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Reading instruction for young Arabic speakers presents challenges for textbook publishers and teachers. In the present study, the authors conduct an analysis at the word level of four multidisciplinary textbooks for reading instruction in grades one and two in Egypt. The study sought to answer the following questions: What are the most common words in standard Arabic? How many of the most common words in standard Arabic are used in the textbooks? How dense is the use of common words? How many rare words are used in the textbooks studied? A word frequency analysis from existing corpora were used to create a most common word list. From that list, the researchers were able to determine frequency and dispersion of the most common words in Arabic that were also used in the textbooks. Frequency and dispersion were calculated by octile, as well. Analysis found that the texts did not make use of any of the rare words found in the corpus, but many words in the texts did not appear in either the reference corpus inclusive of the common words list. Recommendations for policymakers and textbook publishers follow discussion of results.

This study reports the knowledge of text complexity held by preservice teachers prior to coursework. The goal of this research is to determine what strengths and what learning needs preservice teachers have related to text selection with the intention of informing programmatic redesign. In this preliminary component of a design-development study, we report findings from the Text Complexity Task, a verbal protocol task administered to 31 preservice teachers. Findings show that when evaluating text complexity, preservice teachers noted word and text-level features, but attended less to phonemic patterns, multisyllable words, and sentence-level features. Additionally, participants differed in their arguments about how some text features (e.g., unknown vocabulary, rhyming patterns) influence text difficulty. Preservice teachers also differed in their views of how a reader's prior knowledge influences text difficulty, vocabulary knowledge, and word solving. The article concludes with recommendations for teacher educators interested in improving preservice teachers' text selection for reading instruction.

The science of reading has captured the attention of educators, policy makers, and the public. Elfrieda H. Hiebert recounts some of what she's learned from her recent exploration of the topic. She has found that research evidence tends to fall into three categories: research that provides unequivocal conclusions, research that holds promise for solving enduring problems, and research that calls into question long-standing assumptions. When it comes to reading, research is clear that students should learn consistent and common patterns in how letters relate to sounds. Emerging research suggests that automaticity in recognizing letter-sound patterns in words is a function of the frequency with which students encounter patterns in words, making the amount that students read an essential consideration in reading instruction. Research calls into question common assumptions about the 4th-grade slump and what below-basic performance looks like. Understanding the sources of below-basic performances can support students in becoming proficient readers.

Researchers disagree about the value of controlling the decodability of texts for students with reading difficulty, specifically what type of text they should read: "decodable texts" (words limited to taught patterns), "nondecodable" texts (those not limited by instruction), or "both." We analyzed the effects of reading intervention for elementary-age students with reading difficulty (k = 119) to determine whether effects varied by the type of texts students read--decodable, nondecodable, or both--compared with interventions without text reading. Inadequate information was available to code text type for 22 interventions including text reading; effect sizes were calculated for 97 studies. Effects for interventions with decodable or nondecodable reading did not differ from no-text interventions. For both types of interventions, the effect (g = 0.28) approached significance versus no-text, 95% CI [-0.09, 0.65]. Disaggregating effects by whether the measures were standardized or researcher-designed showed a significant both-types effect, g = 0.45, 95% CI [0.02, 0.89] relative to no-text. Disaggregating by whether outcomes were for word recognition or reading comprehension showed a positive both-types effect for word recognition outcomes; data were inadequate to examine comprehension. A possible confounding effect of time spent reading was tested but was uncorrelated with the intervention effect. The both-types finding suggests the possible value of varied reading experiences in intervention, but this analysis did not account for other factors that might be correlated with text type and the intervention effect. Furthermore, more comprehensive reporting about text types is important for replication and meta-analytic review.

We report on a meta-analysis designed to test the theory that instruction that involves direct teaching of academic vocabulary and teaching strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words develops students' abilities to infer new words' meanings and builds students' overall vocabulary knowledge. We meta-analyzed 39 experimental and quasi-experimental intervention studies conducted in grades K-5 to examine the effects of these instructional approaches. Results indicate that interventions that targeted word meaning instruction do not show overall positive effects on measures of breadth of vocabulary knowledge. Although strategy interventions are effective in improving word solving skills on near transfer measures, strategy interventions do not significantly impact students' overall breadth of vocabulary knowledge. These findings suggest that direct teaching of vocabulary words may not be effective for building overall vocabulary knowledge among elementary-grade students. More research is needed to examine the potential of teaching strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words.

