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 text will be for students. The familiarity, frequency, and spelling patterns matter greatly.
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 words most worth teaching.
Morphology teaching frequently stops at the pieces — students drill prefixes and suffixes in isolation, fill in charts, match roots to definitions — without ever encountering those element in real texts. What learners also need is sustained engagement with texts where morphologically rich vocabulary appears in context. It’s the combination — explicit guidance and meaningful reading — that lets students move from recognizing pieces to actually using the system.
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 easier. These instincts are rooted in good intentions, but are our efforts unintentionally undermining our students’ opportunities for success?
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 for many adolescents, especially those who are disengaged from reading, background knowledge is often the difference between confusion and connection.
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 in 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 who score below Proficient are not at zero. When we begin where students actually are, we align practice with theory—and give adolescents the forward momentum they deserve.
What does NAEP Proficiency actually represent? Is it intended to describe what is developmentally appropriate for most eighth graders, or does it represent a more ambitious target? Ambitious goals are essential—they push systems forward. But when aspirational benchmarks are misread as diagnostic norms, high expectations become public condemnation.
While pundits paint dire pictures of 2024 NAEP results for 8th and 12th grades, the reality is more nuanced: many teens simply haven’t read enough… Read More »From Reluctant to Engaged: Open-Access Text Sets That Transform Adolescent Readers
This study examined how the lexical complexity of elementary reading textbooks has changed over six decades, finding that the issue is not declining rigor, but rather compressed progression.
