E66|Linking Automaticity, Vocabulary, and Text With Dr. Freddy Hiebert

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Despite ongoing reading reform for decades, we still wrangle with chronic underachievement in reading proficiency. My guest today argues that we've missed a critical piece of the puzzle, and that is reading automaticity. Today she explains why recognizing words is foundational, and how misunderstandings about fluency, vocabulary, and text complexity have set us back, and what we can do about it.

Our guest today is Dr. Freddie Hebert. She is a renowned literacy researcher with a career spanning four decades and is currently the founder and CEO of Text Project. Lots of takeaways for classroom instruction and the broader reading instruction context. After the show, make sure to stick around for Jake's take on the topic.

So Dr. Heapert, what is reading automaticity and why does it matter?

And if you're getting the right kinds of text There'll always be some words you've likely not encountered before. So automaticity, I I'm concerned with silent reading automaticity. We often use

it's gonna be really, really hard for you to keep, you know, the storyline, keep the schemata of what you're reading. So that's what automaticity is. And like like I said, when E.B.U.E. was the first to really talk about that in regard to reading education and that was 1907, and then um Jay Samuels and um his colleague LaBurge at Minnesota.

um began applying it, the initial application was actually in silent reading. But it turned out that at that point when um Jay was Talking about reading automaticity in the 70s, we really didn't have very good measures of silent reading, rate with comprehension. And one of the things is I think that that situation has changed. We can easily capture A maze, that's M-A-Z-E, or close assessment, you know, where every seventh word is.

kids have an opportunity to either write a substitution or the what what needs to go there or uh pick from a couple choice. So we can now have silent reading that gives you some idea of the rate at which kids are are reading with comprehension. I always want to point out that it's with comprehension.

However, we have to remember that that is an indicator of automaticity. It's not directly measuring automaticity itself. But it is quick, it is relatively easy to administer, it is cheap and it has pretty good predictive validity. So I I think in that sense it's a smart move to be screening students with something like an oral curriculum based measure of reading.

However, when we think about modalities, the times when it really counts, like say on a state end of year summative reading assessment, thinking of like an ACT or an SAT, or thinking of a student just reading a book for enjoyment or for a school project. The automaticity that really matters there is silent reading automaticity. And so we'll get into stamina a bit here in a little bit, but

We do want automaticity for much longer than one minute, right? One minute should be a very low bar for what we want our students to be able to read automatically with. We actually do want them to be able to persist through text for for much longer than a minute. So just shifting gears here a little bit, I want to talk about the core vocabulary because this is an area that you have done research in for decades and understand the distribution of words.

better than anyone else. So talk to us what is the core vocabulary and why should teachers

group. There are about 2,500 morphological families. Those are words that it's they're not a simple task. I'm I'm not trying to communicate that because many of the words are frequent, because in fact They take on lots of different meanings. So many of them are multi-meaning words. That's an important thing to keep in mind. But you need to have that base. And all the words don't appear at once, all those twenty five hundred morphological families and their members don't appear all at once.

So there are particular words that appear in grade one and two, and actually some of that core vocabulary doesn't really appear till you're in beginning of high school. It's a fairly small percentage of the core vocabulary. But what I'm saying is whatever grade level of reading you're on, there's likely a group of words that account for the majority of the words in text that you have to be pretty automatic.

There's another group of words that I call the low frequency words. So the core vocabulary is made up of very highly frequent words. Those are the first thousand words. They aren't just words like the and of. There are lots of different words, including increasingly, right? Words that appear typically in academic text. A word like government, for example, is in the a thousand most frequent words.

But you've got then a medium frequency group. And that medium frequency group probably accounts for about 15 to 16% of the words in text that kids read. Again, I want to emphasize You don't need to know all the words in grade one. Some of those words keep appearing. You know, the age of acquisition of the words isn't such that you would expect them to be in grade one text.

possibly like the word government or citizens, but those words in the high and medium group are the core vocabulary. But then there's another group. of lower frequency words that account for about four percent of the words in text. And again, that percentage stays pretty consistent. But the words aren't all the same from grade to grade to grade. So we've published some papers showing that these percentages

are fairly consistent, but that the words differ at different age groups, right? There's some words, of course, that are going to be across

All grades, a word like read or and or of. And then there's two or three percent of the words in most texts that are fairly rare. And that's where you actually need to have your core vocabulary and those lower frequency words at your disposal. You have to be pretty fast with them because you're always gonna see a a couple of rare words. And in the main, the words are rare because they don't occur a whole lot, but they also don't occur very frequently, even within a single text.

