writer's Practice
The Five-Paragraph Essay
Part II: The Other Necessities
The Problem of Atmosphere
The Problem of Surveillance
The Problem of Assessment and Standardization
The Problem of Educational Fads
The Problem of Technology Hype
The Problem of Folklore
The Problem of Precarity
Part III: A New Framework
Why School?
Increasing Rigor
The Writer's Practice
Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing
Writing Experiences
Increasing Challenges
Part IV: Unanswered Questions
What about Academics?
What about Grammar?
What about Grades?
What about the Children?
What about the Teachers?
In Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index
About the Author

John Warner is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a contributing blogger for Inside Higher Ed, and an editor at large for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is the author or coeditor of seven books, including The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing.

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Back to Results Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities John Warner An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing. There seems to be widespread agreement that-when it comes to the writing skills of college students-we are in the midst of a crisis.

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Opinion | This Is Your Brain on ‘Deep Reading.’ It’s Pretty Magnificent.

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The literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf maps out the ways “deep reading” nourishes our capacity for attention, empathy and insight.

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Improve Reading Achievement Through These 12 Benefits of Fluency Instruction

The better students can read orally, the more deeply they understand and enjoy what they read. This is because they have bridged meaning with automatic word recognition to develop fluency, which has allowed for a far deeper text connection to occur.

Reading fluency is a critical goal for reading success. Yet the approaches for teaching fluent reading are often missing supporting text or practical application exemplars. Poetry, songs, jokes, movie scripts, television scripts, famous speeches, and other such texts beg for expressive reading. Having students perform these develops fluency and brings deeper comprehension.

The research of the past two decades demonstrates a robust correlation between automatic word recognition and expressive oral reading and silent reading comprehension. That is, students who practice reading orally with good expression are more likely to comprehend deeply when reading silently.

Students who are unable to develop fluency will likely have difficulty achieving necessary levels of comprehension when reading. Because fluency is a foundational competency, difficulties in fluency can also lead to later difficulties in content areas that rely heavily on reading.

Effective fluency instruction is essential to improving the overall reading achievement of all students, as well as to boosting their achievement in other content areas. That's what The Megabook of Fluency is all about. In our book, we offer more than 50 ready-to-use strategies to develop fluency in your classroom, plus 200 supporting student pages in a format that helps you find the material quickly and easily so that all the readers in your classroom can benefit from fluency instruction.

The top 12 benefits of authentic fluency instruction and activities are:

1. Improves word recognition accuracy.
2. Improves automatic word recognition.
3. Improves oral (and silent) reading expression.
4. Improves reading comprehension and overall reading proficiency.
5. Allows reading to be a joyful act through performance of texts.
6. Provides an authentic reason for repeated reading (rehearsal).
7. Improves students' self-confidence as readers.
8. Allows even struggling readers to become reading stars.
9. Expands the variety of reading available for students.
10. Unifies all types of learners in a community experience.
11. Increases reading time at school.
12. Can become a great home-school connection.

We have created a book that promotes fluency to help you create students who use fluency for its intended purpose: to read meaningfully and with deep comprehension.

About the authors of this post:

Timothy V. Rasinski, professor of literacy education at Kent State University, began his career as a classroom teacher. He has written and edited more than 50 books and 200 articles on reading education, including the seminal The Fluent Reader.

Melissa Cheesman Smith is an author of professional books and teacher at the elementary and college level, with a Master's of Education in Curriculum and Instruction.

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Scholastic and authors Timothy V. Rasiniski and Melissa Cheesman Smith (The Megabook of Fluency) share the benefits of authentic fluency instruction.

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ASDoha - Reading Focus Group - Sept 2024

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ASD G9 Small Group Planner - thesis vs claim

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ASD G9 Small Group Planner - connecting claim and evidence

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G9 Connecting Claim and Evidence Paragraph

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G9 Connecting Claim and Evidence Paragraph

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G9 T Swift Example for Claim-Evidence-Reasoning

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ASD G12 Small Group Planner - close reading

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Research shows that writing notes with a pen helps the brain’s learning process.

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What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades (Published 2014)

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Even as the emphasis shifts to the keyboard, experts say that learning to write by hand improves motor skills, memory and creativity.

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Languages across the world have unique phonemic systems. For individuals learning English as a second language, it is common for the phonemic system of their first language to influence the production of sounds in English.

Resources listed below are intended to contribute to foundational awareness of potential cultural and linguistic influences. There are variations within cultures, and regional and dialectal variances exist in all languages. Therefore, a single chart/page on cultural and/or linguistic features is not meant to provide a comprehensive overview. Clinical judgment, client/patient/student and caregiver input, and additional research are needed to ensure culturally responsive services.

