Vocabulary Development Through Morphology, Semantics and Complex Text - Elfrieda Hiebert

Welcome to for the love of literacy, where we connect the latest research on language and literacy to innovative instructional methods. I'm Bruce Hallett, a semi-retired special education teacher who struggled with reading, spelling, and settings writing for decades. I'm also the author of Sparking the Reading Shift and Sparking the Fluency Shift. Today, David Ray and I are excited to discuss vocabulary development and its relationship to morphology, semantics, and complex text with El Frida, Ready Hebert. Ready's book, Teaching Words and How They Work, Small Changes for Big Vocabulary Results, is only 120 pages long, but has transformed my understanding of literacy more than any other book. Ready is also the founder and driving force behind textproject.org, an incredible and free resource that provides reading materials and activities that make literacy and vocabulary instruction richer and easier to implement. Together, Teaching Words and TextProject.org do two things that all educators with innovative instructional methods must do, provide an easy path for implementation and a rich source for teaching materials. Today, we'll talk about both resources as well as vocabulary development and the importance of complex text. Welcome, Freddie. Dr. Hebert is, quote, retired, end quote, professor who is taught at the University of Skontucky, Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, Michigan, and other schools. Freddie also has degrees in history and elementary education as well as a PhD in Educational Psychology. She has published extensively, including with Nell Duke, P. David Pearson, Judith Scott, Amanda Goodwin, and William Nagy. Dr. Nagy was also my co-host, David Ray's PhD advisor, where he studied vocabulary and morphology development. Davis is speech language pathologist who is trying to implement stronger literacy and language practices in an elementary school in Washington state. Welcome, Freddie. When I first read Teaching Words and How They Work, I didn't understand the importance of complex text. I actually didn't understand the importance of vocabulary in literacy development. Before we get into textproject.org, I'd like to let you discuss the relationship between text reading and our stagnant reading scores. In a blog you shared with me a year ago, you discussed this relationship between reading simplified text, including level books and decodables, and the reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nations Reading Report Card. Could you update us on this important topic? Well, first of all, Bruce and Dave, thank you so much for having me on. It's really a privilege to be able to talk with people who are as committed as you are to our future. The topic of text complexity underlies so much of what we do in reading instruction. And yet, at this particular time, I would be hard pressed to know what text at particular grade levels represent. We have moved very dramatically from a model that was very graded. So up to about the early 1990s, we were pretty clear of somebody said, this is a third grade text. And subsequently to that, we've really moved to authentic text in terms of core reading programs. And we've seen some real challenges at times. And we've also seen some interesting patterns in terms of the National Assessment. So let me clarify some things about the questions that I've raised about the National Assessment scores. One of the things about the National Assessment, it is an aspirational assessment. So it's not an assessment that's based on any kind of norming or summary of what students have done. When one is asked to be on the NAP Framework Committee, the mandate actually says the members of the committee are to describe their aspirations, what they would hope for. So when we describe declining scores, we are probably the only country in the world that reports to their public something that is an aspiration, something we hope for. In some sense, it would be like saying, we want all of our kids to be expert at running the speed. And then we find out they don't. So the issue about declining NAP scores is really one of interpretation. So what I've been looking at in my research is what can we actually tell from large databases, like Dibbles? So Dibbles is generous in providing their reports, open access to anyone. And I've been using those to ask how many of our students, and they also provide the text, so I can actually calibrate the students' performances with the text. And what we actually see is our students are doing remarkably well in terms of accuracy. I mean, even kids from the 10% tile on up are doing pretty well. But where their incredible difficulties are is with automaticity. And I think one of the things you see with the National Assessment and our claims of declining scores is that if you don't read a whole lot, and you're really slow at it, to read a text of 600 or 700 words, which is the typical length of a passage on the fourth grade National Assessment, you're not going to do really great with that. Especially if that text has a high percentage of words you've not encountered before. So most texts that we can give kids like in core reading programs, or even, by the way, in a magazine article that you might give, or even in