So a rare word might just appear a single time if you're thinking of a core reading program. I mean You know, Barbara Foreman established about twenty years ago that about seventy percent of the words in grade one core reading programs that were adopted in Texas in 2000 actually only appeared one time in the text.

Cry isn't enough to get very good at the word. Uh, if you're thinking of a core reading program. I mean You know, Barbara Foreman established that about 20 years ago that about 70% of the words in grade one core reading programs that were adopted in Texas in 2000 actually only appeared one time in the text. Pry isn't enough to get very good at the word. Okay, so... Is that explaining the core vocabulary sufficiently?

You know, I've seen ninety five percent thrown around, I've seen ninety eight percent thrown around. Regardless we can say upper nineties, that in order for a text to really be understood at a bare minimum

the vast majority, like nearly one hundred percent of the words need to be able to be read accurately if there's a chance at comprehending. And what what I see your contention as being is that it's not only about accuracy here, it's also about Automaticity that not only do the high frequency words, but also the medium frequency words and the low frequency words.

Need to be read with a pretty sufficient degree of accuracy and automaticity so that students can tackle the rare words that exist in a text. And rare words aren't just words that occur in upper grades or a secondary context, but you're saying that rare words actually are happening across all grade levels of text. There just might be different rare words that are occurring. Am I interpreting this correctly?

somebody called Emmett Betts, was a very good clinician. He was a professor at I think it was Penn State, but he said, you know, here are levels at which you can read w without much stumbling around. He called it independent level, independent level and then instructional level and frustration level. Keep remembering when he was doing that, we had a very controlled set of text.

So we actually had a pretty good idea of what was in those percentages. That changed when we moved to authentic text in the early nineties. And there are some people who have very adamantly opposed the instructional level concept.

available for folks who listen to the podcast. But I use the um benchmark of ninety five percent to give a rough idea. That's what Daryl Morris uses. He's got a very, very good intervention that he's worked on. And if you look at ninety-five percent, I mean what I'm interested in is at what grade level on something like the Dibbles do kids attain that level? And I and and keep remembering the content of the text. on on assessments like Dibbles change with every grade, right?

So you're not just looking at a uniform text that the grade one kids are reading and that the grade six kids are reading. They're different texts. But we see that most kids get Um kids at about the what the 13th percentile and above are at that benchmark level by about the end of grade. You know, half of the kids actually have attained it at the end of grade one.

twenty-five percentile at the end of grade two and and then the thirteenth percentile at the end of grade three. So once you kind of get to that level, I I think we really need more people studying this question, Jake. of what the what the, you know, the thresholds are and also how different decoding patterns figure into that. So if you are at A 95% benchmark level at grade one, what are the decoding patterns that you have really, really massive?

So I think that there's an interaction here. So I'm I'm not I don't wanna be quoted like that I'm resurrecting Bets's levels. That's not what I'm doing. I'm not saying you should only be reading at this level or you should only be doing that. I am gonna argue really strongly. that to become fluent. So when you're actually doing fluency practice, not just working on comprehension. To grapple with complex ideas to

where the teacher does some s you know, scaffolding. I'm not meaning reading the text for the kids, but is there to support kids with vocabulary and the content of the text. But when kids are reading things for fluency, I think you have to be pretty careful that the number of rare words isn't too high. Because if you spend all your time figuring out the rare words, you're not getting more automatic with the core vocabulary, right? And I think that's when I look at fluency, um, passages.

I'm getting ready to go to a conference and I've just been looking at 40 fluency passages that are part of an intervention for adolescents. I wouldn't predict that the kids would get much faster with the core vocabulary from those texts, because there's so many rare words. The rare words are maybe eight percent in some texts. And keep remembering, one of the biggest contributors to rare words are proper names. And proper names are really an interesting challenge.

