by Elfrieda (Freddy) H. Hiebert
Why reading volume and word distribution matter
Consider three words from a third-grade DIBELS passage: invented, avoid, and reduced. These words aren’t especially rare in English. Nor do they necessarily contain unfamiliar letter-sound relationships for students who have completed foundational skills instruction. Yet recognizing these words accurately and automatically requires more than knowing how to sound them out. Students need opportunities to encounter them in print. It’s hard to become automatic at something you rarely do.
How often do children encounter words?
English words are distributed unevenly across texts. A relatively small group of high-frequency words accounts for much of what students read. Words such as the, was, and about occur frequently. Other words appear much less frequently. They may be important for understanding a passage, but students have fewer opportunities to encounter them.
Analyses of school texts indicate that approximately 620 high-frequency word families account for a substantial proportion of running words. A larger group of medium-frequency families accounts for a smaller, but still critical, proportion. The consequence is important: Reading the same number of words doesn’t provide equal practice with every word.
What does this mean for automaticity?
Consider a word predicted to occur approximately 50 times per million running words. A third grader who reads 20,000 words over a month of school would encounter that word about once in typical texts. And encounters aren’t scheduled. A word might appear twice in one week and then disappear for months.
A student may successfully decode invented in isolation. Recognizing it immediately in connected text is another accomplishment, one that depends partly on repeated encounters.
Volume matters—but so does text selection
The solution isn’t simply assigning more reading, regardless of difficulty or content.
Students need texts they can read accurately enough to sustain attention and meaning. A consistent diet of texts with numerous unknown words can limit reading volume. Students also need engaging content that makes sustained reading worthwhile.
This is the rationale behind TextProject’s Staircase of Automaticity: providing accessible, meaningful texts while gradually expanding the vocabulary and complexity students can manage. Informational readers, trade readers, and phonics readers all contribute to this goal. Connected sets of texts provide repeated encounters with words and concepts in meaningful contexts.
An instructional priority
Explicit foundational skills instruction remains essential. Students must learn the patterns and structures that make unfamiliar words decodable. But decoding instruction is not the end of the process. Students need extensive opportunities to apply those skills in connected reading.
We should ask not only whether students have been taught a spelling pattern, but whether they’ve had enough opportunities to read words containing that pattern.
Automaticity develops through successful encounters with print. Our responsibility is to make those encounters plentiful, accessible, purposeful, and engaging.