Frankly Freddy Blog
TextProject president and CEO Elfrieda H. (Freddy) Hiebert blogs about important issues in reading research and practice.Frankly Freddy entries (published from 2005 to 2014) have been sorted into five topics of literacy learning and instruction. Click here to download the ebook!
Children’s literacy learning and screen time
January 20, 2012
A question that parents frequently ask these days is: Does screen time count as reading time? With such a wide variety of online reading experiences available, the short answer would be have to be, “Yes, but…”
Is Reading in Kindergarten the Means for Ensuring College and Career Readiness?
August 3, 2011
The inclusion of kindergarten in the CCSS about text difficulty represents an implicit assumption about beginning reading that also requires consideration—that earlier is better. Does beginning reading in kindergarten truly ensure that high school graduates are better at reading the complex texts of careers and college? In this essay, I review research on both the explicit and implicit assumptions within the CCSS regarding formal reading instruction in kindergarten: the dumbing down of kindergarten texts and the pushing down of reading instruction to kindergarten.
The 90-10 Rule of Vocabulary in Increasing Students’ Capacity for Complex Text
June 7, 2011
Elfrieda (Freddy) Hiebert TextProject & University of California, Santa Cruz The English language has an incredibly rich vocabulary, and yet we use only about 2% of it in the bulk of our typical written texts. This core vocabulary accounts for abouRead More »The 90-10 Rule of Vocabulary in Increasing Students’ Capacity for Complex Text
Identifying Principles for the Creation of Texts in A Variety of Languages for Beginning Readers
May 25, 2011
Beginning readers need substantial and consistent data about language they are learning.
What Teachers and Parents Can Do to Stop the Summer Reading Slide
April 11, 2011
Students from high and low socioeconomic homes have been found to make similar gains on reading during the school year (Alexander, Entwistle, & Olson, 2004). It’s what happens in the summer that contributes to a growing gap in low- and high-income students’ reading. During the summer, low-income children either fall or stagnate during the summer, while higher-income children continue to progress or maintain their reading levels. By fourth-grade, the accumulated differences over several summers are reflected in a significant gap between low- and high-income students.
Looking “Within” the Lexile for More Guidance: Word Frequency and Sentence Length
January 24, 2011
Teachers should use the lexile rating as an initial piece of information, much like a check of someone’s temperature. A temperature can be high or low for lots of different reasons. The average sentence length and average word frequency gives teachers more specific information that is useful for decision-making.
The Generalizability of the TExT Model to Indic Languages
October 6, 2010
Considerably less is known about reading processes in syllabic and semi-syllabic writing systems, such as those used by a sizeable proportion of the world’s population. In this column, we consider the generalizability of features of the TExT model to alphasyllabic languages, such as those in use in India.
Immunizations and treatments in early reading
August 4, 2010
Might it be that the immunization effort of the past decade in early reading education has contributed to problems that are far more serious than word recognition ever was? Might it even be that students’ word recognition is, in fact, quite good and that it is their background knowledge and engagement in reading that is the real problem?
Opening the dialogue
June 24, 2010
There are some children who come to school who officially learn to read in school but who have had hundreds of hours of experiences with books, print, and language play.
What Exactly is a Decodable Text?
June 17, 2010
Any text written in English is decodable at some level in that the code never deviates from the alphabetic system. However, the degree to which the letter-sound correspondences within words are common or consistent can vary considerably.