What is text complexity? Why does it matter?
Great questions. I had the same ones as I sat in a professional development training session a week ago. Here's the gist of it. Text complexity refers to the difficulty of a piece of writing. There are varying levels of text complexity. For example, a children's book would have a low level of text complexity. The Federalist papers written by our founding fathers would have a high level of text complexity. The goal is keep students moving up this ladder. Too many times we offer them only reading materials that are at their current level. Sometimes, that's okay. But it's important to also give them reading materials that are just out of their current text complexity level in order to help them grow and achieve new levels of reading comprehension. The goal is not only college preparation, but workplace preparation. Someone who goes to college and takes a sociology course will need to be able to read at a high level just as much as someone turning wrenches and reading a technical manual. For heaven's sake, trying to program your DVD player using the manual can sometimes feel like an honors level course. We need to create readers who don't need everything brought down to their level. Instead, the goal is to create readers who have the ability to climb to whatever level is put in front of them using decoding skills, context clues, and reference skills for the words or phrases they can't figure out on their own. Raising text complexity for students, one of the goals of educators here at Newell-Fonda.
