blog

Children’s literacy learning and screen time

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:03:01 -0800

Elfrieda H. Hiebert
TextProject & the University of California, Santa Cruz

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…”

Heartily recommended are high-quality interactive e-books that engage children’s interest while expanding their knowledge of words. E-books allow children to interact with old favorites, such as Cat in the Hat, and introduce them to new friends, such as the alligator looking to have his teeth cleaned in Open Wide Snap.

A must to avoid are the workbooks that have been turned into reading apps or software. Pitched as aids for beginning readers, they have little or anything to do with good literacy-building practices. These repetitive drills with their distracting animations and sounds do not support comprehension or offer real engagement.

Navigating the sheer amount of content for digital media can be overwhelming. One estimate is that about 300 web applications are added daily—with the majority of these applications oriented to young children. By the time one app is reviewed, 10 more have been added, making it difficult for experts to keep up with recommendations and reviews.

So without expert guidance, how can you find a quality online reading experience? Here’s how. You can become your own expert by considering these five questions:

1. Does the story or the language create a sense of wonder or fun? Pushing children into games and apps that are tricked out rote exercises will not support children’s love of language and literacy in the long run.

2. Does the experience include opportunities for varied responses and involvement? One expert describes edutainment as “taking advantage of our psychological predisposition to repeat something over and over when the game rewards us in small ways as we go.”1

3. Is the experience best suited to a digital environment? Parents worry that children need to develop facility on the computer—but, at this point, there is absolutely no evidence that this experience needs to occur early on. This is not to say that at some future point advantages from participating with digital devices early on may be uncovered. Meanwhile, current research shows that children’s use of pencils to scribble, write, and draw is linked to reading development.

4. Does the experience lend itself to a discussion with your child? Integration of reading content into children’s lives by the adults around them is an important aspect of the effectiveness of learning from any tool—whether it is delivered via television, digital device, or book. The content that parents discuss with children creates a shared set of references that link learning to life.

5. Is the digital experience designed to take the place of adult read-alouds or children’s independent reading time with books? The list of documented benefits that children gain from adult read-alouds and their own independent reading time is long, including vocabulary, increased world knowledge, awareness of different genres, and focused adult attention. A national commission on reading in the 1980s concluded: “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.” 2 Nothing has come along since to dispute this statement.

1 Hunter, S. Designing media to foster creative engagement. Children’s Technology Review, August, 2011.

2 Anderson, R.C., Hiebert, E.H., Scott, J.A., & Wilkinson, I.A.G. (1985). Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading. Champaign, IL: The Center for the Study of Reading, National Institute of Education, National Academy of Education.

Is Reading in Kindergarten the Means for Ensuring College and Career Readiness?

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:07:21 -0700

Elfrieda H. Hiebert

TextProject & University of California, Santa Cruz

“K–12 reading texts have actually trended downward in difficulty in the last half century”

(Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Appendix, A, page 2).

In the case of kindergarten texts, this statement is blatantly false. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Kindergarten texts were added to core reading programs as a result of Reading First mandates in the first decade of the 21st century. How the writers of the CCSS came to the conclusion that kindergarten texts—which had been nonexistent until a decade ago—had decreased in difficulty over a 50-year period is perplexing. The explicit assumption that kindergarten texts have been dumbed down over the past 50 years and that their difficulty levels need to be accelerated has consequences for how young children begin their formal reading experiences, especially the children who depend on schools to become literate.

The inclusion of kindergarten in this blanket statement 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 dumbing-down of kindergarten texts

The CCSS writers cite two sources for the dumbing down conclusion: Chall (1967/1983, 1977) and Hayes, Wolfe, and Wolfer (1996). Chall analyzed first-grade texts from core reading programs of 1956 and 1962. Hayes et al. found that the first-grade texts from the 25-year period represented in Chall’s analysis were significantly easier than either the texts of the previous or subsequent 25-year periods. Further, massive changes occurred in first-grade texts in the decade after the Hayes et al.’s analysis (Foorman, Francis, Davidson, Harm, & Griffin, 2004). When California in 1988 and Texas in 1990 dropped controlled vocabulary in first-grade texts, the number of unique words and rare words increased substantially. These two features of texts challenge, and, all to often, overwhlem, beginning readers. Even with the move to decodable texts in 2000, the number of unique and rare words has stayed high.

Further, neither Chall’s nor Hayes et al.’s analyses included kindergarten texts. In Chall’s era and also in her stages of reading (Chall, 1985), formal beginning reading instruction began in first grade. Kindergarten was not even provided in some school districts and, where it was provided even in the late 1980s, kindergarten teachers believed that their students should not be involved in formal reading instruction (Durkin, 1989).

In 1990, two independent analyses verified the absence of kindergarten textbooks in core reading programs (Hiebert & Papierz, 1990; Morrow & Parse, 1990). Kindergartners worked in reading readiness workbooks. These workbooks included a handful of pages that could be folded into booklets. The booklets were composed of a small group of highly frequent words (e.g., the, a, and) and labels for pictures (e.g., a with a picture of a cat).

Shortly after these reviews, publishers added "big books" to kindergarten components of core reading programs. These were intended for read-along and read-aloud sessions but it was not until the early 2000 programs that texts for kindergarteners were embedded within the core reading programs to comply with Reading First mandates. An analysis of the exit-level kindergarten texts in a 2007 core reading program showed them to be comparable in difficulty to the texts of the 1962 and 1983 copyrights of the same program (Hiebert, 2008). Not only have kindergarten texts not been dumbed down over the past 50 years, the literacy demands for kindergartners have increased immensely, particularly over the last decade.

The pushing down of formal reading instruction

There are two fundamental assumptions related to the pushing down of formal reading instruction to kindergarten: (a) that 21st century American children are cognitively prepared to read at age five and (b) that pushing down the task of reading to kindergarten will aid in high school graduates’ ability to read the complex texts of career and college.

Are 21st century American five-year-olds cognitively prepared to read? At least for children who live in homes above the poverty line, many literacy opportunities exist for young children—educational television, colorful and inventive books, and preschool. Even with all of the literacy stimulation that middle-class children experience, however, few read as kindergartners. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (Denton & West, 2002) shows that most children can recognize letters by the end of kindergarten and many can make the connection to the primary sound associated with a letter but few children are reading before first-grade. These data are not evidence that five-year-olds do not have the cognitive capacity or processes to read. Some five-year olds (and even younger children) learn to read when parents, teachers or a combination of the two groups plan to teach children to read (Durkin, 1966). Even in these contexts, however, many five-year-olds do not learn to read (Denton & West, 2002).

And for those children who do learn to read—two critical questions are: Is the instruction worth it? And what has been eliminated or diminished in children’s experiences to make time for formal reading instruction? I attend to the first question but not the second question in this essay. In the long run, the answer to the second question may be the most critical one in developing engaged, interested, and proficient readers. That topic merits its own essay.

Does pushing down result in higher reading performances? Substantial investments in literacy-related instruction of four-year-olds were made in Early Reading First and even greater investments were made in primary-level instruction that included kindergarten. Despite these investments, gains have not been evident in higher grades (Gamse, Jacob, Horst, Boulay, & Unlu, 2008; Jackson et al., 2007).

Evidence on the effects of early reading instruction on later reading achievement also comes from analyses of international data. Suggate (2009) examined reading achievement as a function of school entry age of 15-year-old students across 55 countries, controlling for social and economic differences. Results showed no significant association between reading achievement and school entry age but, in countries with earlier starting ages, the achievement gap was larger for 15-year-olds. A few benefit from the early introduction. The students who depend on schools to become literate struggle even earlier—and longer.

Potential for decreasing access for children of poverty

Chall (1977) was the one who proposed that dumbing down of texts might be an explanation for lower performances of American high schoolers on college-board exams. In one of her last projects, Chall (1999) identified a staircase of text difficulty to support reading of complex texts at and after high school graduation. The CCSS also identified a staircase of steps with increasingly more complex text. The size of the steps in the two applications of the staircase model, however, differs substantially. At grade five, difficulty levels of the CCSS and Chall model were comparable. Prior to that, however, they were not. Chall advocated a more “gentle” perspective on when students should start on the stairway (grade one) and identified more moderate, although challenging, levels of text difficulty for grades one through five than those of the CCSS.

From Chall’s (1985) perspective, preschool and kindergarten were times when young children needed to be involved in listening to and retelling stories and writing with crayons, paints, and magnetic letters. The foundation that ensures capacity—and interest—in reading complex text is grounded in appropriate early childhood experiences. When the steps are too big and when the capabilities of students do not match the size of the steps, the progression up the stairway of text complexity will likely be fraught with missteps and injuries. The current policy initiative could well have the effect of making high levels of literacy even more inaccessible for the very students who depend on America’s public schools for academic learning—the children of poverty.

References

Chall, J. S. (1985). Stages of reading development. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace.

Chall, J. S. (1977). An analysis of textbooks in relation to declining SAT scores. Princeton, NJ: ETS & College Board.

Chall, J. S. (1967/1983). Learning to read: The great debate. New York: Macmillan.

Chall, J. S., with Bissex G., Conard, S., Harris-Sharples, S. (1999). Qualitative assessment of text difficulty. Brookline, MA: Brookline Publishers.

Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2010). Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. Washington, DC: CCSSO & National Governors Association.

Denton, K., & West, J. (2002). Children’s reading and mathematics achievement in kindergarten and first grade. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Durkin, D. (1966). Children who read early: Two longitudinal studies. New York, New York: Teachers College Press.

Durkin, D. (1987). A classroom-observation study of reading instruction in kindergarten instruction in kindergarten. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2(3), 275-300. doi.10.1016/0885-2006(87)90036-6

Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Davidson, K. C., Harm, M. W., & Griffin, J. (2004). Variability in text features in six grade 1 basal reading programs. Scientific Studies of Reading, 8(2), 167—197.

Gamse, B.C., Jacob, R.T., Horst, M., Boulay, B., & Unlu, F. (2008). Reading First Impact Study Final Report. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Hayes, D. P., Wolfer, L. T., & Wolfe, M. F. (1996). Sourcebook simplification and its relation to the decline in SAT-Verbal scores. American Educational Research Journal, 33, 489–508.

Hiebert, E.H. (2010). Have the texts of beginning reading been dumbed down over the past 50 years? Retrieved August 3, 2011 from http://textproject.org/frankly-freddy/have-the-texts-of-beginning-reading-been-dumbed-down-over-the-past-50-years/

Hiebert, E.H. (2008). The (mis)match between texts and students who depend on schools to become literate. In E.H. Hiebert & M. Sailors (Eds.), Finding the right texts for beginning and struggling readers: Research-based solutions (pp. 1-21). NY: Guilford.

Hiebert E.H., & Papierz, J.M. (1990). The emergent literacy construct and kindergarten and readiness books of basal reading series. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 5, 317-334.

Morrow, L. M., & Parse, R. (1990). Early literacy strategies: Activities represented in current basal readers. In National Reading Conference thirty-ninth yearbook. (McCormick, S., & Zutell, J.) (Eds.). (381-393). Chicago, IL: National Reading Conference.

Suggate, S.P. (2009). School entry age and reading achievement in the 2006 Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA). International Journal of Educational Research, 48, 151-161.

The 90-10 Rule of Vocabulary in Increasing Students’ Capacity for Complex Text

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 09:17:07 -0700

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 about 90% of our narrative texts (including literary texts) and at least 85% of our informational texts (including scientific and technical texts).