How Can I Use This Information?

Speech-language pathologists can use this information to:

Identify sounds in a client's phonological system for languages other than English.

Determine phonemic influences of a client's native language on English.

Identify sounds from the client's first language that may not exist in English or identify sounds in English that do not exist in someone's native language.

Recognize that even if there are similar sounds across two languages, they may not be used the same way. For example, in some languages a sound may only be used at the ends of words and not as a word-initial sound.

Audiologists can use this information to:

Correlate the client's audiogram and the sounds of the client's language(s).

Recognize and respond to amplification needs.

Identify the effect of the individual's phonemic system on speech audiometry assessment.

Modify materials and procedures during speech audiometry assessment.

Phonemic Inventories and Cultural and Linguistic Information

ASHA has compiled resources on the phonemic systems for the following languages:

Amharic

Arabic

Bosnian

Burmese

Chinese

English

English Phonemic Inventory [PDF]
Dialect
Haitian Creole

Hindi/Urdu

Hmong

Japanese

Korean

Navajo

Pashto and Persian

Polish

Russian

Spanish

Somali

Somali (Portland State University)

Tagalog

Vietnamese

Refugee Profiles/Information
ASHA's policy documents state that SLPs and audiologists must consider the sound systems of all the languages used by a client in order to provide appropriate assessment and treatment services.
Websites with Phonemic Inventories

If you have any questions, please contact ASHA's Office of Multicultural Affairs at multicultural@asha.org.

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Phonemic Inventories and Cultural and Linguistic Information Across Languages

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A list of phonemic inventories across multiple languages

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Chapter 2 details short hand notetaking!

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The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley Buy this book from: You may need a writing revolution in your classroom. Here's how to lead it. Expectations about student writing have changed dramatically in recent years.

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On a scale of 1-10, how good are you at comprehending what people say to you?

It's a bit of a silly question, isn't it? Whether or not we comprehend what we are told is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact to convey meaning. Talk to me about the first nine seasons of The Simpsons using familiar words and I'll comprehend pretty well. Talk to me about your favourite "anguilliform" Pokemon character and I'll probably stare at you blankly. Yes, there are some basic capacities that underpin our ability to understand what people say aloud, such as our hearing and our working memory capacity. But - on the assumption that these things aren't an impediment - our ability to comprehend what we are told is dependent on what we know about the subject at hand and the words being used to describe it. In other words, there is no generic listening comprehension ability. There is instead a vast network of understanding that determines the extent to which we can construct meaning from the words we hear. Trying to determine - or, heaven forbid, quantify - a person's ability to comprehend what they are told would rely on some way of measuring their grasp of all there is to know about the world and the language used to describe it. How do you measure a person's entire understanding of their world and their language? How do you effectively sample a domain this extensive? Answer: you can't.

And this brings me on to reading comprehension. Our ability to comprehend what we read is reliant on much the same network of understanding that is required for listening comprehension. Let's assume that we can recognise the words on a page fluently enough to free up the cognitive resources necessary for comprehension. Under these circumstances, whether or not we comprehend what we read is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact to convey meaning. Just as with listening comprehension, this is a domain so vast as to rule out valid assessment. To be clear, what I'm suggesting is that - beyond the development of relatively fluent word recognition* - our ability to comprehend what we read is based on everything we know about our world and our language, alongside an additional layer of knowledge related to written text conventions (e.g. punctuation, sub-headings, italics, etc). How do you measure a person's entire understanding of their world, their language and the conventions of written texts? Answer: you can't.

So, we've established that trying to measure reading comprehension is a non-starter.** From this, we can assume that the results from reading comprehension assessments need to be interpreted very cautiously, especially on the level of the individual pupil.

And this is where this blogpost would end if reading comprehension assessment hadn't warped the teaching of reading. But it has. A lot. For the sake of assessment, teachers have been incentivised to see reading comprehension as a generic skill, or, more precisely, a small set of generic skills. If this perspective were a canvas, it would look something like this:

Here is reading comprehension ability interpreted as a small collection of generic skills, things like retrieval, prediction and summarising. Reading comprehension assessments tend to divide the questions they use into a few categories such as these. Countless teachers and school leaders have thus made the understandable leap that teaching reading comprehension is the process of building up each of these generic comprehension skills. They attempt to add another broad-brushstroke layer to a pupil's prediction skill as a means of filling up the canvas. This conveniently allows for the creation of medium-term plans that state that a given class is working on prediction or inference or some other generic skill. It also allows schools to make lists related to those skills that can be ticked off as children develop. If we're going to gather evidence of a pupil's reading comprehension development, then what we presumably need is a small set of statements that correspond to a relatively small set of generic skills. This interpretation of reading comprehension achieves that.

