Beyond Reading “Level”: How Small Differences in Vocabulary Demands Affect Reading Success
May was a productive month for TextProject with the publication of two studies that have been a long time in development and refinement. The studies examined students at two points in the developing reading period: first graders and second graders, but both show how relatively small differences in vocabulary demands can substantially affect students’ success. Together,… read more
Presenting Multisyllabic Strategies for Adolescent Readers
As students move into middle and high school, challenges with multisyllabic words come to the fore. Freddy asks how corpus linguistics could pinpoint the multisyllabic words most worth teaching. read more
Knowing Word Parts Isn’t the Same as Knowing Words
Morphology teaching frequently stops at the pieces — students drill prefixes and suffixes in isolation, fill in charts, match roots to definitions — without ever encountering those element in real texts. What learners also need is sustained engagement with texts where morphologically rich vocabulary appears in context. It’s the combination — explicit guidance and meaningful… read more