This study describes the features of words known and unknown by first graders of different proficiency levels in six instances of an oral reading fluency assessment: three in winter and three in spring. A sample of 411 students was placed into four groups (very high, high, middle, and low) based on their median correct words per minute in spring. Each word in the assessment was coded on 11 features: numbers of phonemes, letters, syllables, blends, morphemes, percentages of multisyllabic and of morphologically complex words, concreteness, age of acquisition, decodability, and U function. Words were classified as known if more than 50% of the students within a group were able to correctly read those words. Features of known and unknown words were contrasted for all but the highest group, which made no errors, at each point in time. An analysis of the patterns of known words across groups from winter to spring shows that students followed a similar general progression in the number and type of words recognized. The most prominent feature of unknown words in winter and spring for the middle group of students was the presence of multiple syllables. The lowest-performing group of students continued to be limited by word length and frequency in their recognition of words, but on both features, their proficiency increased from winter to spring. The discussion addresses several critical issues, most notably the relationship of words in oral reading assessments to the word recognition curriculum of many beginning reading programs.

Texts classified according to guided reading levels (GRL) are ubiquitous in US beginning reading classrooms. This study examined features of texts across three grade bands (kindergarten, early first grade, final first grade) and the 10 GRLs within these bands. The 510 texts came from three programs with different functions in beginning reading instruction: core, intervention, and content areas. Text features were decoding, semantics, structure, and syntax from the Early Literacy Indicators system, mean sentence length (MSL) and mean log word frequency (MLWF) from the Lexile Framework, and word count. Five variables predicted GRLs of texts: semantics, structure, syntax, MSL, and word count. Differences in decoding and MLWF across grade bands were few and neither variable predicted levels of texts. Intervention texts had lower decoding and MLWF demands than core or content-area texts. Implications of a lack of discernible progressions in decoding and MLWF are discussed.

The two studies reported on in this paper examine the features of words that distinguish students' performances on vocabulary assessments as a means of understanding what contributes to the ease or difficulty of vocabulary knowledge. The two studies differ in the type of assessment, the types of words that were studied, and the grade levels and population considered. In the first study, an assessment of words that can be expected to appear with at least moderate frequency at particular levels of text was administered to students in grades 2 through 12. The second study considered the responses of fourth- and fifth-grade students, including English learners, to words that teachers had identified as challenging for those grade levels. The effects of the same set of word features on students' vocabulary knowledge were examined in both studies: predicted appearances of a word and its immediate morphological family members, number of letters and syllables, dispersion across content areas, polysemy, part of speech, age of acquisition, and concreteness. The data consisted of the proportion of students who answered an item correctly. In the first study, frequency of a word's appearance in written English and age of acquisition predicted students' performances. In the second study, age of acquisition was again critical but so too were word length, number of syllables, and concreteness. Word location (which was confounded by word frequency) also proved to be a predictor of performance. Findings are discussed in relation to how they can inform curriculum, instruction, and research.

Much of the attention given to literacy, of late, has focused on ensuring that students can read, without consideration to what they are given to read. Kristin Conradi Smith & Elfrieda H. Hiebert discuss four general aspects of the texts used in elementary classrooms -- text complexity, text type (narrative versus informational), text format (paper versus screen), and diversity of people presented in the text. They review recent research on each of these text characteristics and then make suggestions for how to apply the research in the classroom.

The Common Core State Standards emphasize the need for U.S. students to read complex texts. As a result, the level of word complexity for primary-level texts is important, particularly the dimensions of and changes in complexity between first grade and the important third-grade high-stakes testing year. In this study, we addressed word complexity in these grades by examining its dimensions and differences in the texts in three widely used U.S. reading programs. Fourteen measures of word complexity were computed, and exploratory factor analysis established that four dimensions--orthography, length, familiarity, and morphology--characterized word complexity. As expected, the third-grade texts have more complex words than the first-grade texts have in the four dimensions, with the greatest differences in length and familiarity. More surprisingly, the words in the first-grade texts increase in complexity over the year, but overall, the words in the third-grade texts do not. Polysyllabic words are common in texts in both grades, comprising 48% of unique words in first-grade texts and 65% in third-grade texts. Polymorphemic words comprise 13% of unique first-grade words and 19% of third-grade words (for derived words, 3% and 6%, respectively, of all words). Results show that word complexity changes markedly between grades as expected, not only in length and familiarity but also in syllabic and morphemic structure. Implications for instruction and future word complexity analyses are discussed.