The Teacher’s Word Book first brought this disparity to the attention of educators (Thorndike, 1921). Yet, there is an additional disparity even within the core vocabulary. The 25 most frequent words (e.g., the, of, to, a) alone account for 33% of all the words in typical texts. This realization led to the creation of Dick-and-Jane-style readers (Gray, Baruch, & Montgomery, 1940). However, many of these most frequently used words are functions words, the glue that holds our thoughts together.

Figure 1. Distributions of the Core and Extended Vocabularies

Beyond the first 100-200 basic words, the core vocabulary is stocked with general concept words--words such as mysteries, property, and interior. These words are highly versatile--many of them are polysemous, or multiple-meaning words. Many of them can also function as different parts of speech. Approximately 4,000 root words in this core group form approximately 5,600 unique words (Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995). When simple endings are added to these words (inflected endings, possessives, plurals, ly, y, er, est), their numbers approach 9,000 words (see Figure 1).

Words outside the core vocabulary--words as such as zebra, zipper, and dirigible--make up the remaining 10% of narrative texts and 15% of informational texts. Approximately 300,000 to 600,000 words belong to the pool of infrequent words, and I refer to them as the extended vocabulary. The English language is a trove of these rare words because the vast majority of our vocabulary (98%) is infrequently used.

Extended vocabulary words tend to stand out in texts because they add specificity and because they are beloved by people who value the richness of the English language. These words also make up the grist of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS; CCSS, 2010) with regard to content area and literary vocabulary. So attention will continue to be paid to them. But as educators, a sole focus there may be misplaced. A student who learns dirigible as part of a vocabulary lesson may not encounter it for years, if ever again. Words such as chief, condition, and resource, however, can be expected to appear frequently in many different subject areas and with a variety of meanings.

The extended vocabulary needs to be a focus of elementary classrooms, too. Such words are the essence of literary and content-area instruction. Lessons attend to what it means for a character to be enigmatic and how this trait may influence the outcome of the story. Inquiry into the meaning of terms such as radiation and convection drives science instruction.

But, in addition to strategic and intensive instruction that develops extended vocabulary1, an elementary program also needs to ensure that students are facile with the core vocabulary that forms the foundation of text. For decades the general rule of thumb in reading pedagogy has been that a fundamental grasp of approximately 90% of the words in a text is needed for the reading experience to be meaningful for students. If students can understand 90%, they can figure out the other 10% without a breakdown in meaning. This makes a strong argument for using valuable classroom time on the heavy-lifting words in our core vocabulary.

In fact, students need to be facile with the core vocabulary by the end of fourth grade. This is the point at which students begin reading to learn. Those who cannot read well enough to do so are quickly left behind. Those who have learned the root words in the core vocabulary can use them to unlock 85%- 90% of all written text. Because the core vocabulary is based on essential concepts, knowledge of these words is also tied to content knowledge. So there is a large advantage beyond reading to be gained.

Table 1 illustrates how bands of core words can systematically be emphasized over second through fourth grade2. Extensive reading of accessible texts helps in building a strong foundation, in addition to lessons that attend to the shared meaning across a morphological family (e.g., develop, developing, developed) and the unique meanings of core words with multiple meanings (e.g., force, energy).

Despite the lure of attending exclusively to infrequently used words because of their specificity and richness, we must remember what is at stake. In the face of demands for higher reading levels from the CCSS (CCSS, 2010), we must be clear about what it means to be a proficient reader. Proficient readers need to apprehend 90% of the text. This is attainable when students are facile with the meanings of this highly versatile group of 4,000 words that make up the core vocabulary. Let’s work to give all students this important foundation before dressing their vocabularies up in the frippery of rare and specialized terminology.

References

Gray, W.S., Baruch, D., & Montgomery, E. (1940). Basic Readers: Curriculum Foundation Series. Chicago: Scott, Foresman & Co.

Hiebert, E.H. (2005). In pursuit of an effective, efficient vocabulary curriculum for the elementary grades. In E.H. Hiebert & M. Kamil (Eds.), The teaching and learning of vocabulary: Bringing scientific research to practice (pp. 243-263). Mahwah, NJ: LEA.

Thorndike, E.L. (1921). The teacher’s word book. New York: Columbia University Press.

Zeno, S.M., Ivens, S.H., Millard, R.T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educator’s word frequency guide. Brewster, NY: TASA.

Table 1. Creating the Foundation with the Core Vocabulary: Grades 2-4
WordZone3	Associated Grade Level	Predicted occurance per million running words of text	Number of words in WordZone (or portion thereof) (#)	Number of words with morphological relatives (simple endings & words with frequencies of 1 or more per million) (#)	Examples
1		68,000 - 1,000	107	177	do, then, which
2		99 - 300	203	478	example, word, united
3.1	2	299 - 200	143	316	public possible, surface
3.2	2	199 - 100	477	1022	develop, service, necessary
4.1	3	99 - 65	439	844	determine, influence, evidence
4.2		64 - 44	553	924	function, standard, quality
4.3		43 - 30	685	1059	conflict, internal, maintain
5.1	4	29 - 20	936	1296	severe, confidence, resistance
5.2		19 - 14	974	1272	tendency, accomany, recommend
5.3		13 - 10	1070	1212	precede, adjustment, component

Footnotes

1 Strategic instruction of the extended vocabulary takes different forms with the words prominent in narratives and those in informational texts. These different treatments for these words have been described elsewhere (Hiebert & Cervetti, 2011; Hiebert, 2011).]

2 The words of the first two zones include many function words that have small morphological families and are best learned through extensive reading.

3 This version of the WordZones represents a modification of the original presentation in Hiebert (2005). The first wordzone is now 1, rather than 0, which affects the numbering of all subsequent zones.

Identifying Principles for the Creation of Texts in A Variety of Languages for Beginning Readers

Wed, 25 May 2011 12:42:43 -0700

Elfrieda (Freddy) Hiebert

TextProject & University of California, Santa Cruz

At the outset, I want to make it clear that my expertise lies in the texts that facilitate the reading development of a particular group of students in American schools--the students who depend on schools to become literate. In the U.S., we have approximately a third of an age cohort that can be described as "depending on schools to become literate." The remaining students may learn to read in school but they have at least a modicum of literacy experiences/criterion knowledge when they arrive at school (according to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study). Unfortunately, our national assessment indicates that we have not been particularly successful in bringing the third of our population that depends on schools to become literate to the levels that are needed in the global-digital economy. Answers, of course, are not simple ones but I would argue that the texts that we have been providing our most vulnerable students have not been as supportive as they can and should be.

Differences in the orthographies of languages are critical and, while I myself came to English as a second language learner, my work has been with children learning to read in English (including but not limited to children who speak English as a second language). Even so, I believe that there are some principles that can be generalized from our work to that of children in other cultures and with languages that differ substantially from English.

With young children who have not been immersed in print, meaningfulness is critical. There is a small but reputable literature on the role of concreteness in the word learning of children and adults. In my model of TExT (Text Elements by Task), the design of beginning texts involves simultaneous attention to decodability, frequency, and concreteness. The lists of concrete words will differ by culture. But in the TExT model, weight is given to words that have common orthographic patterns AND are concrete. In an American venue, for example, words such as mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa would be evaluated as appropriate (at least if repeated), even though only one of these words--dad--has consistent and regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences. I have identified a list of 1,000 concrete words for children in the U.S. that are part of the analysis of what makes a set of texts appropriate in the TExT analysis. This list would NOT be appropriate in particular parts of Africa or India. HOWEVER: the construct is applicable. Children new to literacy, as Sylvia Ashton-Warner argued after working with the Maori children in New Zealand 70 years ago, need to know from the get-go that written language is about meaning. Within the TExT model, concreteness is an early scaffold. It is not the picture-text match of the Reading Recovery/Guided Reading perspective. Concrete words need to be used frequently and a core group of them should have patterns that support decoding. And the weight of this factor on the model is gradually released.
It is also critical to give weight to words that are highly frequent in a language. Zipf's (1935) law appears to apply to many languages beyond the European languages that he orginally studied. Tian (2006) has stated that experiments prove that the word frequency distribution in Chinese complies with Zipf's law. I have yet to locate data on African languages but it appears that a small group of words typically accounts for many of the words in a language. Hopefully (since the orthographies for some of these languages are newer than that of English), some of the languages in African cultures will not have the idiosyncratic high-frequency words that English does. I don't know this but I suspect that this may be the case. Words that are highly frequent, highly decodable, and highly concrete are the ideal. But there are function words that won't be highly concrete (although highly frequent and, hopefully, in languages other than English, highly decodable). Weight needs to be given to words that are part of highly populated "word" neighborhoods.

While orthographies may not have the strange history that English does--and thus, not the erratic orthography--I want to caution against too much nonsensical text for children who are new to text and are the children of poverty. The U.S. has a genre I call "extreme decodables." The texts contain many of the archaic Anglo-Saxon words that are rarely used in conversation or even text (e.g., vex, wrench, tack). Beginning readers need substantial and consistent data about the code. At the same time, we need to remember why we are doing it (meaning) and function (frequency). Children of poverty are likely to treat school tasks seriously and without the humor that otherwise characterizes their lives. School is a "serious" and literal place. Texts that are silly may not be an appropriate point of departure. They have NOT proven to be so with American children who enter schools with languages and cultures other than those of the mainstream.

References

Tian, X. (2006). Statistic analysis of the papers published in Chinese journals of computers. Journal of Library and Information Sciences in Agriculture. doi: 1002-1248.0.2006.003-050

Zipf, G. K. (1935). The Psychobiology of Language. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.

What Teachers and Parents Can Do to Stop the Summer Reading Slide

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:31:51 -0700

Elfrieda (Freddy) Hiebert

TextProject & University of California, Santa Cruz

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.

We can’t ameliorate all of the challenges that low-income children face but we can keep them on the page over the summer. And, to support that goal, TextProject has created a program of free texts called SummerReads™. The SummerReads program draws on what is known about effective home-summer reading programs. Here are the features of effective home-summer reading programs, with specifics on how they appear in SummerReads:

Students need access to texts: Students need to have texts at hand. The number of texts does not need to be great. Even reading 4 or 5 books over the summer helps to decrease the summer slide (Kim & White, 2008). Unfortunately, the very students who are most at-risk are the ones who often don’t have enough books. SummerReads changes this situation by providing 7 free texts per level.

Texts need to be comprehensible for struggling readers: Researchers have found that, when children got free books from a spring reading fair, two-thirds of them chose books that were too difficult for them. These children failed to score any higher on a standardized comprehension test in the fall than their peers who didn’t get the free books (Kim & Guryan, 2010).

Comprehensible means that students need to be able to read texts with enough accuracy so that they comprehend the content. What makes a comprehensible text for struggling, middle-grade students? There are 5,580 words that account for about 80% of the words in the texts read by adults and 90% of the words in texts read by students through the middle-grades. The majority of struggling readers are not automatic in recognizing these core words. They can read but their reading is slow and tedious which harms their comprehension and interest.

SummerReads gives students additional opportunities with the core vocabulary. Across the three levels of SummerReads, there is a small but steady increase in the percentage of challenging words. The rest of the words are from the core vocabulary.

