Season 5 of Literacy Talks begins with a visit from special guest Dr. Elfrieda “Freddie” Hiebert, noted researcher, educator, author, and president and CEO of TextProject, Inc., a nonprofit organization focused on bringing beginning and struggling readers to high levels of literacy using a variety of strategies and tools, particularly the texts used for reading instruction.
In this episode, our hosts explore how small changes in teaching vocabulary and text complexity can lead to big differences in students’ literacy growth. From helping students unlock the treasure box of vocabulary to remembering that language and literacy are always about meaning, this episode invites educators to the world of words and enriching literacy instruction.
Subscribe to our Literacy Talks podcast digest and never miss an episode! We’ll send you summaries of every session, links to the resources discussed on each show, and some extra goodies so that your learning never stops.
Subscribe to our podcast digest.
Download the new Reading Horizons Discovery Product Guide.
Access the show notes.
Read the transcripts.
Season 5 of Literacy Talks begins with a visit from special guest Dr. Elfrieda “Freddie” Hiebert, noted researcher, educator, author, and president and CEO of TextProject, Inc., a nonprofit organization focused on bringing beginning and struggling readers to high levels of literacy using a variety of strategies and tools, particularly the texts used for reading instruction.
In this episode, our hosts explore how small changes in teaching vocabulary and text complexity can lead to big differences in students’ literacy growth. From helping students unlock the treasure box of vocabulary to remembering that language and literacy are always about meaning, this episode invites educators to the world of words and enriching literacy instruction.
Subscribe to our Literacy Talks podcast digest and never miss an episode! We’ll send you summaries of every session, links to the resources discussed on each show, and some extra goodies so that your learning never stops.
Subscribe to our podcast digest.
Download the new Reading Horizons Discovery Product Guide.
Access the show notes.
Read the transcripts.
Welcome to Literacy Talks, the podcast for literacy leaders and champions everywhere. Brought to you by Reading Horizons, Literacy Talks is the place to discover new ideas, trends, insights and practical strategies that will help all learners reach reading proficiency. Our series host is Stacy Hurst, a professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor for Reading Horizons. Joining Stacy are Donell Pons, a recognized expert in literacy and special education. And Lindsay Kemeny, an elementary classroom teacher, author, and speaker. For today's episode, we welcome a truly special guest, Dr. Elfrida Hiebert, an educator, renowned researcher, CEO and President of TextProject. Let's get started.
Stacy Hurst:Hello, and welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst. I'm the host. And I'm joined as I am every episode by Lindsay Kemeny and Donell Pons. And we are beginning our fifth season. This will be the first episode of our fifth season, and it's going to be an awesome one. This will be a really fun conversation. We have Dr. Freddie Hiebert here to join us to have conversation about vocabulary and a lot of the work that she's done. I know I first became familiar with your work, Dr. Hiebert, when I was a literacy coach, and something in the appendix of the Common Core, led me to your website. And I don't know if text project which we'll put links to that in the show notes. Great resource, by the way, and I'll let you talk about that later, too. I went down what we would call a rabbit hole. And I learned so much about text complexity from you. It was really a great, I actually remember the time where I was sitting like the whole, it was just opening a lot of mind doors for me. So we're so happy to have you here. Welcome. Thanks for joining.
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:I'm thrilled to be here. It's a great way to start off the new year. Yes.
Stacy Hurst:And you know, speaking of that, we are going to talk about vocabulary. Today, I just had the opportunity to read your book called Teaching Words and How They Work. It was published in 2020. And I purchased it a while ago. I don't know why I didn't get to read it until now. But one thing I thought was very apropos about the beginning of your book, and the beginning of this podcast season and the beginning of 2024 is that you talk about small changes, making big differences. And I know we can make the connection between New Year's resolutions, and how big they can be. But I do find that if I make smaller ones, I'm more successful. So can you talk to us about I thought it was a unique way to start a book. But a very important way, as I read it, I thought, wow, this is a great way to set up what we're going to learn about. So how did you make that decision,
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:I found the perspective of small changes to be a really effective one in almost every phase of my life, I can have these absolutely huge projects and goals. And I can be stymied by the project. And then the goals or the projects just become wonderful things in thought. So I have some papers in thought, you know, that I cite. But I've never gotten written down because it just seemed too overwhelming. And I think as teachers thinking of what the smallest thing we can do, but also teaching our kids this. So I've been writing, we've got a new project at a text project. And it's called Teen Reads. And it's a magazine on specific topics for teenagers that also have a vocabulary component, which I can describe it a little bit. But one of the first magazine titles that we're doing is on procrastination. And let's admit I did procrastinate somewhat because it can't be kind of overwhelming to start talking about that. But I think that idea of small steps is something we really want to teach our kids from the get go in school. You know, we have some kids who didn't get the same memos at home that other kids did. And I think sometimes it can be so valuable for us to uncover some of the things that work for us and the small changes is something that I work on.
