L1 Literacy
Individual State NAEP Scores Aren’t Evidence For Anything
Two more letters appeared in the 10/12/25 print edition of The Wall Street Journal on the topic of phonics and California. One of them was in direct response to my letter .
1 min readL1 Literacy · October 7, 2025Shanahan Responds to My WSJ Letter
The Wall Street Journal recently published a letter by Tim Shanahan in response to my earlier letter on phonics instruction in California. Several of Shanahan’s points are wrong or misleading.
4 min readL1 Literacy · October 3, 2025Schooling the WSJ and the “Mississippi Miracle”
I schooled the Wall Street Journal editorial page writers in a letter published in today’s (Oct. 3, 2025) edition (see image, link, & text below). The Journal had applauded California’s recent adoption of (more) phonics teaching (see link…
2 min readL1 Literacy · November 18, 2022The Case for Acquired Phonics
Stephen Krashen and I have published a very short paper, “ The Case for Acquired Phonics ,” which argues that the “acquisition/learning” distinction applies to phonics.
1 min readL1 Literacy · December 4, 2019Can Language Minority Students Acquire Academic Vocabulary from Reading?
The study examined the performance of 149 sixth-graders in a seven-week vocabulary intervention called “U.S. History for Engaged Readers.” There were both English-only (EOs) (called “English Monolinguals” in the paper) and LM students…
5 min readL1 Literacy · November 21, 2019The Shaky #ScienceOfReading on Decodable Texts
“Decodable texts” are books written so that the words that appear in them conform to the phonics rules children are taught. So if children have been taught the rules for the correspondence between the letter n and the phoneme /n/, m and…
9 min readL1 Literacy · November 14, 2019The NAEP Reading Panic: 2019 Edition
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – “the Nation’s Report Card ” – has released results from their latest round of reading tests. These tests are given every two years, but regardless of the results, the reaction in the…
2 min readL1 Literacy · November 11, 2019Why Reading Fiction is Good for Academic Achievement
The education writer at Forbes , Natalie Wexler, argued last week that reading fiction isn’t the “only” thing needed to boost academic achievement. It’s a curious position to take, not because it is wrong – I agree with her completely –…
7 min readL1 Literacy · November 5, 2019Another Massive Vocabulary Study Finds No Gains, Massive or Otherwise
Jayanthi and colleagues (2017 online; paywall) conducted a study – in what seems like an endless series of massive , federally-funded studies of this sort – to determine the efficacy of vocabulary instruction. The “pilot” study ( Gerstner…
2 min readL1 Literacy · October 21, 2019The Myth of Teaching Morphology
Several researchers have claimed that “morphological instruction” is an effective way to improve students’ vocabulary and reading proficiency ( Carlisle, 2010 ; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006 ).
2 min readL1 Literacy · September 25, 2019Reading Tests That Don’t Actually Measure Reading
Hua and Keenan (2017, paywall), following up on early work by Keenan and her colleagues , examined five popular reading comprehension tests to see how much of the variance in scores could be explained by a reader’s listening comprehension,…
3 min readL1 Literacy · August 19, 2019How Kids Become Readers
Some parents fear that their child may “fall behind” in learning to read. But there is no evidence that learning to read, or reaching a given reading level, must be done by a certain age to succeed in school.
2 min readAnnouncements · March 4, 2019Free Book! “The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions”
My book, The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions , is now available in PDF format for FREE here .
1 min readAnnouncements · January 21, 2019Language and Language Teaching Special Issue Guest Edited by Stephen Krashen (Free Download)
Stephen Krashen has guest edited an issue of Language and Language Teaching (India). There are 11 great articles on topics that will interest language and reading teachers from preK to adult, for both first and second languages. You will…
1 min readL1 Literacy · April 23, 2018Is Synthetic Phonics Instruction Working in England? (Updated)
Since originally posting this analysis back in September, 2017, I have shortened it for publication in Margaret M. Clark’s new edited volume, Teaching Initial Literacy: Policies, Evidence, and Ideology (2018). But here I’m posting a…
12 min readL1 Literacy · April 17, 2018Don’t Believe What You Read in the Papers: American Kids Are Getting Better at Reading
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones magazine has an excellent take on the so-called “failure” of American students to improve their reading scores. It’s a quick but important read now that the annual NAEP Nonsense Season is once again in full…
1 min readL1 Literacy · February 23, 2018Krashen Responds to the International Literacy Association’s “Explaining Phonics Instruction”
The International Literacy Association recently published a report, Explaining phonics instruction: An educator’s guide . It is incomplete and misleading, but that comes as no surprise to anyone who subscribes to an ILA journal.