decodable texts, in most texts, there are about three to five words per hundred that an all likelihood kids haven't seen before. And what I've been really emphasizing in the work that I do is that we really need to have a vision of some different kinds of texts in a kid's text diet. So one kind of text might be the one like Jake Downs used in a recent study that we published in reading research quarterly. What he did is he took text and the control condition, actually had much easier texts. But what he did is he took those three words that kids have probably not seen before per hundred. And he actually gave kids a lot of practice with those words. And it turned out that they did substantially better in accuracy, but not fluency. And that's exactly what I'd expect. So to become fluent what you want are texts that are loaded with the words that account for the majority of the words in text, but don't have the high percentage, the three to five percent of words that kids haven't encountered before. And when they do encounter hard words, those words need to be repeated. So one of the things that we've really let go of in our text selection process in this also applies, by the way, to decodable texts. We haven't been asking for percentages of repetition. And if you look at linear Eerie's work, David Shere, Chuck Perfetti, everybody talks about the need of repetition of vocabulary, right? And what we want is for kids to have opportunities to be reading texts that are highly accessible for part of the text diet, not the whole one. So what I'm saying is complex texts that we want kids to have, but there's also texts that's going to support automaticity. And what we do at text project, all the texts, the text project, have been written according to a model that moves kids up, a staircase of automaticity, not the common core staircase, but a staircase of automaticity. So the top of the staircase isn't just any novel or any book. It's not a Harry Potter. What it is, it's a text that has the 5,000 word families represented. Once you get to that top of that automaticity staircase, it actually means that you're now, you've encountered these words a lot of times. That's what leads to automaticity. I like that. I love that your book on sparking fluency. And what I'm saying is not just any text supports fluency or automaticity. Joe Torgasin used to say that Freddie always engineers her text. And just because you engineer them doesn't mean that they aren't engaging. When I was a little kid in Saskatchewan, they had an invented ADHD yet. But I'm fairly confident that I would have been one of the kids who would have had that classification. And I have a pretty active mind. And for a text to go onto text project, it has to engage me. So every text that goes on in the last criteria does Freddie find it interesting. And I'm saying you can write texts that are very compelling, that help kids move up the staircase of text complexity and still provide a lot of information. One of that you talk about different types of text and intentional text, that seems to be what text projects resources are with you would define as intentional text as that, correct? So the text to text project, I have never come up with the best term. Sometimes I call them scaffolded text. Sometimes I call them intentional, but they are intentionally written. So just anywhere doesn't go in. So for example, I have something called time. and those are intended for kids. I'm really, really interested, especially in second graders. I think that's a key year that we often forget about. Jeannie Chal always talked about how critical it was for kids to really develop automaticity. The text that are in the topic reads primary are intended to increase automaticity once you have some fundamental foundational decoding skill. So, for example, in the second level, there are texts on snakes. You know who shed their skin and they have scales? Those are all really good. I think long vowel words are some of the words that we spend the least amount of time with. You know, spend so much time on short vowels. That's nice. And there's a one-to-one correspondence. But the deal is that there are lots of words in English where there isn't a one-to-one correspondence. And long vowel words is really the first word. Long vowel words is really the first time, right? That you encounter and where you really need a set for variability. So long vowels, I mean, there are three ways you can make them. You don't all act the same, right? They have the same sound, but they don't act the same. So, when you see a word in those texts that falls beyond the curriculum that I've established intentionally for that level, then the word should be repeated at least two or three times. Barbara Foreman did a study with David Francis and some other folks of the Texas adoption, the first year that they had really gone to some decodable text mandates. And that was the year 2000. And what she said is about 70% of the words in the set of grade 1 books, about 70% appeared a single time across the whole program. And I'm saying, when you get that level of new words, it's going to be really hard to become an automatic reader. I think this is the biggest issue we have. At TechSproject or at academia.edu, should be almost every paper I've ever written. And what I'm doing now is when journals allow it, my husband and I run a not-for-profit call TechSproject. And we use funds from our lives to fund it. But one of the things we spend money on is making sure that all of the things I publish are open access. Because I think we've had these firewalls and teachers haven't been able to get in and to read some of these papers. So I would really recommend to people to go on to TechSproject or academia where my papers are also. And take a look at this paper called "Flatting the Progression." So what I did is I took TechSprom about 20-year periods from 1957 to 2014. And each of those periods represented a critical literacy point. So 57 was when Jean-Chal had looked at TechS that she published and learning to read the Great Debate. 