Stacy Hurst:I love that it really set the whole book up vocabulary is a big conversation. It's a big topic, but as I read through the book, I felt it was very palatable. All and applicable in every aspect, right, I one thing I also appreciate I heard Hugh Katz say something similar recently. And I synthesize it to say, we don't actually read to decode, we don't even read to comprehend, but we read to build knowledge about the world. Right. And sometimes, as a beginning, teacher of beginning readers, I do get so hung up on the word level on the decode ability, right and the patterns. And again, we need to address that. But I really appreciated the way your book helped me to see that from the beginning, we can be focusing on gaining knowledge and how to do that.
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:mean, English has a lot of words. And Yeah, I it has a lot of word meanings. So the idea of how you're going to start uncovering the treasure box of vocabulary to kids, and I use that word treasure box, because it's sort of a direct translation of one of the German words that is used in vocabulary. And I've been learning German as my pandemic project, which is sustained, which has been a really important experience for me. But you know, we, there's so many words in English, so which ones do you actually start with, and sometimes when we think of the issue of decoding, and for kids who come to school, without some of the baseline processes, you know, it just seems like, we've got to get that going, we've got to get that started. And we forget that language is always about meaning, then that's actually what makes us the most unique as human beings, right, is that we have language, and we have a way of writing it down. So far, we haven't discovered another species that has the capability to record their thoughts, their history, and so on. But that's what we do as human beings. And we read, because of the wealth of information, you know, the opportunities that are afforded us in text.
Donell Pons:Dr. Hiebert, you've said something really interesting. It's just got me thinking, having a household of some folks who struggled to gain appreciation for reading because they had some difficulties. But it made me think of how do you for that student who comes to the classroom setting who is perhaps struggling with the code, that the code is not coming? To see it as a treasure box, to stay engaged with it to where they do want to know what those words mean? And that's, that's an interesting one, because it got me thinking about that. I mean, that's
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:a whole degree program, isn't it? The answer to your question, but immediate things, especially for younger children, is the value of the books that we read to them, and also the value of the information that you can get from text. So when I talk to children, young people, one of the first things I always ask is, what is your specialty? What's something that, you know, that I'd really like to learn about? And once I know that, you know, there are books that can help you expand that interest. I mean, one of the big parts, right of becoming good at the code is writing. Right? So writing is very concrete. Reading is much more ephemeral at the start. So what is it that you know, that we could write, and that you could share with other people. So I think that's a really critical part, right? Even if a kid just makes a couple of letters for a word, we can kind of figure out what that is. But they can't always figure out what the word is that somebody else writes. So I mean, that participation of testing out your hypothesis and writing I think, is a really critical part of the story. And
Donell Pons:I love that you bring that up right from the get go through writing and reading and how intertwined they are.