Texts need to be engaging: Many American students are simply not reading enough to get good at reading. Information interests students and invites them to acquire more knowledge—the currency of the 21st century. Summer is a time of sports and picnics and holidays. Topics of SummerReads deal with information about summer activities, such as the origins of first swim fins or controversies around flip flops—or even what they are called in different parts of the country and world.

Expectations need to be clear and students need to have structures for tasks: Conversations in classrooms as to what is expected with summer reading form the foundation of successful home summer reading programs. Students who are going into third through fifth grades are entirely able to establish goals and teachers are highly encouraged to have students set realistic goals of when and where they will read over the summer.

Teachers need to have these conversations with their students but materials can help convey these expectations and SummerReads does that in the following ways:

Each book starts with guidelines on how to use the book.
There is a place where students can keep records of their reading of chapters within books.
There are comprehension questions at the end of each book.
If students have access to computers (e.g., the library), there is a recording of each text at www.textproject.org/summerreads. This recording allows students to monitor and check their reading.

Expectations need to be monitored: This is one component that we couldn’t build into our free program. Schools need to take this one on: follow-up when the new school year starts. Such follow-up can include an assembly where the accomplishments of students in their summer reading are recognized.

Whatever texts you use this summer, be certain that your students, especially those who are basic or below in their reading, have access to texts that are comprehensible and engaging and have structures to keep them on track. Here’s to and enjoyable and productive summer of reading!

References

Alexander, K.L., Entwisle, D.R., & Olson, L.S. (2004). Schools, achievement, and inequality: A seasonal perspective. In G.D. Borman & M. Boulay (Eds.), Summer learning: Research, policies, and programs. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kim, J.S., & White, T.G. (2008). Scaffolding voluntary summer reading for children in grades 3 to 5: An experimental study. Scientific Studies of Reading, 12, 1–23.

Kim, J.S., & Guryan, J. (2010). The Efficacy of a Voluntary Summer Book Reading Intervention for Low-Income Latino Children from Language Minority Families. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 21-31.

Looking “Within” the Lexile for More Guidance: Word Frequency and Sentence Length

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 08:59:01 -0800

Freddy Hiebert
TextProject, Inc.

Standard 10 defines a grade-by- grade “staircase” of increasing text complexity that rises from beginning reading to the college and career readiness level. Whatever they are reading, students must also show a steadily growing ability to discern more from and make fuller use of text, including making an increasing number of connections among ideas and between texts, considering a wider range of textual evidence, and becoming more sensitive to inconsistencies, ambiguities, and poor reasoning in texts. (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010, p. 8).

A standard that emphasizes capacity with increasingly more complex text is a first in a national or state standards document. Text complexity, according to the CCSS/ELA is a function of three factors: qualitative (e.g., levels of meaning, structure, knowledge demands), quantitative (e.g., readability measure and other scores of text complexity, and matching reader to text and task (e.g., reader variables such as motivation, knowledge, and experiences; task variables such as purpose and questions). Of the measures that the CCS proposes for establishing text complexity, only data on one type of quantitative measure—lexiles—is explicitly presented and easily obtained.

Similar to the readability formulas that have been used in American schools for almost a century, the lexile of a text is established through an algorithm that considers sentence length and word frequency. The computation produces a lexile that can be placed on a scale which spans 0 (easiest texts) to 2000 (most complex texts). A single number is typically presented as the lexile for an entire text—including a full-length text. For example, the lexiles for a well-loved children’s book, Sarah: Plain and Tall is 430, while that of Stories Julian Tells is 700. As a single number, a lexile gives a general indicator of difficulty. Green Eggs and Ham has a lexile of 30, while that of Pride and is 1030L. These texts fall a general direction that makes sense to most educators acquainted with these texts. Green Eggs and Ham is easy; Sarah: Plain and Tall somewhat harder; and Pride and Prejudice is the most complex of the three.

When an individual text is examined for purposes of instruction and independent reading, particular features of a text can make the lexile difficult to predict. For example, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Old Man and the Sea have the same lexile: 940. While the Rowlings book is by no means a simple one, it has a style and content that likely make it more palatable to a fifth grader than the Heminway text.

Information on sentence length and word frequency gives more specific information for the lexile rating. Often, the lexiles of texts vary considerably because of big differences in the lengths of sentences. When authors use complex sentence structure, students’ comprehension can be affected. But, sometimes, authors have a style where they use the word “and” to join ideas. That’s the case with example 1 in Table 1. That text and the one in Example 2 have the same average word rating—3.8. But the first text has an average of 3.5 words more per sentence than the second text. The difference in sentence length affects the Lexile: 700 for The Stories Julian Tells and 430 for Sarah, Plain and Tall.

Short sentences do not necessarily make a text easy to read. In the text segment from Sarah: Plain and Tall, Caleb keeps begging his older sister to retell the story of his birth (followed by their mother’s death). The text is more complex conceptually than the description of what Julian and his brother have chosen to plan in their garden.

It is the average word frequency that is even more critical to consider than the average sentence length. A low average word frequency means that the text likely has a number of words that many students may not have seen in the past. Teachers should especially be aware of big differences in the average word frequencies. The One-Eyed Giant (example 3) has a lexile of 680 but it has a word frequency score of 3.47. Sentences are about the same length as The Stories Julian Tells but there are more infrequent words. Vocabulary such as Cyclopes, savage, and devour will likely make The One-Eyed Giant more challenging for third graders than The Stories that Julian Tells.

Children’s reading performances are heavily influenced by the vocabulary in a text. Typical word frequency ranges for different grades are given in Table 2. When word frequency averages are substantially lower than typical grade ranges, teachers should know that students might need some extra vocabulary support.

And, always remember: There are big differences in the styles and vocabulary of stories (narratives) and informational texts (content-area texts). Readability formulas like lexiles often underestimate the difficulty of stories and overestimate the difficulty of informational texts. Why is that? In stories, authors often use dialogue. Typically statements in conversations are short. Short sentences lend themselves to lower lexiles.

In informational texts, authors often use fairly infrequent words (e.g., degrees, frigid, Arctic, blubber in a text on polar bears). Infrequent words have lower ratings than the more frequent words that are found in stories and these words are repeated often in an informational text. But the repetition of the infrequent words can be an aid to comprehension. Further, the words in an informational text usually relate to a theme that also can make words easier to comprehend.

When the average for sentence length is substantially beyond the typical range, teachers should check the author’s style. Usually, long sentences won’t be much of a problem in stories. However, long sentences that have important ideas in phrases or clauses can be a problem for students when they are reading content-area texts.

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.

References

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2010). Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.Washington, DC: CCSSO & National Governors Association.

Table 1. Examples of Texts & General and Specific Lexile Information
	Example	Source & Author	General Lexile	Specific Lexile Information
	Example	Source & Author	General Lexile	Average Sentence Length	Average Word Frequency
1	My father said he wasn't sure he wanted either giant corn or a flower house, and if we wanted them, we would have to take care of them all summer by pulling weeds.	The Stories Julian Tells, Ann Cameron	700 Lexile	11.9	3.8
2	“Every-single-day,” I told him for the second time this week. For the twentieth time this month. The hundredth time this year? And the past few years?	Sarah—Plain and Tall, Patricia MacLachlan	430 Lexile	8.4	3.8
3	He was the most savage of all the Cyclopes, a race of fierce one-eyed giants who lived without laws or leader. The Cyclopes were ruthless creatures who were known to capture and devour any sailors who happened near their shores.	The One-eyed Giant, Mary Pope Osborne	680 Lexile	9.8	3.47

Table 2. Typical Averages for Word Frequency and for Sentence Length1
Gr. Band	Narrative Texts		Informational Texts
	Word Frequency	Sentence Length	Word Frequency	Sentence Length
2	3.7-3.9	8-10	3.6-3.8	9-11
3	3.6-3.8	9-11	3.5-3.75	10-12
4	3.5-3.8	10-12	3.4-3.6	11-13
5	3.4-3.7	11-13	3.3-3.6	12-14
1 Based on an analysis of the exemplars presented in Appendix B of the Common Core State Standards by Elfrieda H. Hiebert (December 9, 2010). The view of text complexity within the Common Core Standards: What does it mean for struggling Readers? Plenary address at the annual conference of the American Reading Forum, Sanibel, FL.

This post was edited on February 8, 2011.

The Generalizability of the TExT Model to Indic Languages

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:09:00 -0700

Shailaja Menon, Jones International University
GUEST COLUMN for TextProject, Inc.

Theoretical models of reading acquisition are based largely on empirical studies of alphabetic writing systems, most notably English. The implicit assumption in the past was that findings from the acquisition of English would generalize to other languages (Vaid & Padakannaya, 2004). This assumption has been tested over the past two decades by a considerable body of cross-linguistic literature that has compared reading processes in English to other alphabetic and non-alphabetic systems, such as, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew and Chinese (Leong & Tamaoka, 1998; Wimmer & Goswami, 1994; Zoccolotti, et al., 1999). However, 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.

Perfetti and Liu (2005) distinguish among three levels of analysis of a written language that are applicable to this analysis. The broadest level is that of the writing system, which reflects the principles of the fundamental writing-language relationships, for example, an alphabetic versus a syllabic system. The next level is that of orthography, which, by contrast, express differences within a writing system. Thus, even though English and German are both alphabetic writing systems, they have different orthographies. Certain orthographies may be more or less shallow or deep, even within a given writing system (for example, German has a more transparent orthography than does English). The third level is that of the script, which is sometimes used to refer to one or the other of the broader levels; however, in Perfetti and Liu’s classification, a script refers only to the graphemic aspects of the symbols used to represent the language. Each of these levels can contribute independently to the reading process by influencing different factors related to it.

There are 29 different languages that are each spoken by more than a million speakers in India, of which 22 are recognized officially by the government (Census of India, 2001). These languages belong to at least four different language families, of which the two largest groups are the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in the North of India, and the Dravidian languages of the South. These two languages families are linguistically distinct; however, the writing system used is common, and descended from the Brahmi writing system.

The Indic scripts, as they are sometimes called, are alphasyllabaries or semisyllabaries that combine aspects of the syllabic and alphabetic systems. Like syllabic languages, the basic symbol unit, the akshara, maps on to phonology at the level of the syllable. At the same time, the akshara also has phonemic vowel markers (diacritics) that can transform the schwa vowel sound inherent in the consonant symbols, rendering it somewhat akin to alphabetic systems. Korean Hangul is another example of an alphasyllabary. There are several crucial features of the Indic alphasyllabaries that distinguish them from English. First, there is no difference between letter name and letter sound, such that akshara knowledge requires the mastery of a single akshara name-sound (Nag, 2007). Second, because there is a one-to-one correspondence between akshara and sound (at the level of the syllable), most Indian languages have symbols for approximately 35 consonants and between 12-16 primary vowel symbols. Each vowel sound also has symbols for secondary diacritics that are combined with consonants to produce unique sounds (e.g., /gu/, /sai/, /ko/, etc.). The orthography is very regular, highly transparent and rule-bound. Third, the visuo-spatial arrangement of syllables in the akshara script is very complex. The secondary vowel diacritics can be placed above, below, to the left, or to the right of the base consonant, and does not always follow the left-to-right linear sequencing of English.