74 was the text that she had used to describe the fourth grade's form. 1995 was after California and Texas said they wanted authentic text and their core reading programs in 2014 came after the Common Core. I think this is one of the most important things I've ever studied. And here's what we found. So when I was in fourth grade in 1957 to the kids who were in first grade in 2014, the amount of lexical density, and by that means the number of different vocabulary words per hundred, my fourth grade text had the same percentage as first grade text in the middle. What I'm saying is we up the ante at the beginning. The jump at the beginning is really steep and then it flattens off. And that's why I mean I'm committed to generating texts that are going to support kids developing automaticity with often the words, you know, they've gotten so many different words in their programs, including a decodable text. Because there aren't any models right now that ask for repetition of words in decodable texts. They're asking for the appearance of letter sound correspondence. So often you find, I mean in the work that we've done, the same percentage of unique words in guided reading books and in decodable text. Not the same kinds of words necessarily, but the same numbers. So when I'm suggesting is that without some accessible, intentional, scaffolded text, I don't think we can solve these problems. And it's not just the decodability at the beginning. It's having opportunities to see some of these words in their patterns extensively. What's going to jump out to us if we look at beginning reads versus what kids are typically given now, like decodable texts or in schools? Well, what I've been doing recently, they're not on text project yet, is something that I call tiny reads. And what I've been doing, here's how I go about writing a text. So I'm going to write a text with short vowels. And I go in to databases. So I have access to, you know, the educators word frequency bug. We have nail done content at Florida State. They just put out this developmental English lexicon project. So we can actually look at the rash modeling of words, the difficulty in elementary grades. I can go to lots of different sources. And now I also have AI, which I didn't when I wrote beginning reads. And what I ask about is what's a topic that's likely a great interest to young children among animals. So I'll get all the names for baby animals. And then I look at those words and I select the words that fit the patterns that I want to instantiate, that I want to teach. So I'm gathering data on what occurs a lot and has these patterns. And one of the things I've always been interested in, if you think of Venn diagrams, and that's how I thought of beginning reads, think of a Venn diagram. What you want is something that's very high frequency, so kids see it a lot. So when we look at data on words, kids actually know, you know, kids who aren't doing particularly well, it actually turns out they're usually high frequency words, because they've seen them enough. I mean, I'm a great, great proponent of Mark Sidenberg's work in the notion of statistical learning. So I want words that are high frequency, but that are decodable. And I want a modicum of them to be concrete. Not concrete like the picture text match tried to tell us in level books, which was erroneous. They tried to say you need to use the picture to figure out, no, I'm not doing that. But it actually turns out that as human beings, it is much easier for us to learn a concrete word than it is an abstract word. So when I go into something with, you know, I look for words, because this is something Jean-Chal taught me when we were doing become an issue of readers. You know, Jean-Chal and is the belt back or both on that commission. And they actually gave this commission of cognitive scientists and all different, you know, a range of people. They gave us a real intensive on orthography and what you needed to do to become a good, good at word recognition in English. You know, Jean would always say, you can't recognize a word that you don't know at the beginning. I mean, later on, right, you're hoping that kids are reading and they're getting words that are new in their experience, but that's embedded in the text that they're reading. But initially, you can't decode a mystery if you don't know what the mystery. So I look for common ideas getting on a bus, on a school bus, or getting in your family van, or some of the ones that I've been writing now have to do with the long vowels like making slime or making a necklace. Both good