Stacy Hurst:One thing that you mentioned in your book just was brought to mind as you were talking, as a child could decode a word accurately and still be none the better for it, right? Because they don't know what it means. Or they don't understand its relationship to the other words in the sentence. I live in this space where I'm a little bit focused on the decodability. But I really want to start thinking about choosing words selecting words and technology can play such a big role. Now, AI can write decodable texts for us now if we give them the right parameters. But how do we marry that? How do we not sacrifice meaning in the service of just having a decodable word? Does that make sense? I know sometimes in decodable texts we use sort of obscure words even if they follow a CVC pattern, but kids won't know what that means. Yeah,
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:the thing to remember about reading and writing continuously is why we do it. As I started out, saying, What makes us really human is our language, and the fact that we can document it. And now we can get into the language. Now we can actually hear speeches, we can hear people talking from a certain historical point of view. Some point, you can't hear people before that, but you can read what they've written. And that access to knowledge is what this is all about. So I know that in I was a primary teacher, we can get so worried about keeping kids on track, but we need to, especially for the kids, who come to school with a history of being loved at home, but not with a history of literacy. And I think that's really critical to realize, you know, this little letter hanging out by itself isn't terribly interesting for them. But words are, you can never decode a word meaningfully, that you don't know what it means. It's like trying to solve a mystery when nobody tells you what the mystery is, you don't know if you solved it. So that's why we start in Jean Shaw, who was the Grondahl, right of reading education for many years, she was the one when we did becoming a nation readers, her and Isabel Beck did a session on on the code basically, for all the commission members. And she was the one that really opened my eyes to that, you need to start with things that are familiar to kids. And from the familiar you go to the unfamiliar, but you always start with familiar. So technically, yeah, people can decode, but it isn't anything meaningful. And
Stacy Hurst:they wouldn't recognize that they've decoded it correctly, if they didn't, correct. So I loved what as I read your book, too, I just picture all these read alouds that we do as teachers, and how much more impactful they can be with the information that you've shared in your book and in other places, as well. So I guess I'll ask a really big question. You can go with that wherever you want. But how do we do this? How do we approach teaching? All of these words, we have a limited amount of time, right? Even if we taught eight words a week, it would take us 10 years every day. So how do we do this? You actually
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:gave me a good hook into the answer. And that is our tradition of the eight words a week didn't the Beatles have a song something like eight days a week? Okay, so eight words a week. And I'd like to disabuse people have that notion. And if there's one thing that I would communicate to teachers who are beginning this process, and thinking about how to invite their students into this world of words, it's that a word never just hangs out by itself. Words live in different kinds of systems. So the thing about English, any language is that there are systems that underlie it, that, you know, in mathematics, you would never ask kids to start solving problems without making sure they know something about the algorithms. And one of the things that we do in teaching kids to read and teaching our teachers how to teach kids to read is we often don't talk about those underlying systems. So we're very, very focused on the phonological orthographic system. And that's important, because English is alphabetic. And you can't learn to read without understanding some of those relationships. At the same time, we have to remember that English came to us from two different languages, Anglo Saxon, German, and French, Latin. Those languages have different systems. So the relationships don't always work. I heard David share a year ago, he's talked a lot about the self teaching hypothesis. And he talked about English in terms on the worldwide scene being an outlier, because of its quasi regular systems. So, you know, one of the systems has to do with the orthographic phonological component. And we can teach kids about what patterns are shared. So that's one thing we're always wanting to teach kids, something about what lies underneath, which is why the the title of my book was teaching words and how they work. So we want to keep uncovering this information. Another system is it's our language is morphological. And it turns out the Romans in the German part or the Anglo Saxon part of the morphological systems are really different. No, so German has very Few suffixes and prefixes. So in the Anglo Saxon part of English, there are very few suffixes and prefixes. And they all make a lot of sense actually, like helpful and neighborhood when you know what the hood means. knighthood know, the state of a neighbor, you know. And the French system is very, very different. You know, you use the prefixes and suffixes. In German, what you keep doing is you keep adding components of words together, in really idiosyncratic ways. So, for example, you know, a lot of our compound words, like cowboy, you know, a cowboy isn't a boy cow. So we have to remember that these systems are different. So morphological is a really important part to start getting into from the get go. Going back to Jean Chol, she criticized American textbooks very much in the early 60s, saying that there wasn't enough letter sound correspondences taught. But what she didn't observe is that there was a lot of morphology taught, actually, there was a little bit more phonics taught than Jean was actually aware of, because the names of all the characters that were always repeated, you need a lot of repetition of patterns, right when you're learning to read, but William S. Gray had in Dick and Jane, he was kind of the architect of, of it, he was really interested in in compound words, and also, you know, some of the few prefixes and suffixes that there are in German like unhelpful as an example, or asleep. And that actually turns out to have been at one point, more of a contraction, that became a prefix. So morphology is really important. But the semantic system is just engrossing and really, really critical. So when I'm teaching children, like I'm doing a lesson with words that have short use, and I think of a word like cut, I really want to also introduce them to the fact that this word is used in different ways. So most of the words that we actually use in our oral language, the words that with which children are familiar, and then we start using and decoding are very polysemous. They have multiple meanings, multiple uses, that's why these are so frequent. And we want to let kids know about that early on. And we also want to let them know when the system doesn't work. So that's, you know, in that it's a quasi regular orthography. When I'm thinking of words like cut, and hut, and jut, there's also the word put. So very early on, I want to start talking about, so you expect this stuff to work out? And it usually does. But sometimes it doesn't. You know, that about how things are right. Sometimes things don't work out, or don't do what you think they should. But one of the things that we're gonna get really good at, as we're learning to read, and I'm starting to talk like a first grade teacher, right? But one of the ways in which we're going to get really good at reading is we're going to start seeing, that's why we we read the words and we say, does that make sense? Because sometimes the letters of the beginning and the ending, you know, are usually going to work, but sometimes not those middle middle sounds not the vowels. We got an incredible amount of variation vowels, right? From what I can tell, I asked people this is a quiz and maybe I don't I ask you how many felt patterns do we have?