'Cause often a proper name retains the pronunciation of the language of origin, right? And I have yet to see a reading program where kids are taught anything about how to pronounce proper names. And the deal is, you know, proper names aren't in dictionaries. They're an encyclopedia. Proper names in a sense. Unless you name your kid something like apple, you know, or tangerine. Um, a proper name typically doesn't really have any specific meaning.

And then ask ourselves, what does it take? What requisite skill is the student going to have to have with uh decoding skill, decoding knowledge with word knowledge, other areas, but what is it actually going to take to be able to understand, be able to access that text? That 18% of the words on the middle of your first grade Acadience assessment, Dibbles assessment, are multi-syllabic. So, in other words, the first time.

that students are expected to read a connected text passage, they are coming in contact with multisyllabic words, and a similar proportion of those words was also multi-morpheme. The implication there being that we can't think of multisyllabic word reading as being exclusively a skill needed for adolescents, for upper elementary, middle school, high school students, because of the very fact that students are encountering multisyllabic words on first grade curriculum-based measures.

The implication there being that if we're not supporting students with reading longer, more complex words as early as first grade, they're going to have a hard time accessing grade level text. So I I see what you're saying here. Yes, specific letter name patterns and repetition with high frequency phonics patterns are going to absolutely matter for proficient. Reading, but we also need to be thinking about the distribution of words that students are actually going to be encountering.

in text in grade level content and providing scaffolding, exposure, automaticity, accuracy support to those. 'Cause you know, if a kid can decode a word, that's great.

But they also have to be able to they also have to have that word in their vocabulary knowledge. They have to know that that word is a word in order for them to know that they've read it A correctly, but B also leverage that word for meaning within a text. So There are bottom-up things that are happening when we read, obviously decoding aspects that happen, but there are also top-down language things that are happening when we are reading a text.

in large, large sets of data. So I mean what we've been doing is analyzing about, I think in the last study, let me just see here, a hundred thousand words for six grade levels. So six hundred thousand words. And what we're seeing is incredible consistency in those in that core vocabulary and also in the low frequency vocabulary. And the low frequency, I I just want to caution that, you know, a lot of those words.

in the low frequency vocabulary are really concrete items. So it's not like every word needs to be taught. Some of them are like, you know, a word like panda or like alligator will be in that group. So What I'm also looking at is how do you differentiate the groups of words in the low frequency area and all in the low frequency zone and also in the rare vocabulary.

You know, are there ways you can connect them so that you're not, you know, thinking that you have to teach kids every single word? You know, we've always been cherry picking vocabulary. And have we really always gotten the right vocabulary? But What I wanna iterate here, I think this is a really important point.

The words in the low frequency vocabulary for grade one kids and grade three kids and five, seven, and nine aren't precisely the same words, but there are particular words that at those grade levels are important. So we see the percentages stay pretty consistent. And what happens is that high and medium frequency vocabulary Changes a bit as you go along. So some words drop out, right? So words like stop and hop and pop aren't gonna be in middle grade text.

And there are going to be some words in middle grade text that you don't see in first grade text. So there's changes, but the percentages of words stay pretty consistent.

So that might be a great word for vocabulary instruction or maybe decoding instruction. You know, you've got a nice blend there at the beginning. There's the digraph at the end. The A is actually saying the aw sound, like in wallet. So there are some

orthographic features there that are interesting that, you know, might be worth teaching for decoding or might be worth teaching with vocabulary. But swath is actually a very rare word. And at some point we wanna be thinking of and I don't know how to quite word this in today's context, but yes, we wanna be teaching students systematically the code, but

Can we also play some money ball and be able to support students in the code with words they're very likely to come in contact with a lot when they're in text and not just a very small You know, the place I see this is in like early elementary decodables where words are orthographically transparent but, you know, perhaps not all that common. You know, uh some words I've seen I've jotted down are like crag, like from a rock or a cliff or

to bilk someone or vein like a weather vein, V A N E or Spud like a potato, you know, informal name for potato. So thinking about, yes, we want to teach students the code, but we also want to make sure that we are not just giving them lots of practice in these really rare niche words that they're actually not gonna encounter a ton. So in other words saying that teaching kids the systematic code with words that they're going to encounter in text a lot.

