TextProject CEO Dr. Elfrieda (Freddy) Hiebert joined hosts Bruce Hallett and David Ray on the podcast For the Love of Literacy to discuss “Vocabulary Development Through Morphology, Semantics and Complex Text.”
The conversation ranges over decades of Freddy’s research on vocabulary development and reading acquisition, and provides some fascinating insights into the process she uses to create the texts offered on TextProject.org
Without some accessible, intentionally scaffolded texts, I don’t think we can solve these problems… and just because you engineer the texts doesn’t mean that they aren’t engaging. For a text to go on TextProject.org it has to engage me.
Dr. Elfrieda (Freddy) Hiebert
Some Key Takeaways:
- Many students read accurately but lack fluency and vocabulary depth.
- Complex, authentic texts are important, but students also need scaffolded, accessible texts that support automaticity and provide repeated exposure to key words.
- Texts designed to support reading automaticity should be loaded with high frequency words that account for the majority of the words in texts students will encounter.
- When more difficult, low-frequency words are included in scaffolded texts, they should be repeated. The importance of repetition is well established by research, yet decodable texts often contain many unique words that appear only once.
- Teaching vocabulary through semantic networks, word families, and clusters helps students understand relationships between words. (Check out TextProject’s Exceptional Expressions for Everyday Events and Super Synonym Sets for Stories for examples)
Explore TextProject Resources
TextProject.org provides intentionally engineered texts and vocabulary learning resources that help students progress up the “staircase of automaticity.”
