Episode Details

Melissa Loftus and Lori Sappington from the Melissa & Lori Love Literacy podcast take their hosting hats off for the day to share their expertise around fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension – and why comprehension instruction is far more complex than simply teaching “strategies.”

Melissa and Lori explain why comprehension is considered an unconstrained skill, how fluent word recognition frees up cognitive space for meaning-making, and why vocabulary and knowledge building are essential for students to truly understand text.

Resources Mentioned:

1. Sign up for Melissa & Lori’s email list and grab a free, fun fluency resource pack!
2. Book: The Literacy 50 by Melissa Loftus & Lori Sappington
3. Five Step Vocabulary Routine (from the Literacy 50)
4. Research: Spencer, Quinn, and Wagner tested 425,000 children from first through third grade on decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension. Among those who had adequate decoding and adequate vocabulary, fewer than one per cent scored poorly on comprehension. Fewer than one in a hundred. Once the word-level problems are solved, the decoding and the vocabulary, comprehension takes care of itself in virtually every case.

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Connect with Melissa Loftus & Lori Sappington:

1. Melissa & Lori Love Literacy Podcast
2. Website: literacypodcast.com/
3. Instagram: @literacypodcast
4. Website: sorinpractice.com/
5. Instagram: @sorinpractice

This podcast is brought to you by Reading Science Academy, where our friend Stephanie Stollar is giving Literacy in Color listeners an exclusive, free grouping resource bund