Commentary on research in language acquisition and language education
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. Abstract: Researchers in second language acquisition have hypothesized that there are two very different ways of gaining knowledge of language: acquisition and learning. Learning results in conscious knowledge of rules, and […]
Gallagher, Taboada Barker, Beck, and Buehl (2019) evaluated yet another academic vocabulary intervention for middle school students. They concluded that language minority (LM) students (called “English Bilinguals” in the study) “need explicit instruction to improve vocabulary knowledge” (p. 15). They claimed to show that LM students were unable to acquire any new academic words incidentally from the 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 /m/, c and /k/, t and /t/, p and /p/, and s and […]
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 press is nearly always the same: “We have a reading crisis in America!“ This panic isn’t […]
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 – but because no one in the reading field I’m aware of has ever said that […]
To make them easier to find, several items originally included in the now-defunct ‘This Week in Language Education’ series are being reposted over the next few weeks. 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 […]
Several researchers have claimed that “morphological instruction” is an effective way to improve students’ vocabulary and reading proficiency (Carlisle, 2010; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006). The theory is that once you know the parts of words (prefixes, roots, suffixes), you will be able to “transfer” your knowledge of morphology to learn new words. A bigger […]
To make them easier to find, several items originally included in the now-defunct ‘This Week in Language Teaching’ series will be reposted over the next few weeks as separate entries. 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 […]
Just published in the Los Angeles Times August 18, 2019: 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. It is true that students who […]
My book, The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions, is now available in PDF format for FREE here. Here is the back cover blurb: Jeff McQuillan has hopeful news for anyone concerned with the state of reading in U.S. schools: Contrary to popular belief, reading achievement has not been declining over the past three decades; U.S. […]
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 want to take a look – and it’s free! Download it . Contributors to the special […]
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 somewhat longer version than the one included in Clark’s book, with updates to my original post. Is Synthetic Phonics Working in England? A […]
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 swing, in which the media tells us how awful American schools are doing (e.g. here, […]
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. Steve Krashen has responded with an alternative report called Phonics and reading: Some basics. As usual, he cuts through the fog and provides […]
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 of fluent readers since 2010. I disagree. A 2016 analysis by Stephen Machin […]
Studies reviewed: Krashen, S. & Mason, B. (2017). Sustained silent reading in foreign language education: An update. Turkish Online Journal of English Language Teaching (TOJELT), 2(2), 70-73. (open access) 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 […]
Study reviewed: Loftus-Rattan, S. M., Mitchell, A. M., & Coyne, M. D. (2016). Direct vocabulary instruction in preschool: A comparison of extended instruction, embedded instruction, and incidental exposure. The Elementary School Journal, 116(3), 391-410. (pay wall) Everyone agrees that reading storybooks to young children helps them build vocabulary. But lots of researchers think they can […]
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 as measured during task and resting-state. Cortex, 75, 204-219. I’m a sucker for academic clickbait. This […]
Study discussed: Chen, S.Y., Chang, H.Y, and Yang, S. (2017). Content-Based Recreational Book Reading and Taiwanese Adolescents’ Academic Achievement. Journal of Education and Learning, 6(1). (Open Access) 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, […]
Study reviewed: Townsend, D., & Collins, P. (2009). Academic vocabulary and middle school English learners: An intervention study. Reading and Writing, 22(9), 993-1019. 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. […]
The New York Times education reporter Dana Goldstein on the rather silly notion that most kids are not “proficient” in writing: Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the […]
Study reviewed: Snow, C., Lawrence, J., & White, C. (2009). Generating knowledge of academic language among urban middle school students. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2(4), 325-344. 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.” I have […]
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 of favorable articles about phonics instruction in general, especially then-education reporter, Richard Lee Colvin. Others […]
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) The Input Hypothesis (more generally referred to now as the Comprehension Hypothesis) states that we acquire language by understanding messages (Krashen, 1981, 1982). How exactly do we […]
Swanson, H. L., Orosco, M. J., & Kudo, M. F. (2017). Do Specific Classroom Reading Activities Predict English Language Learners’ Later Reading Achievement? Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33(3), 199-210. 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 […]
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 Response to Intervention. Cerebral Cortex, 2017; 1 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhx131 (paywall) I admit that the opening paragraph of the MIT press release last week for […]
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 tutors, and taking online cram courses. This is very poor advice, whether you are rich or not. Most studies find […]
Study Reviewed: P. Mitchell, N. Kemp, & P. Bryant. (2011). Variations among adults in their use of morphemic spelling rules and word-specific knowledge when spelling. Reading Research Quarterly, 46(2), 119-133. 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 […]
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