Stacy Hurst:I think I used to know this answer, but a lot. I know. But what's a lot Lindsay like? Yeah, Lindsay, how many do we have?
Lindsay Kemeny:Oh, I don't know. Because I know in general, we say there's like over there's around 250 ways to spell, you know, different spellings, but that's probably including consonants too. So I don't know.
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:Well, from what I can tell of Ed Fry's analysis in Journal of literacy behavior 2004, he took, you know, one of the first projects the US Department of Education invested in in the early 60s was the database of all the letter sound correspondences. And a Stanford professor named Paul Hanna worked on that. And Frey then did an analysis of Hannah's work to make it a little bit more accessible. Because this database I mean, right now, I mean, if you look at the HANA database, it's it's not I haven't found it digitized. If somebody who's listening has it digitized. I'd love to see that. But, you know, Fry said that there were about 106 ways in which we can associate the letters and the sounds. So that's far too many to teach. So obviously, kids generalize which is really what we have to have them do. Do right? I mean, we don't teach them every single way to put a word into a sentence when they're learning to speak. So we really have to teach about generalization set for variability. Yes,
Stacy Hurst:we've been having a lot of conversations about that, between the three of us. That's a really great way to facilitate that. How would you say that vocabulary instruction has evolved in the last 20 or 30 years? Where do we still need to go?
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:Oh, that's a really good question. In some ways, I feel like the evolution has just not kept up with the technology of what we know. So one of the things that's really changed over the last 20 years, has been that with digitization, we can study words in lots of different ways that we couldn't before. And we can also identify which words are connected to each other. Like there are colocation databases, where you can see like a word like cut, what are other words that you might expect will appear with that word, when it's a noun? Or when it's a verb? There are all these databases. And yeah, I think this message well, and let me just backtrack a little bit. There are lots of ways of parsing words. So for example, we have a really good sense of the words that occur the most frequently in written English in the morphological families to which those words belong. And also, you know, the letter sound correspondences, especially the vowel patterns in those words, but I'm not sure how much of that information actually gets translated into how we're teaching kids and the words we're choosing to teach. I did a program a couple years back, where we just taught particular focus letter sound correspondences, and mostly vowel patterns. Not every single one. And, you know, the publisher actually changed it, you know, so we we be at all of these different patterns, when there's generalization that's needed. And we also know a lot about those words that matter the most in text, I study automaticity right now, I'm really interested in how we've been going about interventions to get kids are automatic. And our texts right now, are not at all controlled in terms of their repetition. So even in a decodable texts, you're gonna find a lot of words that appear single time, and sometimes the authors of those texts will say, Well, that's good, because we want to see if kids can generalize. Well, that may be true. But it's also true that you have to see some words with some patterns, repeatedly to get very good at it. Learning doesn't happen at one time trials. So in terms of shares, idea, right of self teaching, you don't start self teaching, when you've just had a single pattern that you've been taught that you've got to actually see some repetition. And so, you know, what I'm really interested in is, what is the content coverage, you need to be able to read typical texts? And what is the letter sound correspondence terms of vowels and also in terms of morphology that you'd need to get good at that? I think that's kind of a little different take on it.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, that is something teachers need to be aware of right when selecting the text and, and knowing that readers too, right. That's a great point.
