The Building Literacy Blog
This blog has been created to explore key topics and issues, such as reading disability/dyslexia, distance learning, effective materials and techniques, reading level vs. grade level instruction, and use of technology.
The Building Literacy Blog will also provide teaching tips, research briefs, reviews of professional books and student materials, and more.
Results of the 2024 NAEP Reading Assessment: Implications for Instruction
According to the results of the latest NAEP reading assessment, there was a drop of 2 points in the average performance of both fourth and eighth graders when compared with 2022 test results. According to Harvard psychometrician Andrew Ho, each point on the scale is...
Impact of Covid on Reading Achievement: Five Years Later
Despite extensive efforts by educators, reading achievement nation-wide lags behind pre-pandemic levels. A study that included nearly 12 million students who took the i-Ready Diagnostic for Reading assessment during the 2024-2025 school year revealed that fewer...
Morphology for All Students: Using Morphemic Analysis to Foster Foundational Skills
Along with being taught how to sound out words, students should be taught, from the earliest stages, the morphology of words. As I noted in the last blog, being aware of the underlying morphemic structures of words aids both reading and writing. For the word does,...
Morphology: A Key Foundational Skill
Morphology: A Key Foundational Skill Initially, students are taught to use phonological information to read words. This works well for words such as hat and pet, which have spellings that are easily...
Achieving Equity with an Exemplary Literacy Program
Better Start Literacy The Better Start Literacy Approach has been highly successful in developing the literacy of year 1 (kindergarten) students with low language in New Zealand. Students provided with Better Start outperformed students taught with the schools’...
Accelerating Students’ Foundational Literacy Progress with Proper Placement
If students are “taught” skills that they already know or they aren’t ready for, or if they are given reading materials that are too easy or too challenging, valuable instructional time will be wasted and the students will likely be frustrated or bored. On my website,...
Helping Struggling Writers: Building Foundational Writing Skills
Writing has its foundational skills, one of which is sentence construction. In a recent article, Chandler and Sayeski (2021) presented a plan for developing sentence-writing capability while at the same time building content knowledge. The authors described six...
Assessing Students’ Ability to Read Multisyllabic Words
A first step in developing syllabic analysis is to assess students’ ability to read multisyllabic words. Students’ syllabic analysis ability can be assessed in running records, informal reading inventories, oral fluency tests, and word lists tests by analyzing...
Importance of Teaching Students to Read Multisyllabic Words
As they progress through the grades, most students eventually learn phonics and become adept at deciphering single syllable words. However, a significant number of students have difficulty applying their knowledge of phonics to multisyllabic words. Alicia is a...
Revised Intervention Program
I have just published Beginnings, the last component of Building Foundational Literacy, an intervention program that includes provision for the most severely disabled readers. Building Foundational Literacy is a revision of Word Building, which has been used in...