The script might, therefore, lend itself to visual processing to a greater degree than the largely phonological processing of English, because syllabic boundaries are often visually apparent. In some of the Indo-Aryan languages of the North that use the Devnagiri script, a horizontal line is placed on top of each word, so that even word boundaries are visually apparent. The final feature of Indic languages that potentially influences reading acquisition is at the morphemic level of the spoken language. Several Indian languages, especially the Dravidian languages of the South, are extremely inflected and agglutinative, that is, a single word may be made up of several smaller morphemes, with each morpheme carrying its own unit of meaning. Thus, Indic languages differ from English at all three levels identified by Perfetti and Liu (2005): at the levels of writing systems (alphabetic versus alphasyllabaries); at the level of orthography (deep and irregular, versus shallow and transparent); and at the level of script (phonological versus visuo-phonological). Further, morphemic aspects of the spoken language may also influence the manner in which words are represented and acquired in the written scripts.

The TExT model identifies two dimensions of significance to the early acquisition of reading: linguistic content and cognitive load (Hiebert, 1999; Hiebert & Mesmer, 2005; Menon & Hiebert, 2005). How well do these dimensions generalize to reading acquisition in the Indic languages? There are barely a handful of studies on reading processes in these languages (see Vaid & Padakannaya, 2004), even fewer on reading acquisition (Nagy, 2007), and none on features of text that could support reading acquisition. Given the paucity of empirical studies related these topics we will use two strategies to fill in the gaps in our knowledge-base. First, we will borrow evidence from studies of the Korean language where available (since Korean Hangul is also an alphasyllabary). Second, we will make theoretical speculations where empirical evidence is not available.

Linguistic Content

The first dimension of the TExT model – linguistic content – identifies critical word-level content that texts can model to support beginning readers (Hiebert, 1999; Menon & Hiebert, 2005). Two features of significance are discussed here – rimes and high frequency words.

Rimes. Studies of reading in English have repeatedly established the utility of the rime unit (vowel plus coda of the syllable) during reading acquisition (Bowey, Vaughn & Hansen, 1998; Goswami, 1993; Goswami, 1995; Juel & Solso, 1981; Treiman, 1992). However, there is some evidence that in more transparent orthographies like Dutch (an alphabetic language), rime units are less useful to novice readers — raising the question of whether a more predictable orthography might be less reliant on rime units, than a less predictable one, like English (Perfetti & Liu, 2005). Moving to alphasyllabaries, the evidence is even more interesting. Summarizing a line of empirical work on Korean Hangul, Perfetti and Liu (2005) report that not only did Korean children not display a rime preference while reading; they actually displayed a preference for the syllable body (onset + vowel), in tasks that involved reading. Even when reading was not involved, and Korean children were orally presented with words, they judged both words and nonwords with shared syllable bodies (e.g. koon and koop) as more similar than stimuli with shared rimes (koon and poon). While there is no direct evidence about the utility of rimes in Indic languages, we can hypothesize that similar findings would hold for them. There are a couple of possible reasons for this. First, the orthography is more transparent than English, so that readers are less reliant on the rime unit for recognizing the vowel sounds within syllables. Second, the onset has a primary place in the akshara based writing system, with the vowels represented as diacritics that are visuo-spatially organized around the onset. For example, the consonant /g/ (which has an inherent schwa sound in it) would be transformed by the accompanying vowel diacritics into /ga/ /gi/ /gu/ /gai/ and so on. This would give salience to the syllable body in the reader/speaker/listener’s mind, especially if the speaker/listener has already received some instruction in the akshara-based system.

High frequency words. Rapid recognition speeds with familiar, high frequency words is viewed as critical to reading acquisition in the English language (Ehri & Wilce, 1983; Juel & Roper/Schneider, 1985; McCormick & Samuels, 1979; Perfetti, Finger & Hogaboam, 1978). Given the emergent stages of scholarship on Indic languages, we were able to locate only a single empirical study that directly addressed the utility of word frequency for the acquisition of these languages. Karanth, Mathew and Kurien (2004) examined the effect of word frequency effects on 15-45 year old, proficient readers of the Kannada script – a Dravidian language. These researchers did not see word frequency effects for orthographically simple words; however, word frequency did matter for orthographically complex words, of the CCVCC type. Would this result be generalizable to beginning readers? In the absence of reliable evidence we are hypothesizing that it would — that acquiring logographic representations of “whole words” might not be as critical or as efficient a way to acquire new words in a transparent and regular orthography, as it is in English. Nevertheless, it would seem commonsensical to assume that orthographic representations of highly frequent words stored in the memory of proficient readers would be more stable than those of low frequency words, and hence would have shorter Reaction Times. However, this study failed to find any indication of stability of orthographic representations of the more highly frequent words when the orthography of the words was simple. We are speculating that the highly inflected and agglutinative nature of Dravidian languages might play a part in this. Kannada (the language used in this study) is not as inflected as some of the other Dravidian languages, but it is more so than Indo-Aryan languages, and English. In such languages, it might be challenging to store stable orthographic representations of whole words, given the number and variety of forms that each “root” word can acquire, depending on the context, and the number of morphemic units that get attached to it. The results might be different for less inflected languages.

Cognitive Load

The second dimension of the TExT model – cognitive load – attends to text features that determine its difficulty level for the reader (Menon & Hiebert, 2005). The cognitive demands of the akshara writing system are insufficiently understood. A promising line of research that is currently underway examines a variety of phonological, visual, oral, and spelling skills in 8-12 year old children learning to read and write in the Kannada language (Nag, 2007; Nag, Trieman, & Snowling, 2010). Preliminary findings from this line of work reveal that the basic challenge in acquiring literacy in Kannada lies in acquiring the extensive akshara set that has 474-476 symbols that combine consonants with specific vowel sounds. Akshara acquisition entails learning the rules of ligaturing the vowels to the consonants, and sometimes, the consonants to each other, in complex visuo-spatial arrangements. The acquisition of the writing system continues well into Grades 4 and 5, and moves from learning the CV, to the CCV akshara set. The key points of difficulty for young/poor readers are: (1) acquiring a firm knowledge of the extensive set of aksharas; (2) remembering the appropriate diacritic marks for different vowel sounds; (3) assembling all phonemes in a consonant cluster into an akshara based on ligaturing rules, with CV clusters being easier to acquire than CCV clusters; and (4) longer words. It is likely that these difficulties are not specific to the Kannada language alone, but might generalize across Indic languages. Evidence obtained from the reading of dyslexic children in Hindi (an Indo-Aryan languages) echo some of these patterns (Vaid & Gupta, 2002; Gupta, 2004) with word length, errors related to ligaturing rules of CC and CCV clusters, and vowel substitutions and deletions occurring more frequently among dyslexic, as compared to normal readers. The majority of these errors was graphemic rather than phonological in nature, and involved vowels more often than consonants.

Implications for a Language Specific TExT Model

The question addressed here is whether the features of the TExT model developed on readers of English are generalizable to the Indic languages. From this brief review of an emergent and patchy literature base, it would appear that both linguistic content and cognitive load have potential in elaborating critical scaffolds for reading acquisition in Indic languages. However, the specific features included in each of these dimensions might vary across these languages.

Linguistic Content in Indic Languages. In writing systems that use the akshara, the syllable body, rather than rimes could be the crucial units for repetition and instruction. Automaticity with orthographic representations is a robust predictor of reading ability across languages (Georgiou, Parrila, & Liao, 2009). Perhaps, the primary unit for acquiring automaticity in the Indic languages is not the whole (high frequency) word, or even high frequency rimes, but stable, highly frequent CV and CCV akshara configurations. It would appear that young and poor readers of these languages need systematic and repeated exposure to the extensive set of aksharas, the diacritic marks, and to the ligaturing rules before they can acquire them to the point of automaticity.

Cognitive Load in Indic Languages. Word length appears to be consistently related to difficulty with decoding text in both the languages examined here – Kannada and Hindi. In addition, the available literature seems to suggest that word decodability shows a progression from CV to CCV words in these languages. It is also highly probable that word decodability is influenced by visually more versus less complex configurations.

In conclusion, we concur with Perfetti (2003) that all languages share certain universal rules and constraints for their acquisition, even though their specific manifestations might vary. In Indic languages, texts with shorter words, more CV words, fewer unique akshara configurations and vowel diacritic marks, may make the task of reading less challenging for young and poor readers. Further, sets of texts that model certain linguistic content consistently (such as highly frequent akshara configurations and ligaturing rules) may support the acquisition of reading in these languages, as in English. In the absence of a critical body of empirical evidence, the suggestions presented here should be interpreted cautiously as theoretical speculations that warrant empirical examination. Differences among the Indic languages also deserve further attention and study.

References

Bowey, J. A., Vaughan, L., & Hansen, J. (1998). Beginning readers’ use of orthographic analogies in word reading, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 68(2), 108-33.

Census of India (2001). Census Data Summary. Retrieved from http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-common/CensusDataSummary.html

Ehri, L. C., & Wilce, L. S. (1983). Development of word identification speed in skilled and less skilled beginning readers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 75, 3-18.

Georgiou, G., Parrila, R., & Liao, C. H. (2008). Rapid naming speed and reading across languages that vary in orthographic consistency. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21, 885-903.

Goswami, U. (1993). Toward an interactive analogy model of reading development: decoding vowel graphemes in beginning reading. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 56, 443-475.

Goswami, U (1995). Phonological development and reading by analogy: What is analogy, and what is not? Journal of Research in Reading: Special Issue: The contribution of psychological research, 18(2), 139-145.

Gupta, A. (2004). Reading difficulties of Hindi-speaking children with developmental dyslexia. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 79–99.

Hiebert, E.H. (1999). Text matters in learning to read. The Reading Teacher, 52, 552-568. [Augmented with foreword in N.D. Padak et al. (Eds.), Distinguished educators on reading (pp. 453-472). Newark, DE: IRA.]

Hiebert, E.H., & Mesmer, H. (2005). Perspectives on the difficulty of beginning reading texts. In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Early Literacy (Vol. 2, pp. 935-967). NY: Guilford.

Juel, C., & Roper/Schneider, D. (1985). The Influence of Basal Readers on First Grade Reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 20(2), 134-152.

Juel, C. & Solso, R. L. (1981). The role of orthographic redundancy, versatility and spelling-sound correspondences in word identification. In M. L. Kamil (Ed.) Directions in reading: Research and Instruction (30th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, pp. 74-92). Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference.

Karanth, P., Mathew, A., & Kurien, P. (2004). Orthography and reading speed: Data from native readers of Kannada. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 101–120.

Leong, C-K. & Tamaoka, K. (1998). Cognitive processing of Chinese characters, words, sentences and Japanese kanji and kana: An introduction. Reading and Writing, 10(3–5), 155–164.

McCormick, C. & Samuels, S. J. (1979). Word recognition by second graders: The unit of perception and interrelationships among accuracy, latency, and comprehension. Journal of Reading Behavior, 11, 107-118.

Menon, S., & Hiebert, E. H. (2005). A comparison of first-graders’ reading acquisition with little books or literature anthologies. Reading Research Quarterly, 40(1), 12–38.

Nag, S. (2007). Early reading in Kannada: the pace of acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic awareness. Journal of Research in Reading, 30(1), 7-22.

Nag, S., Treiman, R., & Snowling, M. (2010). Learning to spell in an alphasyllabary: The case of Kannada. Writing Systems Research, 2, 41–52.

Perfetti, C. (2003). The universal grammar of reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 7(1), 3-24.

Perfetti, C., Finger, & Hogabaum, T. (1978). Sources of vocalization latency differences between skilled and less skilled young readers. Journal of Educational Psychology , 70(5), 730-39.

