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!
Syntax and Text Complexity: A Classic Text Goes from College-Career Level to First Grade
June 26, 2012
Dr. Hiebert shows how the Lexile for a text can change with a few simple edits.
Teaching Complex Text: Why Look at Word Frequency?
June 21, 2012
A webinar version of this content is also available: Teaching Complex Text: Why Look at Word Frequency For the first time in a standards document, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has a standard—Standard 10—devoted solely to ensuring that studentRead More »Teaching Complex Text: Why Look at Word Frequency?
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: What if we’ve got the wrong ones?
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: What’s the story about beginning reading texts?
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.
Whatever Happened to Dick and Jane?
June 4, 2010
If you were 6 years old between 1930-1967 in the U.S., there is a high likelihood that this text was the first of your school career.
High-Leverage Action #3
November 14, 2009
ELLs may have the concepts of a topic but simply give the concepts different labels than the English ones. In a unit on the human body, native Spanish speakers know about a skeleton.
High-Leverage Action #2
November 7, 2009
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common origin.
High-Leverage Action #1
October 31, 2009
We know that oral language is a primary way in which meaning gets constructed and built. Through talk, we come to understand concepts and our interpretations and ownership of ideas.
High-Leverage Actions That Can Make a Difference: Some Useful Background
October 29, 2009
As facilitator of the 2009 CREATE conference, I promised attendees that I would reflect on what I view to the important take-aways from the conference and share them in this venue.
Private, Personal, and Peculiar
October 1, 2009
An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be established by a literal translation of the words in the phrase.
Welcome back, Freddy
September 11, 2009
Some of you may remember that ’70s show—Welcome back, Kotter! Well…I’m welcoming myself back to writing Frankly Freddy. Why, after a three-year hiatus, would I resurrect this column? One reason is that I’ve joined a cooperative work space here in SantaRead More »Welcome back, Freddy
Everyday Events
September 9, 2009
Vocabulary is one of the topics that Cassidy and Cassidy listed as hot in Reading Today. Vocabulary should always be a hot topic in that it forms the foundation of knowing and learning anything. A typical direction that educators take when a topic is hot is to think of lessons and materials and curriculum. These things are part of the solution but an additional resource lies in the everyday talk of classrooms. Language is the medium of human interaction and, like any human context, language fills classroom life.