Inconsiderate Books
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by Jerry Stemach, MS, CCC-SLP
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Sometimes my students with reading or language difficulties bring in a textbook assignment from school, and it takes us an hour to get through one paragraph. If it's a social studies or science assignment, they have the usual difficulty with the bold-faced key words (like tectonic plates) that might be new to everyone, but they also struggle with words like "example" and "region", words they are expected to know.
“It’s not just vocabulary or the length of sentences that trips students up, but how the vocabulary is used and the way the sentences are put together. And there’s a pattern: one student after another trips over the very same types of words and sentences.
“As an editor, I create considerate text by minimizing the stumbling blocks so that students can read whole books instead of single paragraphs. Pairing this text with supportive technology maximizes the potential for success.
Gail Portnuff Venable, MS, CCC-SLP, is a speech, language and reading consultant in San Francisco, CA and the Senior Language Editor for Start-to-Finish Books.
thoughtless of others - showing lack of careful thought; displaying a lack of consideration.
Not well considered or carefully thought out; ill-advised.
You’ve probably encountered inconsiderate books in your own reading – by authors who assume background knowledge you don’t have, or whose contorted sentence structures constantly require you to reread, or who use obscure words (think manufacturers’ warranties). Well, to a struggling reader or an ELL student, most books might seem like that.
The Problem with Hi-Lo Books
You may have tried using the readability scores on publishers’ websites as a guide. You see a 1.5 grade equivalency and think you’ve found a solution for your older struggling readers or English language learners. You order the books, give them a try, but your students may still struggle. Why?
It is possible to take text and tweak it so it will get a lower readability score. All you have to do is cut sentences apart to make them shorter, use more familiar words and reduce the total number of syllables. But does this lead to a more considerate book? Often just the opposite!
Suppose the short, familiar words are used in unfamiliar ways – like “arms” in “a call to arms”? And what if clauses are broken into separate sentences, thus removing the links that explain the relationships between ideas – words like “so” and “because.” Students are suddenly left to make their own inferences, often without the background knowledge to do so.
Readability Formulas: Help or Hindrance?
If you randomly picked two books off a library shelf, the harder one will be the book with longer sentences and a greater number of multi-syllable words. This is why readability formulas are useful in giving rough estimates of a book’s difficulty. They are not designed, however, to provide a prescription for writing a book.
Edward Fry, creator of the Fry Readability Graph, says, “You can cheat on an IQ test to get a higher score, but cheating will not change your intelligence. Likewise you can cheat or artificially doctor writing to get a lower readability formula score, but you might not have changed the true readability much and you may have made it worse.”
— Fry, E. (1988). Writeability: the principles of writing for increased comprehension. In Zakaluk, B. and Samuels, S.J.(eds.), Readability: Its past, present, and future (pp. 77-95). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Considerate Text: What Is It?
My colleague, Gail Portnuff Venable, and I suggest six markers:
- Mature story themes; grade level curriculum Older students with reading or language difficulties are socially astute and academically challenged all at once. The books we ask them to read must “connect” with their maturity level. The texts must be age-appropriate in feel and content.
- Engagement In order to “hook” these students, books must be relevant and compelling, even containing information that is new to a good reader. This kind of information gives the student with challenges confidence and status among more skilled peers.
- Idioms and Vocabulary Good readers add more than 3,000 new words a year—mostly gained through reading—to their comprehension vocabulary. Language learners and struggling readers may add only several hundred. Considerate text limits the density of new vocabulary and introduces new words, new meanings of old words, and idioms carefully. It considers not only the commonness of a word but also the commonness of the way the word is used. The only difficult words that will be found in considerate text are words that are important to the story or the topic at hand. If you’re discussing the consequences of avalanches, words like avalanche and buried should not be avoided. Rather, they should be introduced and supported carefully.
- Background knowledge Good readers apply prior knowledge — mostly gained through reading — to increasingly difficult texts. Considerate text assumes little prior knowledge and anchors the reader using familiar examples, analogies and, when appropriate, builds mental models by providing considerate photos, illustrations, maps and other graphics that are properly labeled and captioned.
- Sentence structure Considerate text simplifies sentence structure, but makes the logical connections between ideas clear. It does not use short, choppy sentences that require the reader to guess at the relationships between them.
- Technology support Considerate text by itself can boost a student’s success. Adding technology can make the text even more effective. An audio CD or MP3 file can add human-recorded, digitized speech to model phrasing, rate, intonation and stress, irony, sarcasm, humor, and the pronunciations of new names and unfamiliar words. A computer book can display on-screen text that is highlighted as it is read.
Next month, LeaderLink will link you to examples of considerate text (PDF file format) along with recordings of professional narrators reading the passages (MP3 file format) fluently, modeling good prosody and rate. We will tell you how to use the examples as “read along” activities with older students (grades 5 – 12) who require instructional materials at the 2nd to 5th grade readability level. Then, you be the judge of what considerate text looks like.
Sample Passage of Considerate Text
In the meantime, here is a sample passage that demonstrates our first 5 markers of considerate text. The passage is from the The Mutiny on the Bounty, a selection in the Start-to-Finish Gold Library (2-3 readability). Notice the use of complex sentences to make connections between ideas clear. Notice too, how the text supports idioms and vocabulary and gives the student background knowledge.
Captain Bligh knew that they had to make their food last until the ship reached Tahiti, so he ordered the clerk, Mr. Samuel, to give the men only half as much bread. The crew did not like Mr. Samuel because he was in charge of the food, and the men thought that he kept the best food for himself and the captain.
Old Bacchus liked to say, “The men eat stale bread and bits of dried pork, while Bligh and Samuel eat high off the hog.”
It’s true that a butcher finds the best pork meat on the higher parts of a hog. The men knew that “eating high off the hog” meant that Bligh and Samuel had the best of everything at mealtime.
One day, Mr. Samuel reported to Bligh. “Captain,” said Mr. Samuel, “the bread supply is full of maggots, and it must be thrown away.” Maggots are small white worms that hatch from the eggs of a fly.