Perfetti , C. A., & Liu , Y.(2005). Orthography to phonology and meaning: Comparisons across and within writing systems. Reading and Writing, 18, 193–210.

Treiman, R. (1992). The role of intrasyllabic units in learning to read and spell. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & R. Treiman (eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 65-106). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Vaid, J., & Padakannaya, P. (2004). Introduction. Reading and Writing (1-2), 1-6.

Vaid, J. & Gupta, A. (2002). Exploring word recognition in semi-alphabetic script: The case of Devanagari. Brain and Language, 81, 679–690.

Wimmer, H.M. & Goswami, U. (1994). The influence of orthographic consistency on reading development: Word recognition in English and German children. Cognition, 57, 91–193.

Zoccolotti, P., De Luca, M., Di Pace, E., Judica, A., Orlandi,M. & Spinelli, D. (1999). Markers of developmental surface dyslexia in a language (Italian) with high grapheme–phoneme correspondence. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 191–216.

Immunizations and treatments in early reading

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:06:38 -0700

Elfrieda H. Hiebert, TextProject & University of California, Berkeley

More than once over the past several months, I have heard at conferences or read in papers or reports that we now know what to do to bring young children to successful literacy. Within the recent report, Time to act (Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, 2010), the statement is made: “these results [early reading interventions] demonstrate that with a concerted effort we can indeed improve the literacy achievement of all our nation’s children.” (p. 8). Early reading interventions such as those reviewed by Torgesen (2000) are identified as the source of this shift. In reviewing five intervention studies, Torgesen concluded that three-quarters of the students in the lowest 20 percentile could be moved to effective word reading above the 30th percentile. These early interventions, according to one school of thought, could serve as an inoculation to ensure that students had the skills that they needed for subsequent literacy tasks in school and beyond (Coyne, Kame’enui, Simmons, and Harn, 2004). Now the statement is made that these early immunization ¹ efforts, while successful, are not sufficient as Time to Act (Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, 2010): “early improvements in literacy alone are not enough to guarantee excellent adolescent literacy achievement.” (p. 8).

Why policy-makers and scholars are surprised that the immunization was not enough could be the focus of an entire volume. The complexities of literacy in the digital age and the needs and strengths of adolescents call for literacy experiences for adolescents that are unique from those of young children. Had policy-makers and particular groups of scholars been willing to consider complex answers to profound problems in literacy, rather than to mandate simplistic responses, we might be well on our way to providing more adolescents with more of the relevant and engaging literacy experiences they need and want.

There are many reasons why many adolescents have low levels of literacy and/or are disengaged or disinterested in it. Many of these reasons have been iterated in the various reports on adolescent literacy (e.g., Biancarosa & Snow, 2006; Heller & Greenleaf, 2007). I offer an additional explanation—not as a sole explanation but as a strong contributing factor: problems with the immunization that was promoted in documents such as those of Coyne et al. (2004) and Torgesen (2000).

Before I describe some of the problems with the immunization, let me describe the primary stance of these interventions. All of the five intervention studies that Torgesen (2000) reviewed emphasized phonological awareness and decoding. There was a substantial amount of word learning outside the context of books and, when books were used, most fell into the category that I have described as “extreme decodables” (see, Hiebert, June 17, 2010). Extreme decodables are characterized by numerous infrequent words, many of which may have consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondences but often have unfamiliar, if not archaic, meanings for young children (e.g., vex, wrench). For young children, the texts that are created when these words are combined are often incomprehensible (e.g., He has a fan and a rat and a rag).

The perspective that there is a specific treatment that can be an immunization is itself problematic. But the immunization metaphor allows for several hypotheses about what may have gone awry.

First, the treatment might have been the wrong one. In medicine, it is entirely possible to treat young children for one illness (e.g., the flu) when, in reality, they have another illness (e.g., meningitis). In reading, children may be given a treatment of extreme decodables where characters such as Sip and Tip sit, tap, tip, and sip and where exercises and assessments are as likely to involve nonsense words as they are real words. For children who have never held books in their hands before, these words and experiences may be sufficiently alien that they fail to understand the function or the content. The extreme decodables may serve a function at some point. But what these students may really have needed initially was involvement with books that had stories that made sense and/or communicated information about the world around them.

There may have been a reaction to the immunization. It is not unusual for children to have a reaction to an immunization. Reactions can be fairly common when too much of a serum is given and an allergic reaction occurs. Similarly, too much of a particular literacy intervention (especially if given at the wrong time and to students with particular propensities) could result in precisely the opposite effect than the intended one. Children who are given extreme decodables day after day and year after year may learn to decode (and, yes, as the reports indicate, most children are able to decode by the end of second grade (see, e.g., Wise, Olson, & Ring, 1999)). They may, however, choose not to read or view reading as a very pleasurable or informative experience.

In the case of the treatment in California, a better metaphor than a reaction to an immunization is that students have been given an over-dose of a medication or the immunization. According to the state of California’s (California State Board of Education, 2006) textbook adoption guidelines, a treatment of extreme decodables is mandated for kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Even though the report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) stated that such treatments did not have evidence beyond first grade, the California mandates call for a set of two texts for each of the 44 phonemes for students who are not proficient readers in grades four through eight. California’s standing as the 48th state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009) cannot be attributed only to this policy. However, these mandates have not increased the percentage of students who are reading more proficiently.

There is even the possibility that a treatment can cause a new disease. A treatment of aspirin has been known to contribute to Reyes syndrome. Certain medications can be the cause of meningitis. The new disease in the case of American students who have been treated by an overabundance of phonological and code-based instruction may be that a disinterest in reading. Evidence for the disinterest of American middle graders in reading is compelling. In international comparisons with students from comparable countries, U.S. students ranked 32nd of 35 nations on reading for their own interest outside of school (Mullis, Martin, & Kennedy, 2003). In a reanalysis of these data with a revised index of attitudes toward reading, U.S. students came in 35th (Twist, Gnaldi, Schagen, & Morrison, 2004).

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? Answers to such questions are urgently needed. A new school year is about to begin where Response to Intervention (RtI) efforts will be applied with a vengeance. To date, I have seen nothing within the RtI literature that indicates that the immunization regimen is being challenged.

References

Biancarosa, G. & Snow, C. (2006). Reading next: A vision for action and research in middle and high school literacy: A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

California State Board of Education (2006). Reading/Language Arts Framework for California’s Public Schools: Kindergarten through Grade Twelve. Sacramento, CA: California Department of Education.

Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy (2010). Time to act: An agenda for advancing adolescent literacy for college and career success. New York: Carnegie Corporation of NY.

Coyne, M.D., Kame’enui, E.J., Simmons, D.C., & Harn, B.A. (2004). Beginning reading intervention as inoculation or insulin: First-grade reading performance of strong responders to kindergarten intervention. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 37 (2), 90-104.

Heller, R., & Greenleaf, C.L. (2007, June). Literacy instruction in the content areas: Getting to the core of middle and high school improvement. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Hiebert, E.H. (June 17, 2010). What exactly is a decodable text? www.textproject.org/franklyfreddy/what-exactly-is-a-decodable-text

Mullis, I. V. S., Martin, M. O., Gonzalez, E. J., & Kennedy, A. M. (2003). PIRLS 2001 international report: IEA’s study of reading literacy achievement in primary schools. Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College.

National Center for Education Statistics (2009). The Nation’s Report Card: Reading 2009 (NCES 2010–458). Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Torgesen, J. K. (2000). Individual differences in response to early interventions in reading: The lingering problem of treatment resisters. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 15, 55–64.

Twist, L., Gnaldi, M., Schagen, I., & Morrison, J. (2004). Good readers but at a cost? Attitudes to reading in England. Journal of Research in Reading, 27, 387–400.

Wise, B.W., Ring, J., & Olson, R.K. (1999). Training phonological awareness with and without explicit attention to articulation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72, 271-304.

¹ After consulting with medical personnel and reading the literature to distinguish among terms such as inoculations, vaccinations, and immunization, I have chosen to use the word immunization. The intent of vaccinations or inoculations is to produce or boost immunity to a specific disease. Inoculation is the procedure of placing something that will grow or reproduce into the body. Vaccination was originally used to refer specifically to the injection of the smallpox vaccine.

Opening the dialogue

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:16:06 -0700

Elfrieda H. Hiebert, TextProject & University of California, Berkeley

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. Tobias, a 26-month-old in my acquaintance, is in this group. He was fascinated with his mittens this week (understandable in that he lives in Chicago which had arctic-like temperatures). He described his mittens as his “hand pants” and his pants as his “leg mittens.” Whatever the texts that Tobias is given when he enters kindergarten, he will transition to conventional literacy quickly (if he isn’t already reading when he’s three).

It is with the children who “depend on schools to become conventionally literate” that the content and style of textbooks matter the most. The texts of school provide the data on which they develop reading skills and an interest (or disinterest) in reading. The pace, content, and amount of texts of the typical beginning reading curriculum currently work for children like Tobias. They are not, however, working for the children whose conventional literacy occurs in school settings. I am not stating that these students will be illiterate. Even at mid-first-grade, students in the bottom quartile consistently recognize words on assessments such as DIBELS (Hiebert, Stewart, & Uzicanin, 2010). However, they cannot read the typical texts of first-grade and they leave first grade reading substantially less and slower than peers at and above the 50th percentile. Over the next years of school, they acquire some reading proficiency but they never attain the levels of literacy needed for full participation in the marketplace and communities of the 21st century. Evidence of this shortfall is the failure of a third of an American age group to attain even the basic standard on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Since policy initiatives in California and Texas in the late 1980s, readability formulas have not been used in selecting the texts for beginning reading programs. The hold of readability formulas on the style and content of beginning reading texts needed to be loosened (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). Unfortunately, there was no alternative system available to publishers, writers, and educators for identifying the appropriate texts for the reading diets of those students most in need.

Over this summer, I will continue to explore topics related to the texts for beginning and struggling readers as the 2010s begin. I’ve already begun with the first three topics (this column really introduces the series). Here’s a preliminary list (subject to change and likely not to be presented in this order):

Whatever happened to Dick and Jane? (posted on June 4, 2010)
Have the texts of beginning reading been dumbed down over the past 50 years?(posted on June 11, 2010)
What exactly are decodable texts? (posted on June 17, 2010)
Shifts in educational policies may lead to new viruses
Ways in which publishers/writers determine appropriate texts for beginning readers
Text diets for beginning readers who depend on schools to become literate
Watch out! You’re about to be hit by the swing of the pendulum
If they aren’t reading: Push it down earlier
Fear of dumbing down: Keep everyone on the same page
Why the delay of the English/language arts textbook adoption is a good thing for California
What exactly does it mean to be a struggling middle-grade reader?
Why phoneme-based programs won’t make much of a difference with struggling middle-grade readers

What Exactly is a Decodable Text?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:07:52 -0700

Elfrieda H. Hiebert, TextProject & University of California, Berkeley

In 2010, a central component of beginning reading programs in the U.S. consists of decodable texts. 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. Extremes in the commonality and consistency of letter-sound correspondences are evident in the following two sentences: (1) I want one piece of bread and (2) Brad’s ram nabs his big hat. All of the words in Example 1 have at least one letter-sound correspondence that deviates from common, consistent associations. By contrast, all of the letter-sound correspondences in Example 2 are among the most common and consistent associations.