words for kids in second grade in terms of long vowels and compound words. So that's how I start out. I always start out with bodies of information and keep remembering the beginning rates, the topic reads, everything is done in sets. Because the research is really clear that you need semantic variability to actually be learning a word deeply. So I don't want kids to just see a word in one book and then not see it in another. So I want to develop knowledge. All the things that I write are in sets of three or four. And I also want to note that I almost write exclusively informational text. And that's very intentional. That's another part of the intentional design. Here's why narrative writers who are good writers don't repeat the same verb over and over again to describe a character's action. Nor do they use the same word over and over again to describe a character's traits or feelings. I mean, I learned to read with Dick and Jane and they had obsessive compulsive disorder right where they would just continually repeat the same word over again. They would run, run, run, never just a single one. Well, a really good writer doesn't do that in a narrative. Narratives to get a good narrative. You've got to be really very inventive and an informational text. It's not that these aren't inventive texts that we write. It's exproject. But in informational text, it makes sense to repeat the words. A narrative writer is developing a concept through the way in which the characters are described. Or the movements are described or the problem is described. An informational writer is trying to explain like how do you make slime? What is it that you need? What are the ingredients? And it makes sense in informational text to repeat words. So a writer of a mathematics book doesn't run around looking for the saw rest to show you other words for equation. They use particular words. Another reason why we only do informational text intentionally at text project is that the kids who are most dependent for good instruction are also the kids that sometimes they're well loved. But sometimes they don't have the bodies of background knowledge they need to comprehend other texts. So we're always in ten. And I am just an incredible fan of semantic maps where kids were called. what it is they're learning. So they have a record of what the ideas are and how the ideas fit. You can trust the traditional 68 words per week of vocabulary instruction in schools with what you label as a generative approach using networks of words that are in relationships with each other. Can you tell us what are the limitations of typical vocabulary instruction? Why do you use it in schools? How does your new thinking help increase the effectiveness of our vocabulary teaching? So the 68 words a week, where exactly did that come from? And I've spent some time trying to find out and I think somebody in a publishing house and keep remembering William S. Gray at Scott Forzman and Albert Gates. It was Albert. It was not the Gates McGinning. So Gates was at what became McGraw Hill. I think one of them must have come up with the 68. So they pick 68, but the deal is if you've got a 600 word story, they're probably more than 68 words that kids might not know and keep remembering the kinds of words that you're going to need to know are going to be very different if it's informational text than if it's a narrative. So I can trace the 68 back to about 1930 when these people were running the core reading programs. But there was so much that's happened since that time that we can draw on. I mean, we are in a world of large language models. And what that means is, with digitization, we could put tons of text and analyze what the words were. So for example, the companies with the biggest data banks of words which we can't access because it's a priortorial, are metometrics and renaissance. And they have, you know, based on billions of words of text, they can actually tell you what the most frequent words are. And we have databases like Educators Word Frequency Book. But that was, you know, in a binder. It was, you know, in a book that you've actually had to go and back and visit. It got digitized. But now we can actually, by going into AI, and this is the first time I've used that term, but going into AI, we can actually get the information on these large language models of what words connect to each other. So when you take the 6 to 8, these words are often like, "I look at them." I mean, I usually, in presentations, show the 6 to 8 words. And when it's narrative, try to get the teachers to figure out what the story might be about. So the word to pick should have the essence of the story. You should be able to draw a semantic map. And by that, I mean, you know, put the key words, and then cluster around other words that are connected to that. You should be able to do that and actually tell your story from that map. And in informational text, you should be able to do that with the key, thematic words. If people don't know the Arreilly study out of ETS, I think the year is 2019, but it's a really important study that shows us about the importance of knowing particular words in relation to big topics. And what they've actually found out is, even if you might not know all the words in that text around that topic, if you know the key words, for