Narrator:If you're wondering where to find proven outcome focused ways to put the science of reading into practice, you're in the right place. Reading Horizons Discovery is the evidence based foundational literacy program educators asked for and helped create with integrated components that emphasize phonics phonemic awareness, high frequency words, and rapid assessments that make grouping and individualized instruction, easy to manage and deliver. This is the program that makes literacy instruction streamlined and more successful for teachers and students alike, so all learners can achieve reading proficiency. Go to readinghorizons.com/productguide to download complete program details today.
Lindsay Kemeny:I have a question. So we know like those rich read alouds are so important to I'm a first grade teacher, I have to look at a book I'm going to read aloud to students and pick words, vocabulary words, right to go over with the students so they can have a better understanding of the text. So I've heard you say before, not to treat words like an island. And I would love for you to tell us kind of what you mean by that and maybe some guidelines as we you know, select Words to teach our students.
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:Yeah, I think one of the perspectives that was really prominent in the teens in the 2010s had to do with picking juicy words to teach. And from my perspective, that's all good. But what I also want to do is help kids to recognize that in these texts in the read alouds, especially if they're stories, these authors take ideas about things you usually know about, but they use a variety of words. So in a book about a character, who's being silly or mischievous, you're not going to see the same words to describe the character over and over again. So when I'm doing a read aloud, what I want kids. So in order to be able to read complex text, you're going to have to navigate a lot of different words, to keep remembering if we have about 6000 words 2500 morphological families that account for about 91 92%. That word you read, you got a lot of other words, what the box for dictionary now has got about 170,000 Active Words, in those Active Words probably each have what an average of three or four meanings, right? I just made that up. So if anybody's listening, don't don't quote me on that. So what I'm saying is, when I'm selecting words, some of it is the stance that I'm taking when I talk about the words, Lindsay. So I'm actually saying, you know, this idea about being silly. But this author is using some different ways of describing that. And we're actually going to collect some of those words. And we're going to add some other words that the author hasn't used. keep remembering that authors of stories especially, are going to keep building your vocabularies by using different words for ordinary ones. And you know what most of these meanings are, you just don't know that particular word. So I want to actually have a lot of word maps in classrooms, where we take some of the words in a text project I've taken what I think there are 20 words, that account for a lot of the words that we use in stories that have to do with movement. Movement is one aspect that authors really tell you something about their characters, right. There's also emotions, their communication words. So an author tells you somebody's eavesdropping, that's really different than the word listening. So what we want to do is start collecting these ways in which authors use words in interesting ways. But always coming back to, we know that idea, but authors use different ways of doing that know when we get to informational text, if it's an informational store, both texts, not a story. And expository text. That's, that's different. Those are ideas that you might not know that much about mummification. But there are ideas around that topic. And we can collect those. So they're not all going to mean the same, but they're going to be connected. And often the definitions are connected. mean, in some sense, I don't want to be misinterpreted here, so maybe I shouldn't say it. But in some sense, school is where we get invited into some of these topics that aren't about human nature and human relationships. But keep remembering narrative is just critical and opening our eyes to help people solve human problems, how people interact with each other. So narrative text is really, really important. You come to school to learn about the ways in which people solve problems over the ages, and how inventive authors describe ways of solving problems. Is that a response? That makes sense? Lindsay?
Lindsay Kemeny:Yes, that's, that's great. And just also that idea of, not to treat the words all separately. And sometimes we do that when we pick a word, and we say, we're gonna pick these five words for the story. But you're saying, don't, you know, like, you're, like you were saying, think about the connections, right? And how we can teach other words, you know, how we can teach them together?