Jeanne Chall (1967), in the popular book, Learning to read: The great debate, identified the numerous variations in how texts offer opportunities for young readers to become more adept at decoding. In a future column, I will describe some of the differences in texts that support children’s facility with the code. My emphasis in this column is on the use of the single phoneme/grapheme(s) as the driving criterion for forming texts. It is the prominent one used in American reading textbooks today because of mandates of the nation’s two largest states, California and Texas. The program that provided the “gold standard” for California and Texas—the decodables of Open Court (2000)—had a unique interpretation of the phoneme/grapheme(s) association. All of the current core reading programs in 2010 (Scott Foresman’s Reading Street, MacMillan/McGraw Hill’s Treasures, Harcourt’s Storytown, and SRA’s Imagine it!) have sets of decodables modeled after those of Open Court (2000).

There had been previous beginning reading programs that had used the individual phoneme/grapheme(s) model for creating texts. However, in at least one important dimension, the texts differed from those of the current decodables. The data from this previous generation of reading programs is offered as scientific evidence for the current decodables. On one dimension, however, the current decodables differ substantially from old decodables. This difference has a substantial bearing on children’s learning experiences.

What is this difference? The current decodables introduce as many different words with the target phoneme/grapheme(s) as possible. There appears an underlying assumption that the word is not a significant learning unit in reading acquisition. The rationale, in all likelihood, is that current decodables are guarding against children’s memorization of words.

The linguists and psychologists who developed the old decodables were also highly critical of students’ memorization of words. Indeed, the developers of the old decodables were responding directly to the problems of the “look-say” method that was dominant during the period that they developed their texts. However, these earlier developers recognized that at least a modicum of repetition of words with shared and/or particular features is needed for children to learn to read.

To illustrate what this difference in philosophy means for children learning to read, I have taken a similar number of words from texts at the same point of four reading programs. Three of these programs are the “old” decodables; the fourth is a new decodable. [Note: While the Reading Mastery program has a 1995 copyright, the texts emanate from the 1970s.] An excerpt from each of the programs is provided in Table 1 and features of the texts are presented in Table 2.

The number of unique or different words per 100 words of running text is an index of the degree of repetition of individual words. The figures in Table 1 indicate that the old decodables had from 22 to 39% fewer different words than the current decodable.

The appearance of the single-appearing word is another indicator of difficulty for beginning readers. The third row in Table 2 shows that the old decodables had substantially fewer single-appearing words than the current decodable.

The final index is the number of words that come from the 300 most frequent words. This figure is an indication of how common or familiar words are to students. Less than half of the words in the current decodable are from this group with a heavy emphasis on words that are infrequent—words such as nabs, ram, and trim in the excerpt in Table 1.

Especially for students who are English learners (and at least in California they make up a sizable percentage of the districts that adopted Open Court as their core reading program—LA Unified, Oakland, and Richmond), infrequent, single-appearing words make a hard task (learning to read in a second language) even harder. For these students and many native English speakers, the task of current decodables becomes one of learning simply to decode without learning that meaning is at the core of reading.

Table 1. Excerpts from Four Decodable Programs: Old and Current

Economy’s Keys to Reading (1972)	Lippincott (1969)	Reading Mastery (1995)	Open Court (2000)
Don had a box with a lid. “What’s in your box?” Ted said. “Something brown,” said Don. “Something that can hop and fly. It can fly out of the box. And it can hop to the street.”	The little sled did not stop. It ran on and on. It ran into a red barn. The barn bent the little sled. And the sled dented the barn. Bob and Ben got wet.	A dog that could talk lived with a tall man. The dog took a book from the table. The dog said, “This book is what I need, need, need. I love to read, read, read.”	Brad is a trim man. Brad’s trim hat fits him. Brad has a fat ram. Brad’s ram spins and nabs his hat. Brad is mad. Brad nabs his hat. Brad pulls, puffs and huffs.

Table 2. A comparison of Text Features of Four Decodable Programs: Old and Current

Text Features of Four Decodable Programs	Economy’s Keys to Reading (1972)	Lippincott (1969)	Reading Mastery (1995)	Open Court (2000)
Unique Words per 100	14	16	18	23
Single-appearing words (%)	1	6	3	10
%words high-frequency(300)	63	59	69	46

*as percent of total words

References for Programs

Adams, M.J., Bereiter, C., Brown, A., Campione, J., Carruthers, I., Case, R., Hirschberg, J., McKeough, A., Pressley, M., Roit, M., Scardamalia, M., & Treadway, G.H., Jr. (2000). Open Court Reading. Columbus, OH: SRA/McGraw-Hill.

Engelmann, S., & Bruner, E.C. (1995). Reading Mastery. Columbus, OH: SRA/McGraw-Hill.

Harris, T.L., Creekmore, M., & Greenman, M.H. (1972). Keys to Reading. Oklahoma City, OK: The Economy Company.

McCracken, G., & Walcutt, C.C. (1969). Lippincott’s Basic Reading. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company.

Have the texts of beginning reading been dumbed down over the past 50 years?

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 10:57:37 -0700

Elfrieda H. Hiebert, University of California, Berkeley

In 2010, the answer for K-2 texts is an unequivocal no. In fact, the texts that K-2 children see in 2010 are significantly more difficult since 1990. The answer may be a different one for grades 3+ ¹ and I hasten to add that Jeanne Chall was correct when she described first-grade texts as too easy in 1967. At that point, mainstream basal reading programs moved at a snail’s pace. The 1962 version of the first-grade Scott Foreman (SF) program in which Dick and Jane figured prominently had a vocabulary of 323 unique words that were repeated over 120 texts. That’s not very many unique words for 120 texts.

In the early 1970s, the responses of publishers to Chall’s criticisms with more difficult texts were not a success in the marketplace and publishers returned to even more tedious programs (Hiebert, 2005). But eventually, Chall’s conclusions influenced policies and practice. The turn-around time and the interpretations of research were not the ones that Chall might have anticipated in 1967 but, when they finally occurred, Chall’s observations of easy beginning reading texts were no longer apropos.

It was the 1985 national report, Becoming a Nation of Readers (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985), that served as the impetus for a change in beginning reading textbooks. Readability formulas, Anderson et al. concluded, were dumbing down textbooks and students’ literacy levels and interests. The report called for an end to the pernicious stronghold of readability formulas on the content and style of American reading textbooks. Not a single study within this research base had been conducted with beginning readers. But the report hit a chord with American educators and within three years the nation’s two largest states—California and Texas—issued their mandates: No reading textbooks controlled by readability formulas would be adopted with state funds; texts had to have authentic literature at all levels.

Within grade-one texts, the leap in number of unique words was astronomical: from 5 new, unique words per 100 words of text in 1983 to 25 (or more) in 1993. A high number of unique words means that few words are repeated. Since a small group of words (e.g., the, of, and, to) account for 33% of the total words in written English, that means that many words didn’t appear very often. At least 40% of the words in the first-grade texts in Texas appeared a single time (Hiebert, 2005; Foorman et al., 2004).

Texas (2000) and California (2002) replaced the “authentic text” mandate for beginning reading components with a decodable text requirement: 80% of the words in Texas’s first-grade programs needed to be “decodable” and 90% in California. Within these mandates, it was the phoneme (e.g., /b/, /i/) that was the unit of repetition. Texts were judged to be decodable if a phoneme had been introduced in an instructional lesson in the teacher’s lesson. The assumption was: “once taught, then learned.” Since it was the phoneme and not the word that needed to be repeated, the number of unique words has remained high in beginning reading programs. The “decodable” policy has meant that the number of rare, unique words has increased—words such as nab, sax, clan, nip, jig, sip, and yip.

Unlike 1967 when beginning reading texts were justifiably described as too easy (e.g.: 323 unique words), 2007 first-grade textbooks have around 2,000 unique words. In 2007, beginning first graders are introduced to more unique words in the first instructional unit than first graders in the 1960s had in the last unit. We don’t want dumbed-down textbooks but can young children learning to read assimilate so many words so quickly? The answer is, once more, an unequivocal no.

¹ I do want to note that the conclusions on the dumbing-down of textbooks (i.e., Chall & Conrad, 1991; Hayes, Wolfer, & Wolfe, 1996) were based on analyses of reading textbooks published prior to the watershed changes of 1990. In their analyses of the dumbing-down of textbooks, Chall and Conrad (1991) used only textbooks for grades four through six and with copyrights from 1971 to 1980.

Whatever Happened to Dick and Jane?

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:28:01 -0700

Elfrieda H. Hiebert, University of California, Berkeley

Dick
See, Dick.
See Dick run.

—Elston, Runkel, and Gray (1930)

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. If you were 6 years old between 1967-1988, there is a good chance that your first school text was similar in the kinds of words but without Dick and Jane.

One of the reasons for the longevity of the Dick-and-Jane genre may have been its imprimatur as a research-based program. William S. Gray drew on two lines of research in his work with Scott Foresman that resulted in the 1930 edition of the Elston Readers where Dick, Jane and their menagerie first appeared. The first line was Thorndike’s (1921) analyses of the frequency with which words occurred in written English. If a small number of words accounted for the majority of words in texts, Gray reasoned, learning to read should start with these words.

The second line of research was from Arthur Gates (1930) who made what he called “guesses” based on observational studies of how many repetitions children of different ability levels needed to learn a word (high-frequency words such as the, of, and, to, a). Average-ability children, Gates guessed, needed approximately 35 repetitions to learn a word. Gray guided Scott Foresman editors in engineering the Dick-and-Jane stories to have high-frequency words appear the requisite number of times.

Gray’s perspective was partly right in at least two ways: (a) repetition is important in learning to read (but 35 repetitions for every single word?) and (b) high-frequency words are important in reading connected text. Gray’s perspective was also seriously incomplete. As Jeanne Chall (1967) pointed out, English is an alphabetic language and, as such, requires knowledge of consistent, common letter-sound relationships to learn to read. Dick-and-Jane had not been without phonetically regular words but they had not been presented as systematically as Chall and Fries (1962) argued was necessary. Goodman (1967) and others identified several other ways in which the theory was incomplete. Specifically, reading, at its core, is a process of constructing meaning and learning to read needs to engage students in meaning-making, not simply word recognition. As a result of such critiques, Dick and Jane retired (they were, after all, 67 by then). It was not until the 1988 copyrights of the mainstream basal reading programs that responded to the mandates of the California textbook adoption, however, that the high-frequency model promoted by Gray and Gates was retired.

There is a legacy of the high-frequency model that is still alive and well in the form of books that were modeled after The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss, 1957). The Cat in the Hat resulted from William Spaulding, head of Houghton Mifflin’s education division, asking Dr. Seuss if he could write an engaging story with 300 high-frequency words. Dr. Seuss used 220 high-frequency words in writing The Cat in the Hat. Series modeled after The Cat in the Hat (e.g., I-can-read, Ready-to-Read) continue to show brisk sales to parents and libraries. Further, at least some of these texts (e.g., Little Bear, Frog & Toad, Henry & Mudge, Mr. Putter & Tabby, Arthur) appear in current first-grade books of core reading programs.

Other than such texts, there are few traces of the high-frequency model in current core reading programs. High-frequency words are NOT included in the vocabulary lists of current first-grade programs. Precisely which high-frequency words are taught at which levels of a core reading program is difficult to establish from scope and sequences. Most importantly, the repetition of key words—whether phonetically regular, conceptually central to themes, or high-frequency—is not evident.