example, habitat and climate zones, kids actually do better on the passages, because they have some place to anchor the words. So you know, and Chuck Profetti's "Lexicole" hypothesis, right? We're anchoring what we do. It's not a phylocabinate that we have in our brains. We actually are anchoring words that kind of looks like, you know, nodes and synapses like a semantic map. One of the reasons I really like to use it to help kids see, you know, we're connecting all these ideas. So rather than just taking these six to eight often seemingly random words, what we want to do is, I'm not saying that I'm going to have kids coming out of this knowing 60 words, but I want them to know the key ideas from the story, and then I want them to know that there are clusters of words that belong with that idea. You know that in stories, this wasn't immediate for me in learning. And it's taken me a while to actually understand this, but the words in stories cluster around the elements of story structure. So the unusual words are always going to be around characters, the problem, the motion of characters, the way they communicate, you know, if a character whispers, is said to whisper rather than eavesdrop, that's giving me some very different information, right? So we should actually be able to generate and help kids. And by the way, I am not suggesting, and I'm not suggesting that kids do this, but that AI is going to be the answer to everything, but I am suggesting that because AI has access to these large language models, it can access all these words much better than I can as an individual, right? Even if I have a very large database of children's books. So it can actually tell us how some of these words are connected. And that's exactly what we want to help kids do. You know, when you get to any kind of task, and the teacher is not there to help you with it, or hasn't picked out the hard words, the words in stories are always going to fit around these elements, and the stories in informational text are going to have a different kind of organization, depending on what the topic is, but they're going to focus on particular nodes again, of really important ideas. And that's what I want to remember from the story. And I also want to get more intensely into those groups of words. So you know, I might have a word like afraid, but over time, I actually want to build that network and know that there are words like terrified. So there's a whole network of words that I might learn. I've analyzed, I don't know how many thousands of stories, and I've yet to come up with some ideas of how characters act or who they are, or how they feel, what the problem is, that kids don't have a basic notion around. But what we haven't taught our kids is that once you have that basic notion, good writers are going to take you more deeply into that family of words, a semantic family. And to me, that's what we can do now with large language models. We can help kids generate a notion of how language works. So Freddie, I'd like to talk a little more about creating these networks of words, both in a child's head, but you actually have them in textproject.org in many different ways. Not just somatic maps, but you have super synonyms, which are incredibly important, exceptional expressions, which I'm sure we get into phrases and idioms. And even word roots where you can go back into the history, the etymology of words, I would just like to give you the chance to tell us more about the material, the wonderful material at textproject.org. So our materials at textproject fall into two groups. One are the texts that follow the staircase of automaticity and the other are vocabulary resources. And I started some of the first things we put on textproject were the exceptional expressions. And then the next one was super synonyms. And I did the exceptional expressions because I wanted kids to have the opportunity to see that some word that's used frequently, like the word stop, is a word that they're going to see in lots of different forms, that they're going to be some more sophisticated forms, but that stop is also used metaphorically in English. So the exceptional expressions and the super synonyms are getting the idea across that words are connected in these networks. And it's important to understand that a synonym doesn't mean exactly the same. There are nuanced meanings and we often use those words for different purposes. So those two are very explicit kinds of instructional lessons for teachers to develop in kids. One of the things that we do as human beings is we generalize. And we want our instruction to help kids generalize. And these two resources are intended to develop in kids as sense that English has lots of ways in which we can say something. And at some point we're really hopeful that part of that instruction, and I noticed that I'm not seeing it on the resource list explicitly, but I will put it on there, in my one single picture of the history of English. I don't know if you all have ever seen that, but it is to me one of the most profound things that I've made. And here's what the picture is. And I'll make sure that it's explicitly available once for this podcast. But it gives a broad worst in a baguette with some Greek yogurt, traveled over it. And that's the history of English. And this picture, I've asked