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:Yeah, and even a story. So we picked five words, what if I actually map those words out? It may actually fit into the story structure, I might be able to tell the story from those five words for how the character walked how the character solved the problem, you know, how the character communicated. So I want to be able to talk about how they're, even if they're fairly different words. You know, they all help keep remembering and I think this is an important part of conversation. I believe, you know that our talk, our uncovering of things for kids is just fundamental to what we do. So I'm talking about The fact that you know, in stories, authors only have words, right? It's not like making a movie. In a movie, you also have some pictures, but what they've got are words, and they're going to use these words to help you understand something about the problem, the context, the the characters, and so on. There are a lot of ways to explain how characters move. And we're going to start collecting some of
Stacy Hurst:those. Yeah, in your book. Those are some of the small changes you recommend. And you make it really easy to remember, because you use for words that are illiterate. So the conversations about words that you're talking about collecting words and having students be part of that process as well. And then you also talk about Core Words, and choice in that, could you say a little bit more about core and choice,
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:what we want to remember, I think this is something we've forgotten in American reading, education. And actually turns out that if you were learning to read English, as a young adult, and an English as a second language context, like in Indonesia, or even New Zealand has been a big place, they've had these programs, you'd be learning in some different ways. So here's an example of a book from a program from Oxford Press, where they're teaching young adults to read in English, and they actually move through a series of stages in terms of the prominence of vocabulary. And our current model of vocabulary is that we don't control text has to be authentic. Please don't think I was one of the ones who originally talked about authentic texts. So I'm not saying we want inauthentic text. But I also am convinced that unless you get highly automatic, with the words that matter most and are versatile, and taking on different meanings for those words, keep remembering that the 1000 most frequent words have lots different meanings. You know, I'm looking at a word here in this book on King Arthur. And here's a word like table, you know, the table that the Knights sat around, but we can also table something, right. So there are different ways or we can have a water table. So we have to have some automaticity. With what I call the core vocabulary. I think all the data points to that's where our kids have the biggest problem right now, you have to read some texts, where you don't have so many rare words, that you can't get good at the core vocabulary. And that's what I do at text project is we provide texts that I think are engaging and interesting, we have things called topic reads for primary that are very decodable. But also repeat some of those words that are highly frequent. So the words are chosen to be highly decodable, and highly frequent. So I think you have to get good and flexible with the core vocabulary. So when I talk about core, I'm saying you have to keep revisiting the core, just like you do that. In Pilates, when you do some physical training you revisit, you know, you deal with the core. And then you also have to start understanding the richness of this vocabulary that's English. And you know, the reason it's so rich, right, is that, for every simple word we have, there are also some really complex words that usually come from the romance Latin level of our of our language. So a word like cut will have other words like laceration, you know, or if it's a verb pierce, so we have to then go into the choice, the richness part, one of the problems that can happen is by identifying a problem, and somebody like me, keeps hammering at it, you know, everything becomes that. And so I'm not suggesting we just are attending to the core vocabulary, but I am saying, I think a lot of our kids, when I look at the data on kids reading fluency, by the end of a minute, most eighth graders can read most of the words on a text, you know, couple ones, they can't, but they aren't automatic enough to sustain meaning they're treating some of the words that are fairly common buzzwords to be decoded. And that takes away from your comprehension. So I'm seeing even from the get go in first grade kindergarten, I want kids to be able to see some text where some of these words are repeated. Seidenberg talks about this, that it's the variety in the amount that you're seeing, so that you keep generalizing the patterns
Stacy Hurst:and become more automatic with them. I think that's a good choice is a good connector with writing too, especially when you're selecting just the right word. And having those activities where you have a lot of words that have a similar meaning but more nuance running sprinting, versus, you know, crawling or walking And helping students to understand the differences between those as well as the similarities. And you know, as you were talking, I was thinking about the kind of text that we use with our students. Because I've always been fascinated with literacy and reading I early on kind of grasp onto the idea of what's the word, I'm looking for analyzing text and the formulas that we use for those. So I know very common formulas that are used the Common Core kind of recommended in a way Lexile leveling. Do they take vocabulary into consideration? And are there formulas that do that? I know that Lexile I think is sentence length. And I know that I use guided reading levels early in my career. And I don't think those were very formulaic in many ways. But do they consider vocabulary and the ways they should?