High-Leverage Action #3

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:45:52 -0800

Elfrieda H. Hiebert

TextProject & University of California, Berkeley

My third high-leverage action from the CREATE 2009 conference is the need for a wealth of multimedia experiences for English Language Learners (ELLs). 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. When the teacher is talking about “skeleton,” they may not connect it with the word they know — esqueleto (a cognate—but not as transparent as some). Showing an illustration of a skeleton may get ELLs onto the page a lot more quickly than a long explanation. As the aphorism goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” ¹

There is a substantial amount of evidence that pictures aid in learning. This research base has been the basis for foreign language instruction of both adults and adolescents. In programs where adults are taught English, pictures are a staple. But I’ve found that, at least in the core reading programs into which many English Language Learners are transitioned, this aid is not provided. In an analysis of a fourth-grade reading unit of the newest copyright of a core-reading program, 12 of the 44 focus, instructional words were very pictureable. But, not only did the publisher not provide pictures for the ELLs (or other students who may never have seen a wharf or frost), the same set of activities was recommended for all 44 words—define, describe, write, and so forth.

In her presentation at CREATE 2009, Diane August ² described an intervention (Project QuEST.), aimed at middle-grade students’ science learning. Lessons within the intervention ensure that, whenever possible, definitions and discussions are derived from visuals. For example, a lesson in a unit on geology with sixth-graders begins with a presentation of several photos of erosion. Students are reminded that the Spanish word for erosion is spelled the same (with the addition of an accent). A topic of discussion between peers is what evidence they can detect in the photos that erosion has occurred.

Illustrations and photos are also used consistently during the introduction of critical vocabulary. In the lesson that August used as an illustration at CREATE 2009, the vocabulary glossary consisted of three words: microscope, concept, and organ. Each was accompanied with an illustration. Concept was accompanied by an illustration of a person with a bubble by his head that contained a question mark that reinforced the definition, “A concept is a general idea or understanding of something.” In the case of organ, the illustration was of a lung.

With digital technology, the use of visuals can go beyond pictures. Research evidence that ELLs benefit from video clips and animations is also accumulating. One of the CREATE interventions deals with the content of social studies—an area, as presenters and participants at CREATE 2009 reminded us, where textbook treatments of critical content can leave students disinterested and uninformed. The CREATE intervention makes consistent use of videos. But a critical feature of this intervention is that the videos don’t take up a whole class period (which was the case in the comparison classrooms that the researchers studied). The video clips that are part of the lessons that Sharon Vaughn ³ and her colleagues designed for seventh-grade social studies were short: 2-3 minutes. The video clips were not intended to carry the weight of the lesson. Rather, the video clips served to as an “anchor” for students—to help them get a grasp of the fundamental content. These video clips were shown after the teacher introduced the big ideas of the content and they were followed by discussions where students talk about critical questions (that were raised before students watched the video clips). While the video clips weren’t the only component of the project, Vaughn and her colleagues report that they did generate discussion and supported students’ active involvement in content. The project showed significant differences in favor of the students who participated in the treatment classrooms that included the video clips.

The use of visuals in Diane August’s project and the use of video clips in Sharon Vaughn’s project demonstrate the importance of multimedia experiences for ELLs. I’m on the lookout for additional projects about research-based multimedia projects that have proven effective with ELLs. Share them with me for future editions of Frankly Freddy.

¹ In doing research for this article, I learned that the original aphorism (attributed to one Frederick R. Barnard, Printers’ Ink, 1927) was: One picture is worth ten thousand words. (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, retrieved 11.10.09 at www.askoxford.com)

² August, D. (October 6, 2009). Developing science knowledge and vocabulary in English-Language Learners: Project QuEST. Presentation at the 2009 CREATE Conference, Austin, TX.

³ Vaughn, S., Martinez, L.R., Linan-Thompson, S., Reutebuch, C.K., Carlson, C.D., & Francis, D.J. (in press). Enhancing Social Studies Vocabulary and Comprehension for 7th Grade English Language Learners: Findings from Two Experimental Studies. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness. (SREE)

High-Leverage Action #2

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:38:33 -0800

Elfrieda H. Hiebert

TextProject & University of California, Berkeley

What are cognates?
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common origin. Since English has its roots in the Germanic language family, there are many English words that are similar in sound and orthography to German words such as heart/Herz, house/Haus, and bear/Bär. Few native German speakers are currently entering U.S. schools so these connections are of less interest than the Romance-based words that make up another important chunk of English vocabulary.

What role do Romance-based cognates have in written English?
Romance-based cognates came into English in two ways: (a) from French words that resulted from the Norman invasion of England in 1066 and (b) from the Latin words that have been used, since the Renaissance, to label scientific products and processes. During the approximately three centuries that the Normans dominated the English court, French was the language of the ruling class—legal, ecclesiastical, fashion, and cuisine. The last three words are examples of French loan words in English and can be contrasted with German-origin words that have similar meanings; ecclesiastical/church, fashion/clothes, and cuisine/food.

As these examples show, Romance words are often the words that are used in written language—the vocabulary of content areas and literature. Romance words are also important in that they often belong to morphological families that share similar meanings (e.g., origin, original, originality, unoriginal). As the complexity of content and text increases, the number of words that belong to Romance-based morphological families increases. Nagy, Anderson, Schommer, Scott, and Stallman (1989) estimated that, in the middle grades and beyond, “more than 60% of the new words that readers encounter have relatively transparent morphological structure—that is, they can be broken down into parts.” (p. 279). Many essential academic process words like compare (comparar), connect, (conectar), process (proceso), and investigate (investigar) are cognates as well as content words.

Like French (and Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan), Spanish is a Romance language that is derived from Latin. This shared heritage means that the forms of many Spanish words are similar to the French-origin words in academic texts. Rose Nash (1999) in NTC’s Dictionary of Spanish Cognates presents 20,000 cognates. (Keep in mind that there is also a NTC Dictionary of False Spanish Cognates—-not as many but it’s important to remember that every apparent similarity isn’t a cognate).

Do Spanish speakers learning to read in English automatically transfer their knowledge of cognates?

Recognizing the connections between academic English and Spanish helps the comprehension of native Spanish speakers who can make the connection. But native Spanish speakers will not necessarily make the links if these relationships are not made explicit. Without such guidance, making these links will be especially difficult for native Spanish speakers do not read in their native language. The pronunciation of most cognates is usually different enough that children may not realize that word that they typically use in conversations (e.g., facil or frío) share meanings with facile or frigid in their schoolbooks. Without guidance in understanding the similarities—and expecting to encounter these similarities in content area texts and literature, Spanish-speaking students may never know that they have a foundational vocabulary on which they can draw.

Will instruction in cognates confuse for students who are native English speakers or speakers of non-Romance languages?

Native English speakers and speakers of non-Romance languages need to become adept with the Romance system of English if they are to become proficient readers and writers of literary and academic English. Information about cognates can be a useful way to communicate this information in that cognates typically are members of rich morphological word families and—in the process—connect to meaningful ideas.

What form should instruction of cognates take for native Spanish speakers and their classmates?

Truly understanding and owning an aspect of language to the point where individuals use that knowledge in reading can take a long time. This observation applies whether that aspect is the existence of Spanish-English cognates or the features of morphological word families.

Becoming facile with cognates and/or in the morphology of Romance-derived words does not necessarily result from a single lesson or even a series of lessons, especially for students who have spent several years in reading instruction where the phonology of the Anglo-Saxon words of English has been the focus.

The first principle, then, is that teachers of students from the middle grades through high school need to view cognate and morphological instruction as an essential and consistent part of their instruction.

At the same time, there are many ways in which teachers can support students in understanding the Romance system of English that can and should be taught to students in the middle grades and beyond. I can’t develop the entire curriculum for this instruction in this column but I can give you some illustrations of how a fundamental stance toward cognates and Romance-derived words can be developed.

One illustration is the consistency within the Exceptional Expressions for Everyday Events of attention to “the Spanish connection.” The Spanish connection is the foundation for generating words that share a Romance root word. Consistency in discussing whether there are cognates—and how those are expressed in a morphological family—is central to the goal of developing an academic and literary vocabulary.

Another illustration is focusing on particular groups of words in lessons. I’ve identified a group of words that are common words in Spanish but are, typically, literary or scientific words in English. The list is located here.

High-Leverage Action #1

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:46:32 -0700

Elfrieda H. Hiebert

TextProject & University of California, Berkeley

Since oral language was a theme of the CREATE conference (www.cal.org/create*; Frankly Freddy, October 30, 2009), it makes sense that the presentations highlighted ways in which the oral language of English Language Learners (ELLs) can be facilitated. These oral language experiences are critical in several ways. Obviously, becoming facile as a speaker of English is one of the goals of the curriculum. At the same time, 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.

But the willingness of students—especially young adolescents who are ELLs—to really express themselves orally and in writing depends on appropriate and compelling topics. Much of what students are asked to talk about in school simply doesn’t seem relevant to them or tap into their funds of knowledge. In particular, the topics of social studies seem to be particularly disengaging to many of this group (as well as their non-ELL classmates). Elizabeth Moje in the inaugural plenary presentation of the CREATE conference observed that many young adolescents/ELLs express a particular dislike for social studies. A study in one of her studies identified social studies as his least favorite class, stating: “Social studies, because there are lots of words that is [sic] new and I don’t know much about the country.”*

I was struck by this comment (especially since I have a passion for history and civics, being the child of immigrants to Canada and am immigrant to the U.S. myself). Civics, history, economics—the content of these topics are central to issues such as immigration, access to healthcare and employment, and the quality and opportunities of daily life for people. The content of social studies, in particular, is the “stuff” of everyday conversations and social interactions. Young adolescents have opinions about food, clothes, music, movies, jobs, friendships, and so forth. Opinions, rights, choices of groups of people (including those made by their governments and other institutions)—these topics are at the center of civics, history, and economics. The manner in which conventional textbooks and curricula portray the topics, however, fails to tap into students’ knowledge, interests, and identities.

I began to listen carefully for the rest of the conference for how effective programs are providing young-adolescent ELLs (and their classmates) with topics about which they will and want to talk about. What struck me in presentation after presentation was the need for ELLs to be engaged with content about which they have some background knowledge and interest. Every topic does not have to do be central to every student. My 40+ years in public education have left me convinced that “a little goes a long way.” In every school day, there needs to be at least some opportunity for students to be involved with topics and in tasks about which they have at least a modicum of knowledge and interest.

What follows is my list of examples from the conference that show how innovative projects are making these links to the background knowledge and interests of young-adolescent ELLs:

Elizabeth Moje: Elizabeth Moje and her colleagues in working with young adolescents who are Latino/a in the Detroit Public Schools have encouraged students to share texts that they read beyond the classroom such as anime and popular magazines (e.g., pop stars).

In a related project, Moje and colleagues have developed a set of project-based units around driving questions. These driving questions interest students and involve students in essential science content such as chemistry, ecology, and biology. Among the questions that have been addressed in these units are: What affects the quality of air in my community? How can good friends make me sick? How can I make new stuff from old stuff? Elizabeth Moje work can be found here.

Catherine Snow/Claire White: The Word Generation project is a cross-subject vocabulary program with discussion as the primary focus for developing academic language in the middle school. At the center of the program is a set of topics with accompanying passages that have been selected to engage adolescents in high-level discussions on nationally relevant topics as well as topics that are of great interest to this age group. Examples of topics include:

Stem cell research and federal funding

Athletes and multi-million dollar salaries

Junk food: Should it be sold in schools?