So for example, at Text Project, I have a set of texts called Topic Reads for Primary Kids that You know, I don't write comprehensive curriculum, but the texts are intended to give kids more experience with high impact phonics patterns. and and and concepts that they should know about. You know, like There's a great set of texts about mud and the texts are always in sets of four or a set of texts on pigs, like tricks you can do that pigs can learn to do, or how pigs can actually get sunburned.

Which I hadn't known. I mean I know I now have learned a lot about pigs, but my point is that what I wanna do with any beginning test Is ensure that kids are reaching into their oral language, but are also connecting ideas and learning some things from what they're. So this is why, you know, a Text Project, we have, I don't know, several hundred texts that are around interesting topics. You know, I I just wrote some texts on drones and bots. And those are great words.

for teaching kids about certain patterns. But I wanted to do it in a set, you know, and then there's also some other things related to mechanical things that kids might might want to build. You know, so a set of text that has a bunch of things that are interesting so you can connect your ideas. That the background knowledge is just vital. I mean, we can get crazy about all kinds of stuff. But keep remembering, reading is about learning.

It's including about the human experience, right? I mean, stories tell us a lot about who we are as human beings. So that's important. But just having vacuous little decoding text about vats and and um hams that have tags on them and whatever, that's that's not a good use of kids' time.

Those aren't three mutually separate silos, but that they can actually in fact be one and the same.

'Cause you've got three different patterns there, right? You've got the open syllable, like in go, you've got a and an e at the end, and then you have two letters together that that make a single sound. A single sound that is the sound of one of the letters, which is different than a diphthong like in OI for the word point or boy. So I think we just hurry over that much too quickly. So I've really emphasized in this topic reads that I've generated, I've just really emphasized long belt.

And there are some really cool topics, you know, like about snakes and reefs and like uh a coral reef and the deep sea. They're they're really interesting things that you can learn about that are interesting.

There's no signing up for anything. What you do with Text Project is just available to practitioners, which I think is absolutely

we read to learn things, which is why I make such a big deal about having interesting topics and by the way, interesting photographs and illustrations. And I'm not describing the Fontus and Panel, you know, look at the picture to help you figure out the word or, you know, it has to have a good picture text mess. That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying kids need some engagement to look at text. I I just see so many fluency programs that are just black little squiggles on a white page. And I want kids to be eager to find out about things. So I make a big deal about pictures. I do want to just do an aside here and say I'm I'm worried that as we generate more text with AI, there's going to be more of that lack of attention to what can support inviting kids into the text. That's basically what I'm saying about.

So a Text Project, partly'cause we're a not for profit, we can get just really great. often royalty free. And I really, really value that. So I've kind of lost my train of thought. I was talking about why would you need to read a lot to amass information you have to read a lot. But the you know, I'm a true believer in statistical learning. So if I've only read, say like twelve minutes a day during my third grade year.

It's unlikely that some of the words that are really, really critical in the core vocabulary are going to actually have been repeated a couple of times across different situations. And keep remembering, you know, we want to see some words repeated in ta in in a single text, but it's also important. to see words in different contexts. And that's been one of the exciting findings, I think, of semantic variability is the field that that's come from.

Statistically, you know, if you haven't seen those words very often, you're not going to be very good at So that's why volume is important. And I think having some accessible text, having some text that's challenging, I think you have to have a, you know, a a diet. That gives you the opportunity to develop automaticity. And a lot of American kids need that in their reading diet, which is

Hence, we do a lot of those texts. I write a lot of those texts. And second of all, it it's helping you build knowledge and also building your knowledge of patterns, expectation of patterns. I'm looking at an assessment where people found that the word spiny and spiky kids didn't Spiny, but they got the word spiny. Why would that be?