big teachers, I think every kid should know what this picture means starting in third grade, at least. We need to know that English started out as this Anglo-Saxon Germanic language. And that is a language that does almost everything by compounding. So we have all these questions. count pounds like bratwurst. And then the French come along, take over England for a while, a couple hundred years, and they add baguettes, you know, something a little bit more sophisticated. It's not just broute, the German word for bread, it's baguette, okay? And that's where general academic vocabulary comes in, right? Are these more sophisticated words? The French words, the Latin-based words. And then the Renaissance comes along and gives us technical and scientific terms from Greek. And that's where the dabble of yogurt comes in. That's the story of English. And I think it's a really concrete way to talk with kids about why English has so many words. And that's why these exceptional expressions and the super synonyms are important. Because it's not that you don't know that basic idea of stop or happy, you've never encountered the word euphoric before, but I want to get kids to anticipate that good writers, and they can be good writers too, right? And their own writing are going to actually use the whole range of different words. So that's something that is really important to me that we provide a text project. We also, for the core ideas, for the core vocabulary, the 2,500 morphological family members, that account for what? About 92, 93% of the words in text, at least in the elementary grades, we have semantic maps that put those words in conceptual groups. And that's the way I want to actually teach it. Not by a list, you know, these single words appearing six to eight in a list, or even if I have something called, you know, general academic words. What I want to do is actually show kids conceptually how these words are related, and that there are different ways because we have, you know, remember the history of English, right? Because we have begets, we have broadwurst, and we have yogurt, and those all do some different things for us in terms of how we create words and how we learn words. You mentioned in the introduction to teaching words that you provide teaching materials as well as aids to implementation. So the subtitle of teaching words is small changes for big vocabulary results. You also talk about as far as the small changes, the four Cs, and how they result in this growth. And if you could go into that a little more, I think it's very important that people understand that there are huge barriers to even implementing fairly simple but complex ideas. Yeah, I've spent many, many years and many, many dollars trying to learn for myself how to enact things in my life that I want to be there. And I've been a great admirer of some folks who talk about the need for your change to be small and consistent. And I think that that's really applicable to a vocabulary because it's really one word at a time, right? One word can make a big difference, then another word, and then another word. So it isn't like, I'm going to teach you 100 new words right now. We're going to take a look at this word and see how it connects to other words. Oh, and by the time we're through with that set of words, this week there are about 100, but we didn't start out with all of them all at once. So for my own personal, I'm this decade, I've been walking from the North Pole to the South Pole virtually, and I do that one step at a time. It's about 12,000 miles, but I keep data on it. So I'm actually going to have gotten from the North to the South Pole by making some small changes in my life, which is to make sure that I walk every day at different times and that it adds up. I don't do all the walking up once for a day, but that it adds up to the amount that I need to make that goal. And so what I'm suggesting to teachers is, I really have a problem when policies come in, and they try to sweep everything away that was, and think that we can start a fresh, and that that's going to make some of the difference. I think as human beings, some of our changes that are the most lasting, if you do a lot of reading and habit formation, are things that you do. I choose to do this every day. I choose to walk up the stairs in my house to get to the printer as a small change. And you know what, that's made a big difference, rather than having the printer at beside me. So what I've suggested are these four C's that we have to think of some reading, and I talked earlier about, you know, that we have some reading that's very intentional, or scaffolded, or accessible texts that help us get a lot better. By the way, I think kids really need to be told these things about small changes too. To me, it's, you know, a text project, one of our sets of texts is called Teen Reads. And it turns out that teenagers who haven't been doing particularly well in school, they actually really appreciate, like learning, what's one thing I could do so that I actually get my homework done, you know, or how can I get a better vocabulary? It's not like I'm gonna learn 100 words, I'm gonna just do it systematically, I'm gonna do it, you know, one word at a time. I always think of Annie Lamont. She has that book, Bird By Bird, where her dad advised her