1 min readL1 Literacy · January 12, 2018The Failure of Phonics in England: Letter in Times of London (Jan 12, 2018)
The Backseat Linguist jumped across the pond today for a letter in the Times of London about phonics teaching in England. Sir, In her article, Alice Thomson claims that the teaching of phonics has led to “a big improvement” in the number…
1 min readL1 Literacy · October 12, 2017A Trial of Tiers: Why Silent Reading Beats Other “Tier 1” Interventions All Day Long
Swanson, E., Stevens, E. A., Scammacca, N. K., Capin, P., Stewart, A. A., & Austin, C. R. (2017). The impact of tier 1 reading instruction on reading outcomes for students in Grades 4–12: A meta-analysis. Reading and Writing , 30 (8),…
5 min readL1 Literacy · September 14, 2017We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Exercises*: Listening to Stories is More Efficient Than Direct Instruction for Vocabulary Acquisition
Everyone agrees that reading storybooks to young children helps them build vocabulary. But lots of researchers think they can improve on storybook reading, making it more “effective” as a way of teaching children new words.
4 min readL1 Literacy · September 7, 2017Do Good Scrabble® Players Read More Than the Rest of Us?
Protzner, A. B., Hargreaves, I. S., Campbell, J. A., Myers-Stewart, K., van Hees, S., Goodyear, B. G., … & Pexman, P. M. (2016). This is your brain on Scrabble: neural correlates of visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players…
2 min readL1 Literacy · August 22, 2017Reading Science Books for Pleasure Will Help You in Science Class: Chen, Chang, & Yang (2017)
One of the current fixations of the reading field is teaching “academic language,” especially academic vocabulary, via direct instruction. Most of these efforts have produced very meager results, as I have pointed out here and here .
3 min readL1 Literacy · August 7, 2017Academic Vocabulary Instruction II: Learning 1 Word in 5 Hours Shouldn’t Count as a Success
In a previous post , I noted that one of the studies often cited for the success of academic vocabulary instruction, Snow, Lawrence, and White (2009), is in fact an example of its questionable effectiveness. Here’s another such study,…
5 min readL1 Literacy · August 4, 2017The New York Times Goes Back to the Future: The New Literacy Crisis, Writing Edition
The New York Times education reporter Dana Goldstein on the rather silly notion that most kids are not “proficient” in writing:
2 min readL1 Literacy · August 1, 2017Academic Vocabulary Instruction: Does Word Generation Really Teach You Two Years’ Worth of Words in 22 Weeks?
One of the hot topics of the past decade or so in language education research has been the teaching of “academic language” and “academic vocabulary.”
7 min readL1 Literacy · July 28, 2017Closing the Books on Open Court Reading
Back in the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times was a big fan of the scripted reading curriculum, Open Court, designed to teach reading in the elementary grades through a heavy dose of explicit, systematic phonics. The Times reporters wrote lots…
3 min readL1 Literacy · July 5, 2017The Goldilocks Corollary to the Input Hypothesis
Zoe M. Flack, Jessica S. Horst. Two sides to every story: Children learn words better from one storybook page at a time. Infant and Child Development , 2017; e2047 DOI: 10.1002/icd.2047 (paywall)
3 min readL1 Literacy · June 26, 2017Do ELLs Need More Grammar and Spelling Instruction?
Swanson and colleagues observed reading instruction in 50 elementary classrooms with 270 Spanish-speaking English-language learners (ELLs) over a period of two school years. Three grade levels were included in the study (first, second, and…
2 min readL1 Literacy · June 19, 2017I Know What You Shouldn’t Have Done Last Summer
Rachel R. Romeo, Joanna A. Christodoulou, Kelly K. Halverson, Jack Murtagh, Abigail B. Cyr, Carly Schimmel, Patricia Chang, Pamela E. Hook, John D.E. Gabrieli. Socioeconomic Status and Reading Disability: Neuroanatomy and Plasticity in…
3 min readL1 Literacy · April 19, 2017What Kaplan and Princeton Review Don’t Want You to Know About the SAT
A recent article in the New York Times recommended that students from low-income backgrounds should prepare for the SAT (Scholastic Achievement Test) “like a rich kid” by spending hundreds of hours studying test prep books, visiting…
3 min readL1 Literacy · March 4, 2012Spelling Nonsense Words Requires Rules Useful in Spelling Nonsense Words
There’s no better way to start a discussion of almost any topic related to reading and writing than a quote from Frank Smith. Here’s one from Writing and the Writer (1994) on spelling:
8 min read