According to interpretations of results from the latest oral reading fluency (ORF) study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (White et al., 2020), fourth-grade students who score below the basic standard require interventions that focus on word recognition, phonological decoding, and fluency. Before such mandates for students at the middle grades and beyond are enacted, the available information from ORF assessments should be examined from the view of what students know and what they do not know. In this paper, I examine the performances of students who score below the basic level on oral reading assessments such as those used in the NAEP/ORF study to identify students' strengths and challenges. Results of analyses of students' performances are used to address how instruction and interventions can best support students in developing the proficiencies required to perform successfully on silent reading comprehension tasks. Issues that particularly require attention in the design of instruction and interventions for readers in the middle grades who score below the basic level are the mode of reading (silent or oral), text, and reading volume.

The purpose of the present study was to examine possible shifts in the presence of academic vocabulary across the past six decades for a continually best-selling first-grade core reading program. The authors examined seven program years dating from 1962 to 2013 and computationally determined four categories of academic vocabulary (science, mathematics, social studies, and general academic) in each program. The primary research question was, Did the volume of academic words in a program year rise with advancing years? A secondary supplementary question was, Did the propensity toward academic affinity of a program considered as a whole rise with advancing years? The authors employed two types of academic word measures: (1) A word was deemed to be academic or not, and if it was academic, it was assigned to one of the four academic categories, and then academic words were counted; and (2) a novel measure, academic affinity, was a continuous measure of the probability that a word was academic (in each of the four academic vocabulary categories). The authors conducted Poisson regression modeling and hierarchical generalized linear modeling. The main conclusions were that later first-grade core reading program years included a moderately higher volume of science, social studies, and total academic words as compared with earlier years and that the science, social studies, and general academic affinity of the program as a whole was statistically higher in later years, but in practical terms, the change was not remarkable.

Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to adequately comprehend text has been to repeatedly read texts orally. The current review first addresses evidence for this conventional treatment, concluding that students have not shown substantial increases in silent reading comprehension. Next, this review presents evidence underlying an alternative perspective for automaticity support where texts are selected to support students in increasing their automaticity with the words they will encounter consistently—the 2500 morphological families that have been shown to account for at least 90% of most school texts. Finally, guidelines for teachers are provided that address the talk, tasks, and time of instruction, as well as texts, for automaticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A group of words, labeled the core vocabulary, can be expected to be prominent across all texts. Scholarship made possible by digital databases of words and new analytic systems has shown that approximately 2,500 morphological families account for most of the words in texts--an average of 91.5% of all words in the Common Core State Standards exemplars from kindergarten through College and Career Ready. The rare vocabulary of texts is so extensive and varied that, without a foundation in the core vocabulary, students are likely to struggle with the meanings of rare words. Words are in the core vocabulary because they represent critical concepts, are part of morphological or word families that share a root word, and are often versatile in their meaning and function. The author describes the semantic, morphological, and multiple-meaning knowledge represented by these 2,500 word families and ways in which teachers can foster these proficiencies.

Readability systems have once more become prominent in policy and practice because of recommendations in the Common Core State Standards. This study revisited two features of current text analysis (readability) systems: their generalizability to all grade levels and to all content areas. A database that encompassed texts across the grade bands and content areas and included aggregate comprehension performance on the texts was used to: (a) describe how the text features (i.e., word frequency, word length, sentence length) varied at different grade levels and within different subject areas and (b) examine if the prediction of comprehension with the text features was moderated by the grade or content area of the text. Results indicated that texts did having differing levels of various word features along both grade and content lines especially in the area of sentence length. In addition, content and grade moderated the relationship between sentence length and comprehension.

