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!
AERA 2024: Considering Decodable Texts
April 16, 2024
Slides from Elfrieda H. (Freddy) Hieberts presentation at the 2024 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association
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.
Webinar: How Words and Literature Support Hope in Classrooms
February 1, 2024
In this presentation, Elfrieda H. (Freddy) Hiebert builds on her research on vocabulary and the article “Fostering Hope with Children’s Literature” (The Reading Teacher, 2022), in describing how literature for children and adolescents can create a community of hope in classrooms.
Podcast: Valuable Words About Vocabulary
January 29, 2024
Freddy talks with the hosts of Literacy Talks about how small changes in teaching vocabulary and text complexity can lead to big differences in students’ literacy growth.
LRA 2023: Reading Research in the 21st Century
December 4, 2023
Download Literacy Research Association 2023 Conference presentations on Reading Research in the 21st Century.
TextProject’s Decoding + Knowledge Program
July 27, 2023
Children need to see lots and lots of texts to become proficient beginning readers. To increase text exposure to engaging, curriculum-based texts, we are a new program at TextProject: TextProject’s (TP) Decoding + Knowledge Program. Our aim is to give teachers, tutors, caregivers, and others easy access to texts that they can use to support children’s automatic and meaningful beginning reading.
Giving Middle-School Readers a Boost with TopicReads
April 26, 2023
Middle schoolers who are challenged in reading don’t need more decoding practice with single- syllable words. What they really need is to spend about 10 to 15 minutes reading texts where they can get fast in recognizing the meanings of the 2,500 most-frequent words and their family members. A new set of texts at TextProject.org—TopicReads-Middle School—provides precisely this opportunity.
The Science of Reading: Seeking Research-Based Answers to Critical Questions
November 30, 2022
I wrote a series of five blogs in late 2020 on the relationship of research to reading acquisition and instruction. In the first blog, I promised a final blog that would raise questions that require the attention of researchers. I am finally following through on that promise. This blog presents questions about the curriculum, instruction, and texts of reading instruction (especially in the early stages) for which I have been looking for answers in the ensuing two-year gap.
Knowledge Building for Beginning Readers
September 19, 2022
Young children are bursting with curiosity about the world around them. A flock of birds flying overhead, the sound of a train, the taste of a kiwi–almost anything can ignite young children’s curiosity. Through answers to their questions and experiences, young children amass a treasure trove of knowledge.
Read-Alouds That Inspire
March 9, 2021
We need to do more than simply get students back on track in their academic learning. Yes, getting back on the page as readers and writers is critical. But at the same time, we as educators need to recognize that children, just as adults, need to feel the vibrancy of community and a sense of hope.
Results May Vary: Do First-Grade Reading Curriculum and Instruction Need to Be Adapted?
January 25, 2021
Beginning readers have different levels of proficiency, but many may follow a similar path as they learn new words and orthographic patterns. This may not be the case for those with the lowest levels of ability, so curriculum and instruction should take into account the needs of those who depend most on their in-school literacy experiences.
Feature Presentation: How Familiarity and Concreteness Can Help Beginning Readers Learn New Words
January 5, 2021
Teachers can help beginning readers master more than half of the 2,500 most frequently occurring word families by focusing on words they have already acquired in oral language and words with high concreteness ratings.
What is the Best Way to Teach Vocabulary?
November 18, 2020
With over 600,000 words in written English, which ones should English Language Arts teachers teach, and how?
Teaching Networks of Words
August 13, 2020
Students have trouble learning and retaining lists of unconnected words. Teaching words in networks helps students form connections among the words, bolstering their understanding.
Getting Back to the Page & Staying There
July 16, 2020
Reading is all about knowledge; it’s not just for practice. Students need the chance to read books and articles clustered around worthwhile content—topics like amazing creatures in the ocean and stories of kids who have done courageous things.
Bad with Names: Why Proper Names Deserve Instructional Attention
January 28, 2020
Rare words typically make up only 5% or less of the total words in texts, but it’s often these words that get students anxious about reading.
A Whole New World of Vocabulary Instruction
January 21, 2020
Words are not only a means of communicating, but a foundation of learning.
Not All Rare Words Are Sesquipedalian!
January 15, 2020
A small part of the English vocabulary accounts for the majority of the words in the texts students read across the grades – but some of the words may surprise you.
What Does It Mean To Be A Digitally Literate Scholar?
November 27, 2018
Some thoughts for Literacy Research Association session: Opening up the ivory tower: Examining the elements of open, digitally engaged scholarship (November 28, 2018, Indian Wells, CA)
A New Kind of Leveled Text: Meeting the Needs of Challenged Readers
July 24, 2018
Short sentences and less text don’t add up to proficient reading. But that’s exactly what the current wave of leveled texts offers.