The concept of readability has had a variable history,
moving from a position where it was considered as a very important topic for
those responsible for producing texts and matching those texts to the abilities
and needs of learners, to receiving very little attention indeed in the
education literature. Dahlia Janan and I have tried to chart the shifting
interest in this topic, and to advance an explanation for the receding interest
in readability (Janan, Wray & Pope, 2010). This has paralleled changes in
the ways the process of reading has been viewed theoretically, from a process
of getting meaning from a text to one of creating meaning through interaction
with a text. This paradigm shift in views of reading has appeared to make established
views of readability, generally conceived as focusing on the perceived
difficulties within texts, less adequate as a means of exploring the matching
of text to reader.
There is a sense that we may be at a point now, however,
where the paradigm is changing once more. Some important work has been coming
from the US over the past two to three years which makes it clear that a closer
look at the text dimension of the reader-text interface is somewhat overdue.
The issue has been redefined as one of text complexity, and there are some
significant implications within it for the teaching and development of reading
at all phases of learning.
Let’s look firstly at some of the background to these
developments.
In 2006 an important report was published by ACT (formerly
known as American College Testing) which reported on the testing of American high
school students for their readiness to embark on study at college and
University level. The rather surprising outcome of this report was that what
differentiated the success of the students tested was not what are usually
referred to as comprehension skills – looking for the main idea, making
inferences, drawing conclusions from evidence, etc. The difference, rather, lay
in the abilities of the students to successfully read and respond to harder,
more complex texts. Those students who could read complex texts were more
likely to be ready for college entry. Those who could not read complex texts were
less likely to be ready for college. Performance on complex texts was the
clearest differentiator in reading between these groups of students.
One of the reasons for the surprise with which this finding
was greeted in the US was the fact that for decades a virtual industry had
grown up in US high schools focused on the teaching of ‘content area reading’,
in other words the teaching of students to use a range of strategies to
comprehend the texts they encountered within their subject lessons. A similar
concern and focus on reading strategies was evidence in the secondary literacy
strategy launched in the UK in the early 2000s (e.g. DfEE, 2001), which drew
heavily upon our own development work (e.g. Wray & Lewis, 1997). The
message of the ACT (2006) report was not that this work on developing reading
strategies was redundant – but, rather, it was actually a minor part of what
really engendered student success across the curriculum. This, it was argued,
was exposure to a range of increasingly challenging texts across the
curriculum.
There was a further dimension to the argument put forward in
the ACT report. This was reviewed in the Common Core State Standards English Language
Arts document (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010, Appendix A) and
drew heavily upon a research review carried out by Marilyn Jager Adams
(2010-11). This revealed the clear and alarming picture that that while the reading
demands of college/University study, of workforce training, and generally of being
a good citizen had held steady or risen over the previous fifty years or so, the
texts used to teach subjects in high school had moved the other way, that is,
they had become less demanding.
There are, of course, some caveats to put forward here.
Firstly, it is possible to question the evidence and difficulty levels of
texts. As Dahlia Janan has shown (Janan, 2011), assessing the difficulty levels
of texts, without reference to the readers who interact with them, is fraught
with problems. It is also the case that the evidence available relates only to
the situation in the US. We have very little comparable evidence about the
situation in the UK as yet. The nearest we can get to this is the claim, in the
DfEE Literacy across the Curriculum
document (2001) that “Modern textbook pages contain a plethora of
presentational devices: flow charts, drawings, colour coding, bullet points,
bold type, explanation, labels, symbols and questions. The written text is
condensed and difficult to follow without diagrams. The emphasis on the visual
is typical of many modern school textbooks.” (p. 50). This suggests that one of
the features of ‘modern textbook pages’ has indeed been a simplification in
terms of text complexity.
One can intuitively recognise that there might be some truth
and wider applicability in the problems identified here. In the key UK document
(DFEE, 2001), Literacy across the
Curriculum, there is constant reference to the need for teachers to scaffold
and support secondary students as they interact with texts in their subjects.
This is good, of course, but nowhere in that document does it suggest that one
of the tasks of the subject teacher is to deliberately introduce their students
to more and more complex texts with the aim, ultimately, of enabling them to
cope unproblematically with the transition to college / university/ workplace
texts. This is exactly what the Common Core State Standards Initiative in the
US has proposed.
There is more to say on these issues, and in future blog
entries, I will try to open up a couple of implications from the text
complexity analysis, as I have briefly outlined it.
References
Adams, M. J. (2010-11) Advancing Our Students’
Language and Literacy: The Challenge of Complex Texts American Educator, Winter 2010-11, 3-11
Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2010) Common Core State Standards for English
Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical
Subjects. Washington, DC: CCSSO & National Governors Association
DfEE (2001) Literacy Across the
Curriculum. London: DfEE.
Janan, D., Wray, D. & Pope, M. (2010) ‘Paradigms in
Readability Research’, International
Journal of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 3 (17), pp. 19-29
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