This exploratory study was designed to evaluate the interplay of students' rate and comprehension in independent silent reading of accessible text, within the frameworks of the Simple View of Reading and the RAND Reading Study Group. In the first phase, 61 sixth graders were given a reading test (GRADE), a motivation questionnaire, and an on-screen measure of comprehension-based silent reading rate (SRF-O, adapted from aimswebPlus SRF) with on-grade and below-grade text. Two-thirds of students had perfect or near-perfect SRF-O comprehension, but the other one-third had moderate to poor comprehension. These weaker SRF-O comprehenders had relatively low GRADE scores, but others with comparable GRADE scores comprehended well on SRF-O. The poorest SRF-O comprehenders read with increasing rate and decreasing comprehension across the SRF-O texts. In the second phase, the 21 students with weaker SRF-O comprehension took an oral reading fluency (ORF) test and a paper form of the silent reading rate measure (SRF-P) in a one-on-one setting. All students comprehended well on SRF-P and their SRF-P rates correlated highly with GRADE and ORF. Results support the view that poor comprehension in independent silent reading of accessible text may be due to factors other than reading ability (such as assessment context) and that, when students read with comprehension, their rate is a good indicator of their reading ability.

This study examined how comprehension-based silent reading rate (CBSRR) is affected by grade, genre, and text position. Second and fourth graders read 2 grade-specific passages (one narrative, one informational) in 4 sections, each followed by 4 comprehension questions. Analyses of rate with a criterion level of comprehension showed higher performances on informational than narrative texts and better performances as students moved through sections of a text. Percentages of students attaining CBSRR decreased across the four sections of both genres and at both grade levels. Implications of findings are discussed and question are raised about text complexity and silent reading patterns.

In this study we examined the effects of syntactic and lexical complexity on third-grade students' comprehension of science texts. A total of 16 expository texts were designed to represent systematic differences in levels of syntactic and lexical complexity across four science-related topics ("Tree Frogs, Soil, Jelly Beans and Toothpaste"). A Latin-square design was used to counterbalance the order of administration of these 16 texts. After reading each text, students responded to a post-test comprehension measure (without access to the text). External measures of reading achievement and prior vocabulary knowledge were also gathered to serve as control variables. Findings show that lexical complexity had a significant impact on students' comprehension on two of the four topics. Comprehension performance was not influenced by the syntactic complexity of texts, regardless of topic. Further, no additional effects were found for English language learners. Potentially moderating and confounding issues, such as the inference demand of syntactically simple texts and the role of topic familiarity, are discussed in order to explain the inconsistency of the findings across topics.

In recent years, readability formulas have gained new prominence as a basis for selecting texts for learning and assessment. Variables that quantitative tools count (e.g., word frequency, sentence length) provide valid measures of text complexity insofar as they accurately predict representative and high-quality criteria. The longstanding consensus of text researchers has been that such criteria will measure readers' comprehension of sample texts. This study used Bormuth's (1969) rigorously developed criterion measure to investigate two of today's most widely used quantitative text tools--the Lexile Framework and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade-Level formula. Correlations between the two tools' complexity scores and Bormuth's measured difficulties of criterion passages were only moderately high in light of the literature and new high stakes uses for such tools. These correlations declined a small amount when passages from the University grade band of use were removed. The ability of these tools to predict measured text difficulties within any single grade band below University was low. Analyses showed that word complexity made a larger contribution relative to sentence complexity when each tool's predictors were regressed on the Bormuth criterion rather than their original criteria. When the criterion was texts' grade band of use instead of mean cloze scores, neither tool classified texts well and errors disproportionally placed texts from higher grade bands into lower ones. Results suggest these two text tools may lack adequate validity for their current uses in educational settings.

This study addresses the distribution of words in texts at different points of schooling. The first aim was to identify a core vocabulary that accounts for the majority of the words in texts through the lens of morphological families. Results showed that 2,451 morphological families, averaging 4.61 members, make up the core vocabulary of school texts. The 11,298 words in the 2,451 morphological families account for 58% of the approximately 19,500 most frequent words in written English. The majority of the morphological families appear by the end of the elementary school period (85%), but a small group of morphological families (15%) is added through the middle to high school period. Analyses of the ranks of words across grade bands indicated that late-appearing words gain in prominence in higher level texts as some elementary-level words become less frequent. The second aim of the study was to determine the degree to which the core vocabulary accounted for the words in an independent but critical set of texts: the exemplar texts identified within the Common Core State Standards. The 2,451 families accounted for 97.1% (grades K and 1) to 89.1% (grade 11 through college) of the total words in texts and 95.6% (grades K and 1) to 74.9% (grade 11 through college) of the unique words in texts. Implications of the findings on the nature and role of the core vocabulary in complex texts are suggested for researchers, curriculum developers, and publishers.