[The materials used in this program are available for free download (with registration) at the Word Generation website.]

Nonie Lesaux/Michael Kieffer: The Language Diversity and Literacy Development Research Group at Harvard has a project with the acronym ALIAS that stands for “Academic Language Instruction for All Students.” ALIAS has numerous components but a central one is the reading of articles on topics that will interest students (grades 4-8). An example of a topic that is used in a demonstration lesson is Single-Gender Classes in Middle School. ALIAS also involves activities that will engage students such as conducting a mock interview with a famous person.

The format of a lesson (and the role that texts and tasks have in a lesson) are available on Michael Kieffer’s presentation at the CREATE conference.* Lesaux and Kieffer have described this program in an article in The Reading Teacher (Kieffer, M.J., & Lesaux, N.K. (2007). Breaking down words to build meaning: Morphology, vocabulary, and reading comprehension in the urban classroom. The Reading Teacher 61, 134-144). They also have an article in press at Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy entitled “Morphing into Adolescents: Active word learning for English Language Learners and their classmates in middle school.”

Freddy Hiebert: I was the facilitator of the conference, not a speaker. But, as I reflected on “Talking About Things That Matter,” I realized that I had a set of materials for middle-grade students. The students for whom I developed the materials are slightly younger than those that are the focus of the CREATE work and conference: third through sixth graders. But the ennui that we see among young adolescents has its roots long before middle school. I’ve dusted off these materials —the program is called Talking Points for Kids— and have provided a prototype at this website that you can download here.

As you can see from the prototype, students are engaged with topics that will generate opinions and discussion—topics such as whether school days should be extended and whether bicycle riders and skateboarders should be required to have tests and licenses.

All of these efforts underscore a critical point: If you want children and young adolescents to produce meaningful talk in classrooms, they need something meaningful to talk about!

*Power points from the CREATE conference will be available as of December 1, 2009 (estimated) at the CAL/CREATE website.

High-Leverage Actions That Can Make a Difference

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:37:06 -0700

Our third CREATE* conference in Austin TX on October 5-6, 2009 was a resounding success. The theme of the conference, “Improving Outcomes for English Language Learners: Oral Language and Literacy Learning Across the Curriculum” clearly is a topic on which there is substantial need. The conference was sold-out (not a typical pattern in current economic times for an education conference). Attendees represented 31 states and the District of Columbia. For those of you who couldn’t attend, you can attend the conference virtually after December 1 (estimated) when the powerpoints will be available at the CREATE conference website.

As facilitator of the 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. Translating research findings/suggestions into action can be a challenge. Some research findings require replication before they can be translated. Other research findings require consideration follow-up to be translated in meaningful and appropriate ways in classrooms. But there are some findings that are ready for translation and can make a big difference. I’ve chosen four actions from research presented at the conference that are ready for prime-time and that, I believe, can have the greatest leverage in supporting the learning of English Language Learners (ELLs) and their classmates. I’ll be highlighting one of these actions on each of four consecutive column/blogs:

High-Leverage Action #1: Talking About Things That Matter (Oct. 31)
High-Leverage Action #2: Spanish Cognates & Written English (Nov. 7)
High-Leverage Action #3: A Picture is Worth a 1,000 Words (Nov. 14)
High-Leverage Action #4: Academic Vocabulary: Connections and Repetition (Nov. 21)

By the way, if you want to read a summary by Mary Ann Zehr, a reporter from Education Week who attended the conference, here’s the link to the article entitled, Oral-Language Skills for English-Learners Focus of Researchers.

You might also be interested in virtually attending the conferences from the last two years as well. Leaders of professional development and instructors of graduate and undergraduate courses will find a rich reservoir of resources related to these conferences in that a bibliography of related readings that participants were given prior to the conferences is available, as are powerpoints of all presentations.

2008: Math, Science, & Social Studies: A Focus on English Language Learners in Middle School.

2007: Academic Language and Content: A Focus on English Language Learners in the Middle School.

*CREATE is the National Research and Development Center for English Language Learners, funded through the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Click here for more information about CREATE.

Private, Personal, and Peculiar

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:25:57 -0700

If I told you that “I’m not hanging noodles on your ears” (Bhalla, 2009), you’d look at me in puzzlement. If an English speaker said to a Russian, “I’m not pulling your leg,” the Russian would think the same about the speaker. In both languages, the phrase means, “I’m telling the truth.” Both phrases are examples of idioms.

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be established by a literal translation of the words in the phrase. The word idiom, like the word idiosyncratic, has the Greek “idio” which means private, personal, or peculiar. A group of people uses an idiom in a peculiar fashion that indicates membership in a culture or cultural sub-group. For example, the adolescent users of a language often have a wealth of idioms that, when known by adults in the culture, no longer maintain their cachet.

For someone learning a new language, idioms are especially challenging. It’s not that English Language Learners don’t know idioms. They know the idioms of their own culture. But they don’t know the idioms of English and each idiom is unique.

In this school year’s installment of Exceptional Expressions for Everyday Events (E4), we have added idioms. We’ve included the idioms as part of E4s because idioms are especially prevalent in conversations. Idioms occur in narrative text or stories but they are much less frequent in informational texts where language is more precise and less colloquial.

How should the idioms in the E4 be used? The intent is to support students in becoming aware of the many special phrases that are used in language. All idioms can’t be taught. The basic instructional procedure is to use the idioms that are part of the E4s to assist students in becoming aware of idioms—in English and in their native languages.

Bhalla, J. (2009). I’m not hanging noodles on your ears and other intriguing idioms from around the world. Washington, DC: National Geographic.

Welcome back, Freddy

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:38:09 -0700

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 Santa Cruz (NextSpace Coworking + Innovation). It’s like a combined coffee shop and set of graduate student offices. What I mean by this is that there are open spaces where the “graduate students” work (those are the cafe members like me). There are offices on the perimeter like those of the professors (who, in this case, are principals in a number of philanthropic and entrepreneurial organizations). There are seminars (but not mandatory like graduate school). And, yes, there is a weekly Friday afternoon happy hour.

I’ve joined one of the informal networking groups that eats breakfast together on Thursday mornings while members update their blogs and tweets. I’ve always wanted to be part of a group where you came together for a focused period of time with the goal of producing some writing (I’ve always thought that this would be a good use of faculty meeting time in universities). I have Mahesh Grossman of the Authors Team for starting the “blog/breakfast/Thursday” group and for getting me back to thinking about Frankly Freddy. I don’t see Frankly Freddy as a blog (mostly because I’d hate to have to define blog). I see Frankly Freddy as more of a column.

But the most basic reason that I’m returning to Frankly Freddy is that I have some new ideas that I’d really like to share. Let me make it clear that I’m not suggesting that I haven’t had ideas in the past. There is lots of fodder for discussion in the set of Frankly Freddy columns from 2006. But, having had a landmark birthday in 2008, I’m finding that I’ve got a renewed energy for reading education. I’ve published two edited collections over the past two years and am in the process of writing a new one.

In addition to these ideas, however, I’ve got some topics that I’m very interested in but am not yet ready to write about in a formal academic venue. I’ve worked hard on the topic of fluency over the past decade and am coming to recognize the importance of fluency in communicating well in writing. I need some venues in which I can try out some ideas. Writing this column seems easier than going to an airport and flying somewhere to give a presentation.

I’m fairly confident that I can commit to a monthly Frankly Freddy. Perhaps if my fellow writers at blog/breakfast/Thursdays teach me what blogging is, I will write more often. But for now the commitment is to a monthly column.

The first real new column follows: Everyday Events: Bringing Rich Talk to Classrooms. In it, I describe the rationale for this very exciting feature of the textproject and quickreads websites.

I’d also extend a welcome back to school to you. Here’s to a year of learning and a curiosity about new information and words.

Everyday Events

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:51:51 -0700

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.

As teachers, we are the ones who control the language in classrooms. In this capacity, we often overuse particular words—“listen up,” “clean off your desks,” “check that your name is on your paper.” A linguist named Zipf (1935) described a phenomenon that you’ll notice is true, if you were to get a transcript of the talk in your classroom over a day: Most of the words that people use in their conversations over and over again are short and come from the same, very small layer of the 606,000 words in English. Overall, this vocabulary is much less rich and varied than the vocabulary of writing. When teachers use a rich vocabulary in everyday events, students have a model and resource that they may not have in other life contexts.

In presentations to teacher groups, I’ve often commented on the availability of everyday events in classrooms as a source for enriching the quality of language—alternative words for lining up (e.g., form a queue) and check that your name is on your paper (e.g., scruntinze). I got a great response from teachers for this idea but many wanted more examples, not only of the events in classrooms but also of the alternative words that could be used. Out of these requests, Exceptional Expressions for Everyday Events (or E4), was born.

For the 2009-2010 school year, we’re going to provide 30 E4 vignettes—an E4 that can be used as the basis for each of 30 school weeks.

As the project is developing, I’m finding that there is more and more information to include—idioms where appropriate (another topic of importance about which I’ll be writing in the future), sometimes antonyms, possible ways of interacting about the words, and so on. As teachers, you’re free to use these words and ideas in your classrooms. We’re providing the E4s in a format so that you can project them in your classrooms.

If you have suggestions for E4 vignettes—or, better yet, if you have developed one or more, please send them to The same goes for samples of student work (e.g., a class book on a cluster of words from an E4). If your vignette or products are included on the website, we’ll send you one of the literature books that is featured on a quarterly Freddy’s Favorites.

Word Findings #8

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:12:19 -0800

Over the last decade, a term has entered the lexicon of scholars who study vocabulary development—word consciousness. Word consciousness is characterized by knowledge of words. For example, recognizing that many words have different meanings (i.e., that they are polysemous) is evidence of word consciousness. But word consciousness is much more than knowing about words or even knowing many words. Word consciousness is also a disposition—an appreciation of words and an interest in them. The ears of students who are conscious of words perk up when they hear as their teacher reads aloud “His long chin faded into an apologetic beard.” (Tuck Everlasting, Babbitt, 1975, p. 17) or “The house felt as lifeless as a tomb.” (The Half-A-Moon-Inn, Fleischman, 1980, p. 10).

Researchers have shown that word consciousness is something that develops in classrooms where teachers themselves are conscious of words. Judith Scott, in collaboration with a group of teacher-researchers, implemented a project called the Gift of Words. The emphases of teachers in the project varied. Some used literature circles as the context for developing word consciousness, while others concentrated on their students’ use of rich vocabulary in writing. While the emphases differed, several processes were similar. Trade books written by authors who use unusual and picturesque vocabulary were prominent in the classrooms. Further, these phrases and words were the source of group and class discussions. Discussions might focus on the various synonyms that an author uses for a known concept (e.g., apologetic rather than sorry; idle or languid rather than lazy). Words and phrases were posted in classrooms to remind students of interesting vocabulary.

After viewing artifacts of student work and achievements, Scott and her colleagues concluded that teachers were able to influence their students’ word consciousness. Students developed in understanding about the appropriateness of words in different registers such as an academic setting relative to a conversational one. Teachers also reported that their students were more willing to take risks with new words. In writing and in speech, students experimented with words that they had not used before the project. Students increased in their interest and use of vocabulary. These teachers had truly given their students the gift of words.