The problem, of course, is that this interpretation is completely bogus. It is based on a view of reading comprehension that is palpably false. Yes, when we comprehend what we read, we tend to be able to retrieve information, to make predictions, to summarise what we have read, etc, and doing this stuff while we read is a useful set of habits that keeps us awake to what we are doing.*** But this is an unhelpful way to visualise our ability to comprehend what we read. I'd argue that this is better:

Forget for a moment the exact scene being portrayed, and consider the means of portraying it. Here reading comprehension ability is interpreted as a vast interacting network of understanding. It is not built up through broad brushstrokes, but through the painstaking accumulation of knowledge about words, texts and the wider world to which they relate. The natural consequence of such an interpretation is that the teaching of reading comprehension must prioritise the guided exploration of text, involving lots of reading and lots of rich discussion. Retrieval, prediction, summarising, etc will naturally form a part of this, but developing these habits is not the central goal of reading comprehension lessons. The central goal of reading comprehension lessons is to understand the specific text being read and the world to which it relates through exploration of the text's use of language. Everything else is secondary.

However, this interpretation leaves us with some problems. I've lost count of the number of school leaders and teachers who - despite their instinctive enthusiasm for this content-focused conception of reading comprehension - have asked the same two questions:

1. "How would we evidence this?"

2. "What would this look like in terms of our long-term planning?"

I will address these two questions in turn:

The answer to (1) is simple: Don't bother.

I'm serious. Just don't bother. Ofsted have made it abundantly clear that they don't want teachers gathering evidence for its own sake. If your method of assessment requires you to pretend that reading comprehension is something that it clearly is not, then it's time to dump that method of assessment. Think instead about how fluently your children read and how much they know about the English language and the wider world. The former can be assessed by hearing children read aloud and by undertaking quick fluency assessments; the latter, however, is not accessible via reference to simple rubrics. Standardised reading assessments may give a very rough idea, but they are not to be relied upon as precise measures of individual progress for all the reasons explained above. It's time to accept that there are some things that we can measure and other things that we cannot and to change our assessment decisions accordingly.

The answer to (2) is a little more difficult. Think back to the canvas above. To build up a picture like that, many thousands of dots are added across the breadth of the canvas, each chosen partly based on its relationship to the other dots on the canvas. In a content-focused view of teaching reading comprehension, our planning must focus on the content being read - the characters, the themes, the text features, the aspects of the world being described, etc. And it must do so in relation to the rest of that which has been, and will be, added to the canvas. In short, stop focusing on how non-existent generic comprehension skills will be taught. Instead focus on the texts themselves - not least their variety and their relationship to the rest of the curriculum**** - and on how you will ensure that pupils learn lots about them.

A content-focused approach to the teaching of reading comprehension aligns with a more accurate view of reading comprehension. It allows teachers to do away with pointless, time-consuming forms of assessment. It encourages school leaders to re-imagine their reading curriculum primarily in terms of the texts to be shared. Most of all, it offers our pupils a more authentic, enriching and effective experience of reading.

So, what's stopping us from teaching reading comprehension really well? Absolutely nothing.

If you'd like to find out more about teaching reading, please consider my book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: link

All royalties will be going to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well-recommended charity.

* Fluent word recognition is also dependent on our broader language comprehension alongside our knowledge of phoneme-grapheme relationships, phonemic skills, etc.

** The Teachwell blog has an excellent series on this idea: http://www.teach-well.com/reforming-the-key-stage-2-reading-sat-why-its-needed-and-possible/

*** There is lots of research into comprehension strategies. This blog is a good place to start if you want to know more: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/comprehension-skills-or-strategies-is-there-a-difference-and-does-it-matter#sthash.ZC5WlzWX.dpbs

**** This does not mean that every text has to directly relate to something else in your wider curriculum. It might even be the case that texts are chosen precisely because of how they supplement the curriculum. (E.g. If a primary history curriculum doesn't include a study of a South American civilisation, a non-fiction text relating to the Maya civilisation might be an apt choice to add breadth to the pupils' understanding of the challenging - and often controversial - concept of civilisation.)

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What's stopping us from teaching reading comprehension really well?

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On a scale of 1-10, how good are you at comprehending what people say to you? It's a bit of a silly question, isn't it? Whether or not we comprehend what we are told is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact...