Macalister and Webb (2019) claim that "children's literature" written for native English speakers is too difficult for intermediate English as a Second Language (ESL) students, those who have acquired the first 3,000 to 4,000 most commonly used words in English. The authors analyzed a corpus of short stories written for a classroom magazine published by the New Zealand Ministry of Education. They found that children would need to know 8,000 of the most commonly used English word families in order to read the stories with 98% vocabulary coverage. A previous analysis of a similar corpus (Webb & Macalister, 2013) found that 10,0000 word families were needed to obtain 98% coverage. Macalister and Webb (2019) omit any mention of the author's research, also published in this journal, in which he analyzed more than a dozen fiction series popular with children and young adults. Several of those series would be comprehensible with 98% vocabulary coverage to intermediate ESL readers with knowledge of 3,000 to 5,000 word families. As he pointed out in McQuillan (2016a), the classroom magazine corpus Webb and Macalister (2013) used is clearly not typical of the kinds of books children actually read for pleasure. The same is true of their narrative fiction corpus used in the current paper. [This comment is in response to "Can L1 Children's Literature Be Used in the English Language Classroom? High Frequency Words in Writing for Children" (EJ1212805).]