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:No. They could. There are ways now, I was talking earlier about the digitization process. And we know a lot about vocabulary features. So I have in this is not something you're going to find on the on the internet. But I have a word analyzer that I've had engineers built for me. And I can take a text and we can see the distribution of words in terms of their frequency in terms of their vowel patterns, in terms of their semantic categories. So the words in our database are tagged by semantic categories, you know, by morphological family, you can do that. But what lexiles have done, and they what started out doing this about 45 years ago and haven't changed, they aren't using the capacity that they actually have in their databanks. But it's basically in with Jim Cunningham and Heidi Mesmer, Heidi and Mesmer, we've written about this, that the Lexile is predicted very much by sentence length. What they actually do in computing a Lexile is every word in a text is given its rank. And then you average that out and do a mean log Word Frequency. That's problem because the frequency with which a certain group of words occur, right, the very thing that I've been talking about in terms of automaticity. So could we have a formula? Do I have a formula that uses vocabulary? Yeah. Do I want to have have that spread across the whole world? No, I really don't. I mean, Gene Shaw, you know, the Delta role, actually used a set of vocabulary words that were correlated, at that point, two different basal reader reading levels. So that actually will would give you a better indication of Okay, why don't I want to do this? I just, I don't want to be in the business of determining text complexity for 1000s and millions of kids. Because I think that it would be beyond full time job, I can make recommendations. So what I have said consistently over the last 15 years is 2500, morphological families account for about 90 to 91% of words in text, another 2000 families account for another 5%. And then no matter what level the kid is reading at, this is what is important to know, they'll typically be three, three rare words for every 100 words you read. By rare I mean, that doesn't mean you can't decode them. It just means it's the first time you've probably seen it. So if we just give kids the typical text to practice getting automatic get, they're going to be dealing with these rare words all the time, which is why I've been writing texts, right, that have a really small percentage of rare words that have some interesting information. And I typically use informational texts for automaticity development. Why? Because informational texts, it makes sense to repeat the hard words. In a story. An author doesn't repeat galavanting 10 times like Dick and Jane, you know, had obsessive disorder where they were always obsessively repeating all the words. They would run, run, run, stop, stop, stop. But good author doesn't do that in informational text, if you're talking about mummification, yeah. Canopic? You repeat that. So I use informational texts because it makes sense to repeat words. And at texts project we've got what hundreds of texts that are based around the core vocabulary, that's my contribution to can you order text by vocabulary? You can but you know, if I were to say you know those three words, the three words are really different for first grade texts than they are for fifth grade text or for ninth grade texts. In you have to make all kinds of decisions isn't is a proper name, a word you count, I mean, lots the little guys text, its proper names that occur a lot. Yeah.
Stacy Hurst:And as you're talking to, it just makes me think more about that set for variability that we need to have as educators to, because I think one of the appeals of having a formula is that it's very consistent, very reliable. But when you're talking about getting on that level, that you are the miniscule, we need to have the knowledge of what we are looking for, for our students. And it doesn't have to be so finite, that we are really over relying on it. I do have a question. When we're talking about words that repeat themselves frequently, I mean, the most frequent words in our language, many of them are function words. And I know that when we're talking about comprehension, those aren't the words that our brain holds on to, right, we're really focusing on words that will help us understand the overall meaning or the content. So how would you approach those function words from the vocabulary perspective, maybe semantic connections? How would you do that?
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:You know, I have some colleagues that have really worked on that. And I'm not going to take that on today. My focus has been more on making some assumption, but do keep remembering, right, that was those function words, even though in terms of the top 25, you know, about 40% of them have an irregular vowel pattern. They don't have an irregular consonant pattern, typically, although some of them do like is that's that's the rear th pattern. I mean, my interest is, in texts that I've written, like the topic reads primary and the beginning reads, is on words that appear frequently. And that you know, words like mud, you know, we have a series of books on mud, that are also concrete, because concreteness makes a difference in a beginning readers, memory of a word, and regular, so I'm always looking for words that are regular, pretty frequent, and are concrete. I wanted to say something in terms of the conversation on text complexity. One of the things that I'm really glad about in the current conversations, there's some things that I think we might not be understanding completely, when we talk about science, and maybe declaring some things to be scientific, that aren't yet scientific. But I am glad that we're moving away from leveling. Now, that doesn't mean we move away from the leveled texts. Because what I've always done with level texts and studies since 1992, is sorted them according to a phonics curriculum. So sometimes it helps. And that's one of the ways in which you might be seeing some of the high frequency words more. And, you know, we have a meta analysis and reading Research Quarterly, recently, that actually says that when interventions use both of those kinds of texts, Decodable and Leveled, there were higher effect sizes. But what I want to point out is that our findings, published an elementary school journal on on leveling it, we're not the only people who have reported this Jim Cunningham as well. But the best predictor of a guided reading level is the number of words in a book. I mean, you could stop reading a book at some point, like if it's too long, right? How we kept using that for as long as we did. I didn't finish that sentence. But I think you get what I'm saying. I, when we worked on becoming a nation of readers, and I saw, as a young academic, what could happen to words that you've been involved in creating, when they go into policy? What I started seeing at that point is that one generation solution can become the next generations problem if taken to its extreme. And I think we always by that I'm not talking about balance. That's not what I'm talking. I'm talking about being reasonable in how you interpret things. And what's reasonable right now is to say, yes, English is alphabetic, but it also has two underlying systems that have some different expressions in terms of phonology and orthography. And morphology also matters. What does it mean when you have a quasi regular orthography? It means that set for variability is dominant from the get go. And Lindsay knows a lot about how to how you teach that how you talk to little people about it doesn't always work out the way you think it should. That's why you actually read it and see if that makes sense.