Texts are a central part of reading. Yet our understandings of appropriate text features and distributions of text diets at different points in students' reading development are limited. The thesis of the essay is that, if the trajectory of struggling readers is to change, attention is needed to the features of texts and students' text diets, especially those of students who attend schools in heavily impacted communities. Three issues are identified that require the attention of researchers to ensure appropriate texts and text diets for struggling readers: (a) texts from the earliest levels need to be meaningful, (b) at least part of struggling readers' text diets need to be with texts in which words with morphological and phonological consistency are repeated, and (c) amount of text read by struggling readers needs to be substantial for reading capacity to increase. For each issue, the manner in which current practices can contribute to potential obstacles for struggling readers is described. Next, research on alternative practices is presented that shows how shifts in texts and text diets can support higher reading proficiency. The essay ends with a description of a research agenda that uses digital resources to increase students' facility with vocabulary in complex texts.

This study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1-6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade progression of average complexity among the four assessments. However, considerable cross-assessment variability was observed in terms of the size of increase in complexity from grade to grade, the overall range of complexity, and the within-grade text complexity. These cross-assessment differences were less pronounced with newer, multi-factor analytical tools. The four assessments also differed in the extent to which their passages met the text complexity guidelines of the Common Core State Standards. The authors discuss implications of the differences found among and within the classroom assessment systems, on one hand, and among the measures of text complexity, on the other.

The Common Core raises the stature of texts to new heights, creating a hubbub. The fuss is especially messy at the early grades, where children are expected to read more complex texts than in the past. But early-grades teachers have been given little actionable guidance about text complexity. The authors recently examined early-grades texts to discover what makes them complex and now report that there is a lot that can help teachers, specifically, young children's texts are special, a handful of text characteristics can signal text-complexity level, sometimes the interplay of text characteristics modulates text-complexity level, and knowing why a text is complex can facilitate text selection.

The present study measured the comprehension-based silent reading efficiency of U.S. students in grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Students read standardized grade-level passages while an eye movement recording system was used to measure reading rate, fixations (eye stops) per word, fixation durations, and regressions (right-to-left eye movements) per word. Eye movement recordings were regarded as valid only if students demonstrated a comprehension level of at least 70% after reading a passage and answering a series of true/false questions. Reading rates increased over grades, with two exceptions: (a) between grades 6 and 8, growth in reading rate appeared to plateau; and (b) between grades 10 and 12, reading rate increases were seen only among students in the upper two quartiles. Changes in the other three efficiency measures reflected similar patterns of reading efficiency development over grades. The reading efficiency of students in this study was also compared with that of a sample of students from 1960, using norms reported by Taylor (1965) and validated by Carver (1989). Comprehension-based silent reading rates in grade 2 were comparable across the 50-year span, but the cross-grade growth trajectory was much shallower in the present study than it was in 1960. These results suggest that present-day students may not achieve the same level of word-reading automaticity as did their 1960 counterparts.

In this foreword to the special issue of the "Journal of Education" celebrating the 30th anniversary of the publication of "Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading" ("BNR") (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985), we share the backstory of the making of "BNR." We view our role as that of commentators, narrators, and storytellers. As members of the Staff of the Commission on Reading: Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Judith A. Scott, and Ian A. G. Wilkinson, and the Chairman of the Commission, Richard C. Anderson, our task, as we see it, is to tell the untold story of how "BNR" came into being, to reflect on what we were able to achieve given the circumstances of the time, what we wish we could have achieved, what issues went under the table, and what lessons can be learned from the endeavor.

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA) focus on building student capacity to read complex texts. The Standards provide an explicit text complexity staircase that maps text levels to grade levels. Furthermore, the Standards articulate a rationale to accelerate text levels across grades to ensure students are able to read texts in college and the workplace on high school graduation. This study empirically examined how third graders at two reading proficiency levels performed with texts of differing degrees of complexity identified as the Grades 2 to 3 band within the CCSS. The study also investigated the influence on comprehension of two text lengths. Results suggest that the compounding effects of text complexity and length uniformly affected reading proficiency of third graders. Typically, when presented with two texts of the same complexity level, readers had lower comprehension in the lengthier version of the text than the shorter version. Features of the single level where performances on texts of different lengths were not statistically significant are described, as are implications for educational practice and future research.

