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New podcast: Linking Automaticity, Vocabulary, and Text With Dr.Freddy Hiebert

Jake Downs, host of the Talking Literacy podcast, welcomes guest Dr. Freddy Hiebert, a renowned literacy researcher and CEO/Founder of TextProject. The conversation covers topics such as the importance of automaticity, the core vocabulary, reading volume, and shifts in text complexity over the decades.

illustration of 3 adolescent readers

Unpacking automaticity: Scaffolded texts and comprehension

In this review, Freddy Hiebert examines the standard intervention for secondary students lacking automaticity—repeated oral reading—and the limited evidence for its impact on silent reading comprehension. She then presents an alternative approach using texts where the core 2,500 most frequent word families in written language comprise the majority of content.

a close up of a dictionary page showing the entry for the word "rare".

The Presence and Progression of Rare Vocabulary in Texts Across Elementary Grades and Between Genres: How Rare Words Increase the Challenge of Reading and What We Can Do About It

The authors examined a set of rare words from narrative and expository texts aimed at Grades 1, 3, and 5. The purpose of the study was to determine the proportions of rare words that occurred across grade levels and genres, as well as to examine the features of rare words that occurred in these elementary texts.

Using AI to Teach Word Networks

Dr. Elfrieda (Freddy) Hiebert shares tips on using an AI assistant to select words from narrative text for more effective vocabulary instruction.