Minda Marshall from South Africa Considers the Best Ways to Improve Reading Comprehension

An Interview by Dr. Sam Bommarito ©2025

As my regular readers already know, I am a retired reading teacher. I hold a doctorate in reading. In my 40-plus years as an educator, I’ve taught every grade from K through Graduate School. For the past six years, I’ve been writing a blog promoting a centrist point of view. I try to follow P.D. Pearson’s advice that folks should not take sides in the reading wars. Instead, they should take positions (see 24:31 in my earlier interview with Dr. Pearson). Accordingly, I’ve tried to talk to people from many perspectives within the literacy world. My goal has been to help them clarify their ideas and share them with others. I hope that doing so can result in civil discourse among folks in the reading world. Such discourse includes avoiding the use of strawmen, that is, presenting incomplete or inaccurate explanations of what the “other side” is saying. I hope that by listening to and understanding what the “other side” is saying, common ground can emerge. This could give teachers the ability to select research-based materials and practices that will help their children. Those selections would be carried out within the confines of their district’s literacy curriculum.

The bottom line- Teachers should be empowered to use evidence-based practices regardless of which side promotes them.

From time to time, readers ask me for advice on certain issues. That happened recently when I was contacted by one of my followers. Her name is Minda Marshall. Minda provides professional development coaching for teachers in South Africa. She was especially concerned that her 3^rd– and 4th-grade teachers were not seeing satisfactory progress in their students’ reading, especially in developing reading comprehension. What follows is Minda’s biography and an interview I conducted with her, sharing the interventions I think she could adopt to use with her teachers. After sharing those with you, I will discuss some interesting developments that have arisen from the interview. Some of my colleagues and I will conduct the teachers’ in-service on techniques developed by Dr. Tim Rasinki. It will also include the use of Mary Jo Fresch’s The Phonics Handbook as a resource to equip teachers with the phonics knowledge they need to deliver instruction. There will be more about that in the conclusions section of this blog.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION- Taken from her LinkedIn page.

Link to the interview. Use these talking points and questions to identify sections of the video that are most interesting to you.

Conclusions and looking to the future.

I’m very excited about the prospect of teaching teachers from South Africa to implement the ideas of folks like Rasinski, Harrison and Fresch. Stay tuned. There will be a lot to talk about in the upcoming year. Maybe there is still hope that we can use common sense to find some common ground among researchers. Dare to dream!

Dr. Sam (the guy in the middle, taking flak from both sides)

Copyright 2025 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization. Copyrighted materials from Minda Marshall were used with permission.

To my followers who are of many different faiths and beliefs, I wish you all a very Happy Holiday.

I’m using this week to prepare my family’s holiday celebration.

The blog resumes next week with a very interesting entry.

Minda Marshell and I will be discussing a project we are starting in South Africa. It will involve providing in-service to teachers based on the ideas of Tim Razinski and Mary Jo Flesch. We will train teachers to use repeated reading to improve both fluency and comprehension.

See you next week- Dr. Sam

Mary Jo Fresch talks about her newest book, The Phonics Handbook. It is a valuable resource for teachers in any phonics program. It provides up-to-date, research-based answers to all your phonics questions.

An Interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito

I first met Mary Jo at an NCET conference in St. Louis. She and David Harrison had just released their newest book, and they were introducing it at the conference. The picture includes me, David Harrison, Mary Jo Fresch and Glenda Nugent. She was my co-editor for The Missouri Journal.

LINK to blog

This was one of my first experiences seeing how authors roll out their new books. It was an exciting time. I was able to attend their sessions and do both a Missouri Reader article and a blog about their new book. It was a great learning experience. In the years since, I have written about several more of her books. See her website to find out what the books were all about. They were first and foremost teacher-friendly professional books with tons of great teaching ideas.

With this latest book, she takes things to the next level. The book’s title is The Phonics Handbook. On the one hand, if you are looking for research-based answers for the questions the kids often ask about phonics as you teach, the answers are in the book and easy to find. On the other hand, if you are looking for a standalone book to use in teaching your own phonics program, she identifies teaching strands and provides sample lessons. Let’s learn more about Mary Jo and hear what she has to say in the interview. You can use the information in the talking points graphic to move to the part of the interview that interests you the most.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (Taken from her website)

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Mary Jo has a very useful webpage with lots of practical teaching resources. Here is a screen capture of her site. To use the menu bar below (decodable poems, etc.), go to her website LINK.

While you’re on the site, be sure to explore the professional books she has. I especially like the partner poems and word ladders. They give students a chance to apply and use the phonics strategies they learn in a fun, engaging way.

Conclusion:

While Mary Jo has resources appropriate for both beginning and intermediate students, I think teachers at the middle school (and even high school) levels will find that, if they use this book, they can determine which phonics to teach at those levels. I also highly recommend that, if you are a middle school teacher trying to figure out a phonics program that will help your students learn the sound-symbol relation and to internalize and use them, you add this book to your professional library. In the meantime, whether you are a beginning teacher just learning about how to teach sound-symbol relations or a veteran teacher needing a research-based answer to the questions students often pose about words during lessons, I think you’ll find that Mary Jo’s new handbook will be a useful addition to your professional library.

Until next week, Happy Reading and Writing

Dr. Sam

Copyright 2025 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Copyrighted materials for Mary Jo Fresch were used with permission. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.