It always appears as P-I-C-K or I C K. It makes a whole lot of sense. Those two words, really different patterns of of recognition. And I'm saying that's one of the things you gain. From doing a lot of reading. I mean Seidenberg, Mark Seidenberg, you know, talks about your attention to patterns as you do more reading. So I'm actually saying I'm seeing programs now that are claiming that they're teaching every single letter sound correspondence in English.

One of them advertises a hundred and fifty of them and I'm kinda going, If you really want to kill a kid's interest, that's what I would do. But the deal is that some of those patterns don't appear in that many words, and just to have a lesson on it isn't gonna be enough. What Seidenberg is saying is once you pick up some of those patterns that occur frequently, you're gonna start being able to extend to the patterns that don't appear as frequently.

I think the argument here is that if From an automaticity standpoint, even if kids are reading those words accurately but those words aren't being automatically processed, and if those are the words that are bogging kids down, it's gonna be really hard for them to be able to have a deep understanding of what the text is talking about to comprehend the text because the cognitive resources are being devoted to just processing the words to get through

And one of the things about compound words is a lot of them are idiosyncratic. You know, a cowboy is not a boy cow. And a firehouse isn't a house on fire. And I think sometimes when you speak English, even for somebody like me who learned it as a second language, but as a child. You don't realize how weird some of those words are. And they're used in early texts. And so I'm saying you have to be around it a lot. You have to be around and and it has to be interesting and it has to

have some level of engagement. That's why I I must be a child at heart because I don't put anything onto Text Project unless when I look at it the final time before we post it. I'm still interested in it. And so I mean like the scales of snakes. I think snakes are creepy, but it's really interesting to read about the scales of snakes and also how snakes Shed their skin. Those are great words for decoding development. So I'm just saying you can do both. You can have engaging text.

And you can also ensure that kids read a lot and develop this, as you were saying, this generalization ability. That's the thing we do as human beings, right? We generalize. Once we don't, we're in trouble. A little kid generalizes some things about what chairs are. That's just not

A particular chair, you know, that's that's why there's such a difference between proper names and common nouns, right? Because a chair can take on lot has as a function and we can define it, which is different than a proper noun.

uh the the average orph rates for that grade level to find out how many minutes of reading a particular program has has per day. And in a lot of cases we're seeing that the reading volume in popular core reading programs is actually fairly low, like single digits, low teens.

Why do you think that is? And I mean, is the remedy for that just for teachers to start supplementing with their their own texts or how how prevalent is the issue of low reading volume and how might we address that with our students?

was a from nineteen fifty seven was actually used by the guys when they wrote the comic. We tried to get them not to not use it, but they actually said texts had been really dumbed down. So let me just give you some stats here. In nineteen seventy four, the amount of texts increased the relationship between the number of words and the number of repetitions increased substantially from fifty-seven to seventy-four and then it just

rose incredibly high in 1995 when we went to authentic literature. So at that point you start seeing text that they start looking at authentic text. So then you have to have all the pictures in it. Right? And so you don't have as many words. So you go from having texts with maybe forty or fifty thousand words in a third grade program in the seventies to having maybe eighteen thousand in the nineteen nineties now.

We have to check on that number before anybody quotes me on that. But what I'm just saying is the numbers changed a lot and the number of unique words changed a lot. So that by grade one in nineteen ninety-five, the ratio the number of different words per hundred that first graders were seeing was the same as what fourth graders saw in nineteen fifty-seven. That one I can say definitely. And the ratio of frequent to rare words

was the same for first graders in nineteen ninety-five as it was for fourth graders in nineteen fifty-seven. Now, Shaw was right when she criticized the nineteen fifties books as being too repetitive. But we've gone kind of crazy with it. So I'm just saying from, you know, really kind of slow moving text, we've gone to the point where by first grade, I mean The texts are really, really hard. And the common core statement that texts have been dumbed down across the board was incorrect.

be within a reasonable amount of complexity of what they would need to be able to tackle in the college and career realm. But the second prong of that was that uh the authors of the Common Core were asserting that text complexity had actually decreased. in the decades prior to the creation of the copy. And so it was it was packaged as a coarse correction that that text complexity needs to be increased to bring it back to what the complexity was in in previous areas.

