Interview with Nora Chahbazi about EBLI, her very successful literacy program. Interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito

When Tim Rasinski and I visited Nora’s site many years ago, we were both impressed. What stood out to me was that she was able to get students to what is now called the “takeoff point” in phonics in months, not years.  People noticed. Her site has grown exponentially. I can now say, “I knew her when.”  Check out the biography section to learn how her program has evolved and how her site has grown.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Nora this week and talking to her about her amazing work over the past few years. The interview is on YouTube, and the link is below. Let’s have a look at her background and what she had to say in the interview:

Biography

YouTube Interview

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THE EBLI WEBSITE

USE THIS LINK TO GO TO THE EBLI WEBSITE

During the interview, Nora promised to share some other links. Here they are:

• Speech-to-Print vs. Print-to-Speech webinar: more effective, efficient decoding and encoding instruction
• Why Our Children Can’t Read and What We Can Do About It by Diane McGuinness
• Reading Reflex for parents to teach their children: what I used to teach my daughter in 1997 
• The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read by John Corcoran
• The Reading Gap by John Corcoran
• EBLI webinars
• EBLI Blog

My thoughts and analysis of what Nora had to say:

I first want to thank Nora for taking time out of her busy schedule to talk to me. Let me go over some important takeaways from the interview.

First and foremost, her decision to use linguistic phonics is a real game-changer. Getting kids to the takeoff point in months rather than years frees up much more time for other classroom activities, including activities where comprehension strategies can be taught explicitly using the gradual release model. I’ve written about this many times.

Methods like OG take up too much classroom time and take too long to get kids to the takeoff point. That kind of overemphasis on synthetic phonics has failed to get results in England. LINK. We’ve known for a long time that synthetic phonics by itself gets great decoding results (see the original NRP report). It does not improve comprehension scores on achievement tests. LINK,  Rachel Carson recently wrote about the buyer’s remorse many districts have had with programs that provided great decoding scores. Take, for instance, the so-called Mississippi Miracle- great decoding scores but failing to raise comprehension scores.  LINK, LINK, LINK.  The upshot is that overdoing synthetic phonics raises decoding scores but not comprehension scores. Proponents of this method claim the results are miracles, which is very misleading. They laud the improved decoding scores but fail to mention that their methods do not raise the comprehension scores. These are the scores mainly used in state tests. States considering changes based on the so-called Mississippi Miracle must keep that in mind. A simple fix to much of the current legislation mandating synthetic phonics would be to base the mandates on performance scores, not adherence to any particular reading theory.  

Nora and I also talked about how mean-spirited some of the exchanges on social media have become. What has happened is that anytime someone makes a claim, someone else counters it often with misinformation or misleading information. The counters are often vitriolic. I wrote an entire blog about the current situation on social media: LINK, LINK. Too often, both sides use a technique I call “discount and discredit.” They try to discount or discredit any citations that support anything but their point of view.  We should be having conversations online, not debates. More on that in a minute.

I’m also interviewing Andy Johnson about the problems he’s had trying to talk to SOR folks on social media this week. I’ll add a link to this post when that interview is complete. Folks aren’t interested in conversations where they try to find out what the other side is saying. They are debating rather than having conversations. What I’m sharing next is what I think is the most important takeaway in this analysis. Debating is not what real scientists do. Dr. Tyson is a researcher’s researcher. During the recent solar eclipse, news channels relied on his expertise to explain it. He is a widely respected researcher. Please indulge me and watch the following two-minute video from Dr. Tyson. Dr. Tyson is a widely recognized scientist. Just this week, he provided feedback to an international audience as they watched the recent solar eclipse.  See the screen capture:

PLEASE KEEP IN MIND:

• Scientific conclusions are written in Xerox, not stone.
• The term “settled science” is an oxymoron (Dr. David Pearson said that)
• Scientists inquire with an open mind; they don’t cherry-pick research designed to prove their point of view.                

USE THIS LINK TO LISTEN TO THE 2-MINUTE VIDEOhttps://www.youtube.com/shorts/kDHD-zcwDPI

Final Thoughts:

Next week I will post Part 4 of this series. In Part 4, I will talk about some other folks who are having a positive impact on helping students achieve better comprehension results. I first examine Scanlon’s extensive research showing the importance of using contextual information during the meaning-making process.  I will also examine websites that provide professional development or resources to support comprehension. Included will be Steinberg, Mermelstein, and Shanahan.  Don’t forget that we have already looked at EBLI today!  So, until next week,

Dr. Sam

The guy in the middle taking flak from all sides

Coming up soon: Interviews with Nora Chabazi from EBLI, Laura Robb, Bruce Howett and Rachel Gabriel. (Please note I am talking to people from all sides)

PS: If you don’t already follow this blog, please use the information in the top right of this blog entry to do so. That way you won’t miss any of these great interviews that are coming up!

Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading: A Way to Empower Teachers to Help Kids by Dr. Sam Bommarito ©2026

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My name is Dr. Sam Bommarito. As regular readers of this blog know. I am a not-so-retired reading teacher/reading professor. Over my 60-plus-year career in education, I have taught every grade from kindergarten through graduate school. I retired from full-time teaching in 2016. I began taking on a variety of activities, including tutoring, staff development, making presentations and, of course, writing this blog. For more information about me, see my blog post from 07/30/26: LINK. This entry is the third in the series Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading: A Way to Empower Teachers to Help Kids. For more information about the Phonics to Meaning program in South Africa, where a team I helped to organize is currently using the work of Rasinski and Fresh to provide help for over 1000 non-reading 3rd and 4th graders. That help uses the instructional methods suggested by Rasinski and Fresh. LINK

In the previous entries in this series, I have documented problems with the Social Media Point of View.  This week, I want to address claims made by social media gurus like Emily Hanford. Among the claims are that Balanced Literacy resulted in teachers adopting failed practices, practices that were not grounded in research, and that Balanced Literacy is the cause of our current literacy crisis. Was Balanced Literacy a failure, as Hanford and others claim? Let’s look at the evidence.

The first contrary evidence comes from places like Wilton, Connecticut (see the screen capture below).

Here is the LINK from the screen capture: https://goodmorningwilton.com/board-of-education-stories/

Wilton is not the only example of a place that was forced to stop using Balanced Literacy practices, despite being HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL. This alone is enough to cast doubt on the claim that these practices failed.

Add to the analysis of what the NRP scores show about what’s been happening in the reading world in the past 20 years or so.  Consider the next two screen captures:

The first slide shows that NRP scores from 1992 to 2022 remained flat. The second slide provides information on two literacy experts who have consistently criticized claims made by SOR advocates, including Emily Handford. They have both posted extensively online, and each has a well-researched book detailing the many issues surrounding claims made by SOR advocates. A major point to be made here is this:

If Balanced Reading is the cause of all the current problems in reading achievement, then

WHY WASN’T THERE A DIP IN THE SCORES WHEN BALANCED LITERACY WAS ADOPTED IN THE EARLY 1990s?

Some background: Balanced Reading came into widespread use starting in the early 1990’s. Dr. Michael Pressley was its creator. Its success led many programs to claim they were Balanced Literacy when they were not. In the long run, this misuse of the term became so widespread that there is no longer agreement on what constitutes Balanced Literacy.  Folks like Shanahan say the term is virtually meaningless today. Seidenberg fears the term Science of Reading may suffer a similar fate.

Recently, Tim Pressley did an interview with me about his newest book. It provides documentation that, as defined by the two Pressleys, Balanced Literacy has a strong research base and a successful track record. Many programs/teachers say they use Balanced Literacy, but they don’t meet the Pressleys’ definition. See my interview with Tim Pressley, where he talks about all these details LINK.

This blog entry was posted by

Dr. Sam

The guy in the middle taking flak from all sides

Coming up soon: Interviews with Nora Chabazi from EBLI, Laura Robb, Bruce Howett and Rachel Gabriel. (Please note I am talking to people from both sides)

PS: If you don’t already follow this blog, please use the information in the top right of this blog entry to do so. That way you won’t miss any of these good things that are coming up!

by Dr. William Kerns & Dr. Sam Bommarito ©2026

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My name is Dr. Sam Bommarito. As regular readers of this blog know. I am a not-so-retired reading teacher/reading professor. Over the course of my 60-plus-year career in education, I have taught every grade from kindergarten through graduate school. I retired from full-time teaching in 2016. I began taking on a variety of activities, including tutoring, staff development, making presentations and, of course, writing this blog. For more information about me, see my blog of 07/30/26 LINK. This entry is the second in the series Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading: A Way to Empower Teachers to Help Kids by Dr. Sam Bommarito ©2026. Dr. William Kerns wrote the main section of this blog post. Bill and I have been working together for almost two decades. One of the first steps in writing is to identify your audience. Over the years, my audience has mainly been teachers and administrators in the literacy field. Bill’s audience has been researchers and folks at the district level charged with making sure districts’ programs have a good foundation in research. Bill is well published, including an article published in the Reading Research Quarterly. Over the years, this has proven to be a very productive partnership.

