Previously, I have suggested that the decline in reading scores might be traced, in part, to mandates requiring students to read primarily complex texts, whether… Read More »The Complexity That Counts: How Word Support Makes Demanding Text Comprehensible
TextProject celebrates back to school season with a giveaway of 3 beloved read-alouds featuring stories of new beginnings. For Grades K-1 The Day You Begin… Read More »Back to School Book Giveway
Freddy joins hosts Bruce Hallett and David Ray on the podcast For the Love of Literacy to discuss how we can guide students to reading… Read More »For the Love of Literacy Podcast: Freddy Shares Insights on Supporting Reading Automaticity
Two new studies suggest an important shift in thinking about beginning reading instruction. “Reading level” alone does not tell us enough about how difficult a… Read More »Beyond Reading “Level”: How Small Differences in Vocabulary Demands Affect Reading Success
As students move into middle and high school, challenges with multisyllabic words come to the fore. Freddy asks how corpus linguistics could pinpoint the multisyllabic… Read More »Presenting Multisyllabic Strategies for Adolescent Readers
Morphology teaching frequently stops at the pieces — students drill prefixes and suffixes in isolation, fill in charts, match roots to definitions — without ever… Read More »Knowing Word Parts Isn’t the Same as Knowing Words
In our efforts to motivate students to engage in reading instruction–– particularly in middle and high school–– we’ve often responded by trying to make reading feel… Read More »Guest Post: Motivation Isn’t About Lowering the Bar
During several recent presentations, participants have asked how I generate text sets to build background knowledge for a particular literary selection. It’s an important question—because… Read More »Building Background That Matters: How I Create Text Sets for Adolescent Readers
Automaticity is built through volume. But volume alone is not enough. Volume must be designed. At TextProject, we have built a coherent Staircase of Automaticity… Read More »Climbing the Staircase of Automaticity: Why Volume and Design Matter in Adolescent Reading
Too many reading interventions send adolescents back to the beginning—as if a thirteen- or seventeen-year-old were encountering print for the first time. But adolescent readers… Read More »Not Zero: Why Adolescent Reading Interventions Should Start Where Students Are