But what you're saying is that well f if the the evidence actually points to the contrary on that second prong then text complexity was not actually decreasing in the decades leading up to the Common Core, but had actually increased substantially in and it sounds like nineteen ninety five being a focal point of that shift. Am I understanding that correctly?

I I mean, I think this is why I'm such a crusader for automaticity, because I think kids need some text that they can access. and learn to be exposed to the high and medium frequency vocabulary so that in fact they can they can deal with the text that they're encountering on their state tests and also in the reading program.

We also see a lot of emphasis on third grade reading and reading on grade level by the end of third grade. And something you've pointed out is that might not be as important a focal point as

perhaps it's made out to be. Talk to us about third grade reading and help us understand help us understand why there is such an emphasis around reading on grade level by the end of

From my perspective, as the texts have gotten harder, Which is what happened in the nineties. So all of the work that Charles had done saying the texts were too easy got reflected in policies like becoming a nation of readers. It's just, you know, don't don't dumb down text is what we said in becoming a nation of readers. So we start having really, really challenging text.

in the nineteen nineties, authentic text. Remember we said you can only read authentic text, then California and and Texas started having decodable text. But even those didn't have a lot of repetition of words. That wasn't a requirement for those texts. It was have you covered all the letter sound correspondence? And and texts were evaluated by the degree to which a letter sound correspondence had been handled in a teacher's manual, if it had been in a lesson.

Then words with that pattern could be used in a text. So what did we do when the text gets so hard? 2000 with No Child Left Behind, we push beginning reading into kindergarten. And now the stuff that little kindergarten kids are seeing are stuff that probably, you know, wasn't really dealt with till the end of first grade through the through the eighties.

So the problem isn't that there's a particular level at third grade. I'm saying it's not third grade where you have to like it's all done. And if you're not there at third grade, then you're really in trouble. What I'm saying is that It works for half the kids, our current curriculum, but for the half that come to school, depending on schools to be the place to learn to read, it's not working.

What I'm suggesting is we have to be very aware that to learn to read in a quasi-orthographic language like English, English has a lot of inconsistencies. It has consistencies. But also a lot of inconsistencies. Studies done in Europe have shown that it takes about two to two and a half times as long for kids to learn to read in English or other com or other variable uh orthographies like English.

than it does in a consistent orthography like like Finnish. So what we're saying now is if you don't reach a certain level by kindergarten and then by second grade and by third you know, I mean, we've got all these benchmarks that when I look at them, I just think You you you can't do that. Nobody's ever, you know, really shown that you could actually take that staircase of text complexity and move kids at that kind of rate. I want to emphasize that it was a hypothetical. Construction.

just like our national assessment of educational progress is an aspirational assessment. We aspire that our kids will get to this level of proficiency. Has anybody ever shown what kind of finances it takes to have an entire cohort meet that? So I think what I'm suggesting here, Jake, is not dumbing down standards. I don't want to be interpreted to say that.

But I think we have to be very careful with the time that we have with our children. And I think we have to do a lot of thinking about the nature of instruction, how long some of these these ideas take to generalize. How much text kids are seeing. Those are important kinds of things. And I'm going to continue to work on this as long, you know, for a very, very long time.

I anticipate many more years. In fact I feel some days like I'm just starting out. But I think we have to really revisit both the methods that we're using and the pace at which we're moving. our very youngest little guys. And the expectations. It's kind of like if you don't know this by the end of kindergarten, there's something wrong with you.

There isn't. There's something really complex about our orthography. And it takes a long time to figure some of that out. And you've got to really be involved with it, which is why I keep providing all these texts. You know, every single day I write a couple. And I love doing that. And I think some of the writing is even easier and more fun now that I've got AI to play with. But we need to also be careful with that, that we don't produce a lot of more silliness, you know.

intensity, there's less there's less of a data-driven perspective to support readers. And and what you're saying is that

if a kid doesn't reach reading on grade level by the end of third grade and that that is an an admirable goal, but they're not doomed. That for some kids it just takes time in the quasi regular English orthography, and we need to be willing to, as a system, be able to go the distance with these students and still provide really targeted intentional support in fourth grade and fifth grade.

