Text Complexity and Reading Disciplinary Texts

This week's readings centered around text complexity and reading disciplinary texts.

Synthesis: 

The first authors, Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas, began their chapter by giving some background information on Common Core State Standards and cited the "increasing proportion of informational text" in the adolescent years.  Students must be directly taught how to read and respond to these higher level texts.  According to the CCSS, there are three components which can be used to measure text complexity: quantitative measures, qualitative measures, and reader and task considerations.  Quantitative measures are straight-forward and provide a number, such as The Lexile Framework, which is derived from a formula that looks at vocabulary, syntax, word and sentence length, and word repetition.  Qualitative measures include four domains: levels of meaning, text structure, language conventionality, and knowledge demands.  Qualitative rubrics and quantitative formulas provide valuable information, but they do not take into account specific reader and task considerations, which is why the third measure must be used.  For one to become a better reader, text complexity must gradually be increased through deliberate practice.  Teachers must provide effective feedback to students and try to reach their "zone of proximal development."  According to the chapter, "simply reading more at the same level is insufficient" to promote increased reading skills.  Teachers also need to make sure that their students stay motivated because of the need to reread texts and build fluency.  Computer-assisted instruction can be helpful for reading if a quality program is chosen.  Finally, teachers must ensure that their "expert readers" continue to be challenged.  

The second authors, Jetton and Shanahan, centered their chapters around the differences in text among specific academic disciplines.  According to them, the past decade has yielded a lack of improvement in literacy scores, and teachers are ill-equipped to rectify the situation.  In their research, the authors found that sadly, only 3% of instructional time was spent modeling and scaffolding, and of that 3%, mostly literal questions and written summaries were assigned.  Highly specialized disciplinary texts make comprehension difficult because of their many abstractions and impersonal nature.  Some suggestions for helping this situation include exposing children to all kinds of texts starting in elementary school, building prior knowledge, noting text features and surprising information, and summarizing.  The authors made it clear that reading comprehension strategies and instructional strategies for reading are not the same (instructional strategies are ways to teach reading strategies).  A major point was that automatic word recognition and fluency are requisite to comprehension, and these things must be taught explicitly to students.  Building background knowledge will also assist comprehension.  Some instructional strategies and frameworks included reciprocal teaching, direct explanation, and modeling.  Students must be taught to use multiple strategies and self-regulate.

The two following chapters from Jetton and Shanahan discussed the challenges of reading disciplinary texts and how expert readers read such texts.  The authors emphasized the differences in reading mathematics, history, and science.  Because each subject has its own set of vocabulary, sentence construction, and required background knowledge, the disciplinary texts must all be read differently, and comprehension may become a challenge.  The chapters talked a lot about reading "outside the text," meaning that students and expert readers both bring their own ideas and judgments about the author(s) of a particular passage and when the article was written.  These preconceived ideas dramatically affect the way one reads "inside the text."  Teachers of math, history, and science all need to be taught how to teach their students to read within the discipline they teach.

Responses:

Text-to-text:
Many of our readings seem to discuss the importance of motivation, and this week's readings were no different.  As the first chapter talked about text complexity, it mentioned repeated readings.  Teachers will want to be sure that their adolescent readers are engaged in and motivated by the texts they are reading if they are to read them multiple times and improve fluency.  Just as the readings last week, this week's chapters also talked about modeling good reading strategies for students to improve their comprehension.  An addition that I enjoyed this week was when the authors mentioned that teachers need modeling, as well!

Text-to-self:
When I was reading the Academic Disciplines book this week, I realized that I read almost everything the exact same way.  I have always believed myself to have good comprehension skills, but when it comes to disciplinary text, I am not sure that I do.  I have never been very good at math or science, and now I understand that perhaps part of the reason is due to the fact that I never really knew how to read the assigned texts.  I was not looking at them with the right perspective and didn't quite know how to find the information I needed.  Realizing this about myself will allow me to better help my students, I believe.  I am looking forward to teaching them how to consider different angles when reading various kinds of texts.

Text-to-world:
This week's readings relate to the world because every student needs to know how to read a variety of texts for a variety of purposes.  It becomes easy to get "tunnel vision" and only read texts that are a specific genre or match a certain interest that a child has.  If students are able to increase their comprehension across all kinds of texts including math, history, and science, what an enlightened world of young people we will have!

Questions:

1.  I'm realizing that I have gone my whole life and not known how to read disciplinary texts.  What are some ways that I can improve my comprehension skills, particularly in math and science, as an adult, given the many years of bad habits I've developed?

2.  I teach special education, so I feel like I do pretty well with differentiating instruction for struggling students.  As the texts continue to mention the importance of motivation and engagement, what are some ways that I can continue to challenge my advanced students?

3.  Do your schools use any quality reading programs on the computer?  If so, what are they and why do you like them?