younger brother, who was procrastinating about his school essay, and here at Sunday night, and the report is due the next morning, and the dad says, "Well, buddy, you just need to write the report, bird by bird." And that's kind of how I think of this. You know, I want us to think about the reading, the core reading that we're doing, especially helping kids with accessible text, and then also doing opportunities where the text is more complex, and we're helping them in terms of seeing what some of the key ideas are. And I think that the next C, which is conversations, is something that I've been trying to talk about in this whole podcast. I think we need to uncover for kids. I actually want them to see how many of the words in a text as a third or fourth grader, somebody who's not particularly doing well, are actually words they already know, because it's a small group of words, right? If we have 600,000 words that are active in the Oxford English dictionary, there are what, about 10,000 of them, that we use very heavily in text, and they know a lot of them. So I want to talk with them, you know, my thing about the story of English. I want them to know this, I want to uncover these things. I think often we have left some of these things secret. You know, mathematics, we uncover all the algorithms, but often when we're teaching kids about reading, we haven't uncovered some of these ideas that, you know, now that you know this word, you know, Bill Lagan and Dick Anderson, right? They had a study that basically said, "Once you start in third grade, with every word you learn, you're basically learning about another four or five." And I think that's really important information to know. And I, especially, the third C is collecting. I want kids to have collections of both the words that they've learned, and I also want in classroom, I'm not talking about, you know, one of these word walls where we just randomly put the words up. I'm talking about the connections among words, the kinds of things that we're doing in the exceptional expressions for everyday words, or the super synonyms. I want kids to be adding onto their words, you know, in English, we actually have a lot more words for fear, an anger than we do for words like happy, but I want them to keep adding on happy words, or euphoric, and, you know, abulliant, as well as words that describe other emotions. So I'm just saying collections of words to me, to actually see what I've learned, I think is really, really important to see the connections among things. And then we also want kids to be choosing things that they read. And I really love the opportunity to talk about this, but I am not into free range reading. That's one of the things the National Reading Panel actually wasn't as interpreted about, but free range reading is when you just say you can read anything. And to use class time, do you know, actually, that knowing how to select a good book for yourself is an incredible skill. I wrote a whole bunch of papers on that early in my career, and that's something I haven't returned to. But I have talked a lot about silent reading, but the idea of selecting text, you know, just put kids out there, here are three choices. Which of these would really work for you? You know, I curate books. So here are some ideas for books that you might read, but it's not just like just go and pick something. And, you know, we don't want book reports on everything, but we want kids to tell us what new words they learned from books or what are really key ideas that they want to keep. I think that's really important. So for me, I have a small change that I've made, you know, so I started this actually on September 5th, 1977. And that was that I would spend, I would open up my day by doing some writing, and it was word by word, and I've kept doing that. And to me, that was a change that has made a big difference. To me, it really has, to be able to share my compassion and my commitment for our future. And that's what we do as educators, right? We're creating the next generation. Thank you for your profound contributions in your career and your life or literacy. And you're really a rare researcher who can speak directly to educators and to take your ideas and say, "Here, this is what you can do practically to implement them." And I so appreciate what all of you are doing. - So I want to thank you, Freddie, for this wonderful discussion. Your decades of research and the materials that you've created that are transformative, including textproject.org and teaching words. Dr. Hebert's website is text project. We'll put this in the show notes. You can also find information about all our guest books, methods, research, blogs, and tutoring services at language-literacy.org. That's language-literacy.org. And you can find out contact information for me and my work at readinshift.com. So please follow for the love of literacy on Spotify and Apple Podcast so that we'll be able to notify you when we release more high quality, but occasional podcasts. I'm Bruce Salette. Thank you, David Gray and Freddie Hebert for this wonderful discussion. Thank you so much for this opportunity and for what you do. Very, very much appreciate it. And to all the teachers out there who are going to make us tiny, teeny little change in how they teach words. So thank you guys.