Bill and I have concluded that many educators (not all educators) have reached a consensus around best ways to teach literacy. It is what Bill calls a synergistic view of literacy research. We’ve noticed that many of the gurus on what I have dubbed the Social Media Version of Science of Reading have relied almost exclusively on empirical research. Looking through the bibliographies of what they have written, one searches in vain for evidence that qualitative research has been treated as co-equal with empirical research. Most often it has been ignored or worse yet, discounted and discredited. The social media form SOR has been challenged multiple times, saying that it only looks at a narrow range of research, ignoring, discounting or discrediting any research that does not fit their narrow views about reading. I’ve written about this in this blog, providing plenty of examples of when this is happening. 

For the moment, let’s look at the work of Emily Hanford. First, please view this podcast from Thomas Ultican about Pearson and Tierney’s views of the SOR LINK. After that, download the PDF Fact-Checking the Science of Reading LINK.

In our first blog, we documented the problems created by the Social Media version of SOR LINK. Let me illustrate that point further. The 2000 NRP identified 5 ways to teach phonics LINK. Of the 5 ways, only one is allowed under the new laws being passed by multiple states. Even when districts get the best reading scores in the state, they are not allowed to use the methods that got them those results LINK. A simple fix for that problem is to change the criteria used for success to performance criteria. That is a topic for future development.

Please look now at what Dr. William Kerns has to say about our current position. Thanks for considering what he has to say.

A Synergistic View of Literacy Research

by Dr. William Kerns

An old metaphor maintains that “if you always use a hammer, you treat everything like a nail.” More than 25 years ago,the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) prioritized experimental research designs to shed light on what type of instruction has a causal relationship to literacy gains demonstrated by students. To this day, discourse around the type of instructional strategies that are supported under the umbrella of the “science of reading” is often based on what can be tested through experimental research design.  But one may think of this form of research as a type of hammer. The analysis of trends in quantitative data such as test scores may be thought of as another type of hammer in a toolbox.

We encourage teachers to draw on diverse tools rather than relying solely on hammers. A foundational principle in basic research practices is to remember that the appropriate method of research depends on the questions being asked, and what it is that one is attempting to learn. If literacy scholars and practitioners only rely on a limited type of research methods, they will only gain answers to a limited set of questions.

Qualitive research is no less valuable to the field of literacy than quantitative or experimental design. For example, the pioneering ethnographic research by Shirley Brice Heath (1983) to this day provides a reminder of the importance of paying attention to a possible mismatch between language used within a community and the way language is used in a classroom setting.

This blog has long argued for a “radical middle” (Pearson, 2001) in literacy instruction, one that defies the limits of debates between structured literacy or balanced literacy.  We agree wholeheartedly with the importance of addressing basic literacy skills. Teachers can gain a great deal from use of explicit and systematic instruction that builds toward increasingly difficult concepts. We also counter that reading instruction is richer, more complete when also considering factors such as motivation, self-efficacy, and social and cultural aspects as envisioned by Duke and Cartwright’s (2021) active view of reading.

In practice, this includes the use of literary response and writing workshops. We also advocate for the creative use of poetry to build decoding skills (Fresch & Harrison, 2026). Beyond this, we believe in the use of explicit strategy instruction combined with wide, diverse, readings (Scanlon & Anderson, 2020). These diverse readings should tap into approaches of culturally responsive instruction, drawing on the diversity of cultural and linguistic backgrounds students as strengths to enrich instruction. Qualitative methods of research provide tools for tracking the meaning-making of students when these approaches to instruction are used.

Our approach also finds common ground with the synergistic view of reading proposed by Kuhn and Stahl (2026). In this approach, components of literacy such as phonological awareness, decoding, and comprehension work together in interactive ways. Instruction, then, should flexibly reflect the interactive rather than isolated nature of the components of reading.

Drawing on this proposal, we would also like to suggest taking a synergistic view of literacy research one in which different methods of research are viewed as working together in interactive ways rather than as isolated components (see also Yaden et al., 2021). We advocate flexibility and dexterity in the use of research, sensitivity to the backgrounds of the students and the social contexts. Experimental and quantitative research methods are invaluable. But so too are qualitative methods.

References

Duke, N.K., & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44.

