Flattening the Developmental Staircase: Lexical Complexity Progression in Elementary Reading Texts Across Six Decades
November 20, 2025
This study examined lexical complexity patterns in elementary reading textbooks across four pivotal decades (1957, 1974, 1995, 2014) to understand how educational reforms have influenced developmental progressions in reading materials. The study analyzed a corpus of 320,000 words from one continuously published core reading program across grades 1–4 for four copyrights. The corpus consisted of a 20,000-word sample for each grade and year, analyzed for type-token ratio, percentage of complex words, and percentage of single-appearing words. The findings challenge narratives of declining text complexity and reveal that contemporary elementary readers experience compressed developmental progressions with elevated starting points but minimal growth trajectories. The implications suggest the need for reconceptualizing text design to balance appropriate challenges with systematic scaffolding, particularly for students dependent on school-based literacy instruction.
Scaffolded texts and comprehension
October 15, 2025
Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative’s plot or an expository text’s description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to adequately comprehend text has been to repeatedly read texts orally. The current review first addresses evidence for this conventional treatment, concluding that students have not shown substantial increases in silent reading comprehension. Next, this review presents evidence underlying an alternative perspective for automaticity support where texts are selected to support students in increasing their automaticity with the words they will encounter consistently—the 2500 morphological families that have been shown to account for at least 90% of most school texts. Finally, guidelines for teachers are provided that address the talk, tasks, and time of instruction, as well as texts, for automaticity.
Unpacking automaticity: Scaffolded texts and comprehension
May 29, 2025
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.
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
May 14, 2025
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.
Text types and their relation to efficacy in beginning reading interventions: The effects of decodable and non-decodable texts in early reading instruction
April 24, 2025
Supporting early readers means not only selecting texts at an appropriate level but also selecting texts of the appropriate text type. While necessary, decodable texts may not be sufficient for the full development of reading skills. Texts without phonetic control—non-decodable texts—may also provide a benefit.
Making sure the books check every box: Preservice teachers learning to select texts for reading instruction
April 2, 2025
To be prepared to teach reading, teachers must learn what makes a text complex: how text features contribute to text complexity. They must also learn how to locate and select appropriate texts for various pedagogies and know how to differentiate based on individual readers’ needs and interests.
“CATERing” to Readers’ Needs with AI: Innovation in Text Design and Instruction
June 27, 2024
In this article, the authors describe an innovation that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create texts tailored to the interests, strengths, and learning needs of individual readers.
What the Quasi-Regular Orthography of English Means for Bringing Students to Proficient Reading
April 19, 2024
Proficiency in reading demands automaticity in connecting letters and sounds, necessitating systematic phonics instruction. However, the complexity of English orthography and its morphology means that becoming proficient in reading takes time and requires substantial exposure to text.
Enhancing Opportunities for Decoding and Knowledge Building through Beginning Texts
April 16, 2024
Ensuring effective texts for student reading acquisition is a shared goal. This paper addresses the efficacy of decodable and leveled texts, their word features, and outcomes of reorganizing texts by vowel patterns and topics. Sparse evidence supportsRead More »Enhancing Opportunities for Decoding and Knowledge Building through Beginning Texts
Fostering Hope with Children’s Literature
February 5, 2024
Today, in a world of instantaneous communication, children and young people can be confronted with images and information that are troubling and hard to understand. “Fostering Hope with Children’s Literature” is an essay that draws on scholarship about how literature can give children and young people insight into how people have found unexpected sources of strength and resilience in challenging times.
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