throughout the grades to be able to support students reading proficiency and to take what they have and to to to value and say this is what the student can do. How do we build on that? How do we build on their accuracy, their automatic automaticity, their multisyllabic word reading, their background knowledge, linguistic structure? third grade shouldn't be as perhaps an end all be all, but we should be doing a better job throughout the advan

And I you're spot on when you're saying what happens in the middle grades of developing vocabulary and um and interests and background knowledge is just So vital. Jake, y you always give me far too much credit. And I value what you're doing and uh I really appreciate this opportunity. And I thank you so much for being my partner in learning. You're you're a great colleague. And I hope we get to do some things for a very long time.

also developing maze assessments to help with vocabulary. So I'm really optimistic about what's gonna what is possible, whether we choose to do the things that are possible, I don't know. That's going to depend on people like you, uh, who are going to carry the banner and the teachers that we work with. Um, but I'm really excited about how we can select words. It's not cherry picking anymore. It's looking at networks of words. AI is fabulous at creating semantic grids.

like words that go from blaze to glow, for example. You know, they'll they'll give you a whole range of words that that you you can see how they relate. They serve slightly different functions and stories, you know, they're not the same word, same meaning, but um they're semantic maps that can be created that can help teachers understand things in text. So I think it's that's an exciting time. I'm enjoying it.

a classroom teacher doesn't necessarily have a lot of influence on the types of text that are being used by major curriculum companies or what the specific policy is and We can always be advocates and always be involved and engaged. But but at the same time, to an extent f things are the way that they are. the is bigger than what a lot of teachers are are able to influence. So I'm always really interested in how do we play the game the way that it's been set up to play.

And we can always work and advocate and strive to change the game for the better, but we can't just wait to change the game for the better. We actually have students that are in classrooms today that need us to play the game that it's been designed to play and to play. And the thing that stuck out to me from Dr. Hebert is she said from the very beginning of her career, she's always asked herself, what is the task required of the student? And and regardless of what the the bigger picture is.

That's a question that we should be asking ourselves every single day. That's what teachers, coaches, principals, district personnel, that's what reading researchers, we should be asking ourselves. What is the task for the reader every single day? And uh Dr. Hubert connected that with automaticity because grade level text is challenging text.

We've got to really be very intentional with getting our students to a level of automaticity with grade level text such that we can actually do really productive things in the comprehension range. So it's automaticity as a tool, as a leverage point, not just speed, right? Not just moving through a text fast, but being able to process it with a a low amount of bandwidth. One of the most influential books I've I've read in my life was the book Moneyball. It's way better than the movie.

You you need to read the book Moneyball, but Moneyball's really all about accumulating a lot of really small gains together and accumulating small gains and perhaps unconventional You know, the idea of spiny being harder to read than the word spiky. that that blows my mind. If you look at those two words, they are so orthographically similar, but because the P I N and the I N in English occur with a short vowel sound.

much more frequently that students are more likely to read that as spinny, which we can't blame them for that. But we can't teach our students every single irregular word within the English orthography. We have to expose them to enough text. That they can, you know, the efficient way to do it, the money ball way to do it, say, well, which which letter sound correspondences occur the most frequently in

And let's systematically teach students those. Let's expose students to those. And then at some point the reading volume acts as the counterbalance to that where we can start to generalize those common letter sound patterns into you know, words that are are more irregular. And of course we give students strategies for reading irregular words, especially multisyllabic irregular words, but thinking about how do we accumulate a lot of small gains Together in order to promote overall

you know, often we see fluency, quote unquote like fluency instruction as sort of siloed from comprehension, you know, instruction. And I think what Dr. Hebert's talking about here is well Because automaticity is actually in the service of comprehension, those don't have to be siloed. That any text we want to read for meaning, we can consume it in ways that are going to be productive for automaticity's state. And in a lot of cases that's going to mean for a teacher to scaffold it if it is great.

Always a lot to think about with Dr. Hebert. The resources she's mentioned, I have linked them in the show notes. But that's that's my take on today's discussion. This is Jake with the Teaching Literacy Podcast, and until next time, let's work together to make reading and writing instruction even better.