Lindsay Kemeny:I know we are almost out of time, but I wanted to ask if you just wanted to share a little bit about your website, text project.org There's so many good resources there. I've used when I taught second grade I use the FYI for kids. I love that it was just like one sheet kind of like little math. magazine spread on the topic that we could read. And my students love that. So I just thought maybe you could share a little bit about what that website is. Thank
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:you Lindsey for saying that, sometimes when when labor is on these things when doesn't know, you know, there are a lot of research papers and the products that we have at Tech's project are based on research that we've done. So I think we've got now maybe seven or eight different text sets, FYI is one of them. And they're all based on the same model that I've been describing of core vocabulary. And then being thoughtful about what the choice words are, and how many times the choice words are repeated. So we have a lot of texts that are for free download, everything that texts project is for free download. And then we have a lot of exercises, not exercises, but prototypes of how to teach the core vocabulary. So we have in the vocabulary is always clustered into meaningful groups. Okay, so the 2500, morphological families are clustered into vocabulary maps. And I don't know how many there are, I didn't look that up for this podcast. Sometimes I forget some of these things. But the other thing that we have our word pictures of the court most of the core vocabulary, not for though, but you know, for the concrete words, and sometimes more abstract ones, but ones that if you show a picture, you can kind of define it and talk about it. We also have some things that I call everyday words that you can show kids, like a word that a teacher uses, a lot might be stop, or quiet. And that's an example of words that have really rich semantic webs. So we have lessons on that as well. So when I said that there were those 20 words, that up here, the root of those ideas, not root word, the root of a word, like stop, or listen, or quiet. Those are words that will appear a lot in stories as part of the semantic clusters. And so we've provided a lot of those as well. Like I said, we put the research that goes along with that, I want to say thank you to you all, I hope that some of this may be productive in terms of you telling a story. And I want to say thank you for what you do, and your commitment individually. And also as a group and your podcast. I think that that's credible contribution. And thank you for letting me be part of this. Thank
Stacy Hurst:you so much for joining us today, anybody who's working in the world of literacy does it on the shoulders of people like you who put so much time into research. And one of the thing that draws us to your work is that you also don't stop there, you help us turn it into practice, that's very valuable for our students. So thank you so much.
Dr. Elfrieda Hiebert:You know, I'm a teacher. And it's nice to have context in which to teach. And it's nice to have faces, you spent so much of the pandemic talking to well, just myself on a screen. And I already know what I think. So it's helpful to have other people. So you guys take care. And hopefully we'll be in touch.
Stacy Hurst:Thank you so much. And just as we end here, thank you to our listeners for joining us and I, we will be at plain talk in just a couple of weeks after this airs. And Dr. Heber, we are going to be giving away some of your books, some copies of your book, I should say. So be sure to find us at plain talk. We'll have our own hospitality suite. And you'll have the opportunity to win that the book Teaching Words and How They Work and so many ways that you can apply that into your teaching, no matter what your role is. So be sure to join us, Dr. Hiebert, we can't thank you enough. Thank you so much again for your work. We look forward to more contributions on your part. And hopefully you'll join us again on another episode of literacy talks. Take care. Thank you, you too. Thanks to everybody for listening.
Narrator:Thanks for joining us today for Literacy Talks, the podcast series for literacy leaders and champions everywhere. We invite you to join the Science of Reading Collective, our free community and resource hub so you can stay current with new ideas, free webinars, resources and more. And be sure to visit Literacy Talks online for resources, access to every season's episodes and more at readinghorizons.com/literacytalks. It's an exciting time to teach reading and ensure your students reach grade level proficiency this school year. Literacy Talks comes to you from Reading Horizons where reading momentum begins. Join us next time