About our author
Thomas G. Gunning has taught courses in methods of teaching reading and writing for more than 20 years and was director of the Reading Clinic at Southern Connecticut State University. Before that, as a secondary English teacher, a reading specialist, and an elementary school reading consultant, he worked extensively with achieving and struggling readers and writers. Dr. Gunning is currently working on programs to help struggling readers learn foundational skills and build their overall reading ability.
Over the years, Dr. Gunning's research has explored reading interests, informal reading inventories, decoding strategies, readability, higher-level literacy skills and response to intervention. As a result of this research, he has created a number of informal assessments and programs for developing decoding and comprehension skills, including an intervention program for students experiencing difficulty learning to decode multisyllabic words: Foundational Literacy Booster: 50 Lessons for Reading Multisyllabic Words (Galvin Publishing, 2020) and programs, techniques, materials, and approaches designed to help struggling readers reach grade level or close to it: Closing the Literacy Gap: Accelerating the Progress of Underperforming Students (Guilford Press, 2022).
Dr. Gunning's books with Pearson include Assessing and Correcting Reading and Writing Difficulties, 6th Edition; Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students in Grades 4 to 8, 3rd Edition; Creating Literacy Instruction for All Children in Grades Pre-K to 4, 2nd Edition; Building Literacy in Secondary Content Area Classrooms; and Developing Higher-Level Literacy in All Students: Building Reading, Reasoning and Responding.