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics--length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness--that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to explain variation in word knowledge and word learning. The outcome measures were the pretest (evidence of word knowledge) and posttest (evidence of word learning) vocabulary scores of second- through fourth-grade students who participated in one of several studies designed to evaluate the efficacy of science units that were part of a multiyear research and development program for an integrated science and literacy curriculum. The authors first examined individual predictors and then built multivariate models from the individually significant predictors of pretest score. Three characteristics were predictive of word knowledge (pretest score) at two or more grade levels; frequency, polysemy, and length predicted word difficulty independent of instruction. These three characteristics accounted for 39% of the variance in third graders' pretest scores. Polysemy and frequency alone accounted for 34% of the variance at second grade and 23% at fourth grade. In addition, frequency and polysemy explained students' vocabulary growth scores (posttest controlling for pretest) over the course of instruction at two of three grade levels. Understanding which characteristics of words are related to difficulty within the domain of science may provide a principled basis both for the selection of words for instruction and for differentiating instruction across categories of science words.

The National Reading Panel (NRP) identified five pillars, or essential components, of reading instruction that lead to the highest chance of reading success--phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. A decade after the NRP's report, the majority of US states adopted the Common Core State Standards/English Language Arts & Literacy (CCSS/ELA). One of the most significant changes of the CCSS/ELA is a focus on knowledge development as part of literacy development and focus on the acquisition of literacy skills specific to different disciplines. In highlighting these connections between ELA and knowledge as part of literacy, the CCSS/ELA provide an opportunity for teachers to emphasize what research has validated for decades: that knowledge is a critical component of the reading process. In this column, we describe why knowledge development should be viewed as the sixth pillar of reading instruction and how teachers can increase their students' knowledge building through reading.

This study examined the relationships between silent and oral reading fluency and comprehension. Findings indicated that fourth grade students had consistent levels of comprehension in both reading modes. Students of all reading levels showed a similar pattern across the segments of a text set in both oral and silent reading--a gradual increase in rate from texts one through three, a drop-off on text four, and the fastest speed on text five. A portion of the sample engaged in abnormally rapid silent reading relative to their oral reading rates coupled with low comprehension. Implications for instruction are discussed.

Over the past 50 years, substantial changes have occurred in the texts used for beginning reading instruction. This article analyzes four perspectives that have most influenced these texts in the United States over this period and the changes in these texts in relation to those in the nation's demographics and young children's literacy-related experiences including media exposure, availability of children's books, and time spent in nonparental care. These analyses are followed by an examination of the research underlying three assumptions that shape the reading instruction in all current core reading programs: (a) earlier is better, (b) word repetition is not a factor in learning to read, and (c) one size fits all. The article concludes with a call for care in designing and selecting texts for students whose literacy levels are impacted greatly by the quality of their school experiences--children in high-poverty communities.

The research question was, "What text characteristics do primary teachers think are most important for early grades text complexity?" Teachers from across the United States accomplished a two-part task. First, to stimulate teachers' thinking about important text characteristics, primary teachers completed an online paired-text comparison task. While doing the task, teachers were asked to decide which texts in pairs were more complex, and they were also asked to think about which text characteristics mattered most for their decisions. Next, teachers completed a questionnaire, with primary focus on the text characteristics teachers thought mattered most for early grades text complexity. The teachers emphasized word decodability, word frequency, pictures, and word meanings, and they also referenced other characteristics. Their outlook has implications for implementation of the Common Core Standard on text complexity for young children learning to read.

The Common Core State Standards represent the first standards document to address whether students are able to read progressively more complex texts as they progress across the grades. This article gives an overview of the three components of the model of text complexity that were identified in Appendix A of the Standards and also were the basis for the selection of manuscripts for this special issue: (a) qualitative, (b) quantitative, and (c) reader-task considerations. This introduction gives an overview of the three components and the contributions of the articles in this special issue to extending understanding about these three components.