Practitioner papers, research briefs, and field notes on how reading is built, and how it breaks. Each piece is clearly labeled by type, and grounded in the science it builds upon.
Being smart and reading well are two different skills. A look at the identifiable, teachable gaps, vocabulary, word structure, language comprehension, that stall capable children, and why intelligence rarely has anything to do with it.
The case for morphology as the missing layer in most reading instruction. When students learn that incomprehensible is just in + comprehend + ible, thousands of "hard" words become solvable puzzles. Read the paper →
Why deliberate structure and repetition, so often dismissed as rote, are exactly what struggling readers need to build automaticity, and how to design for it without dulling curiosity.
What educational publishing can learn from product design: coherent systems, visual consistency, and treating the learner's experience, not the scope-and-sequence document, as the thing you're really building.
Each piece is labeled by type. Full papers available on request, or published here as the library grows.
What does it mean to truly know a word?
How does the structure of a word shape comprehension?
When does explicit morphology instruction matter most?
How do we know when students are transferring what they learn?
Why do some readers generalize a pattern, and others never do?
This work synthesizes and applies existing reading science; it does not claim to originate it. These are the ideas it builds on.
Gough & Tunmer (1986). Comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension, not decoding alone.
Scarborough (2001). Skilled reading braids word-recognition and language-comprehension strands over time.
Ehri (2005). How readers bond spellings, sounds, and meanings to read words on sight.
Bowers, Kirby & Deacon (2010). A systematic review finding morphology instruction benefits literacy, especially for developing readers.
Nagy & Anderson (1984). Morphological relationships sharply reduce the number of words that must be learned individually.
International Dyslexia Association. Explicit, systematic, cumulative instruction in the structure of language.
Wider, B. & Hutto, M. (2012). A co-authored work drawn from direct practice with at-risk youth, the early roots of a career spent reaching the learners systems tend to miss.