Fresch, M.J. & Harrison, D.L. (2026). The phonics handbook poetry collection: 101 decodable

poems for reinforcing sound letter patterns. Routledge.

Heath, S.B. (1983). Way with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms.

Cambridge University Press.

Kuhn, M.R. & Stahl, K.A.D. (2026). A modest proposal for a synergistic view of reading.

Reading Research Quarterly, 61(3), e70133.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). (2000). Report of the

National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction: Reports of the subgroups (NIH Publication No. 00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved November 11, 2005, from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/ publications/nrp/report.htm

Pearson, P. D. (2001). Life in the radical middle: A personal apology for a balanced view of

reading. In R. Flippo (Ed.), Reading researchers in search of common ground (pp. 78-83). Newark DE: International Reading Association.

Scanlon, D.M., & Anderson, K.L. (2020). Using context as an assist in word solving: The

contributions of 25 years of research on the interactive strategies approach. Reading Research Quarterly, 55 (S1), S19-S34.

Yaden, D.B, Reinking, D., & Smagorinsky, P. (2021). The trouble with binaries: A perspective

on the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), 119-129.

https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.402

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This blog posted by

Dr. Sam

The guy in the middle taking flak from all sides

Coming up soon: Interviews with Nora Chabazi from EBLI, Laura Robb, and Rachel Gabriel.

PS If you don’t already follow this blog, please use the information in the top right of this blog entry to do so. That way you won’t miss any of these good things that are coming up!

An interview with Laura Robb and David L. Harrison, authors of Guided Practice for Reading Growth. Dr. Sam Bommarito conducted this interview.

NOTE: The Part Two blog about Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading will not be posted until tomorrow, Monday, Aug 10^th.  What follows now is the interview of David and Laura about their book Guided Practice for Reading Growth: Texts and Lessons to Improve Fluency,  

I’ve known David and Laura for a very long time. Here are links to their bios: LINK1, LINK2.  In writing the book Guided Practice for Reading Growth: Texts and Lessons to Improve Fluency, Comprehension and Vocabulary, they had a perfect collaboration. Laura’s years of working with teachers in classrooms and familiarity with the latest research on how middle school children learn helped her create the kind of lessons teachers need to help their older readers. David’s ability as a writer and poet is unmatched anywhere. He has been the poet laureate for my state (Missouri). The project uses a method I’ve reported on extensively: repeated readings of short text to improve fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. The guru of that method is Tim Rasinski. A good resource for more information on implementing that method is Rasinski and Chesman’s The Megabook of Fluency LINK and The Fluency Lesson Plan: Closing the Reading Gap   LINK. My blogs around this topic included the work of Rasinski, LINK, Kraus and Kay LINK, and Litwin LINK.

What Laura and David’s series brings to the table is a ready-to-use, complete program, with lessons designed for students in grades 4-8. The lessons were modified during field testing. They work. Laura and David do an amazing job during the interview of explaining how and why the lessons were written as they are. The series provides short texts for each lesson. Most of the content area poems were written by David, especially for this series. The book also includes helpful videos to explain and support the implementation of the lessons.

While visiting sites where reading specialists gather to talk about their craft, I’ve often seen the question raised: What is an effective intervention to use to improve middle school students’ reading? I have at least one good answer to that question- Robb & Harrison’s Guided Practice for Reading Growth series. Let us see what David and Laura have to say about their book.

Biographies (taken from Corwin.com)

Laura Robb

David Harrison

Guided Practice for Reading Growth

LINK to the book on Corwin Literacy

Laura Robb and her son Evan have a website called We Are Teachers. Here is a link to that website: LINK.  One component of that website is the We Are Teachers Media Kit. As you can see from the screen capture below, the media kit is widely used by many different groups of teachers.

Other books by Laura are available on Amazon. Go to Amazon to look up particular titles.

David Harrison Website  LINK.

Conclusion

A very special thanks to Laura and David for doing the interview! There is a lot to unpack. I think teachers really will find plenty of ideas and material they can use on Monday.

Looking ahead to Monday’s post

Who wants their easy over eggs served with a saltshaker full of salt and a pepper shaker full of pepper?

NOBODY

The same thing goes for phonics methods at the building level. As Seidenberg and others have pointed out, there really is such a thing as too much phonics instruction.  Next week’s blog will do a deep dive into that topic.

In the meantime, Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam

The guy in the middle, taking flak from all sides.

PS If you don’t already follow this blog, please use the information in the top right of this blog entry to do so!