Investigation A
In the associated material Measuring readability , the passages A, B, C, and D represent academic texts at successive levels. Both the average sentence length and the percentage of longer words increase to match the greater age and education of the intended audiences.
Why investigate complexity?
If we take the first part of each passage, we can see that the sentences become not just longer, but also more complex.
A. Kinleith Forest is a very busy place. During the day, forestry workers hack and saw noisily.
B. Ferns are usually very easy to identify from their leaves. Known as fronds, fern leaves tend to be very long.
C. Vitamin D is essential for bone growth and health at all ages because it helps the body to absorb ingested calcium and to deposit calcium, with phosphate, into the skeleton.
D. Orientation refers to how learners view a task, the nature of the goals they form in order to perform it and the operations they use to carry it out.
If teachers are to help their students develop the skills to use increasingly complex sentences, they need to be able to analyse what it is that makes sentences complex.
How can I help students deal with complex sentences?
When students are having difficulty with the material they need to read for their curriculum studies, teachers need to explicitly teach them how to read that material. Students who are not challenged may not move on to more advanced learning. This is what the Matthew effect refers to.
Investigations B, C, and D show three ways of analysing complex sentences to establish where the complexity lies. The three ways are:
- breaking sentences into parts
- restating parts of sentences in more familiar ways
- putting parts together into more complex sentences.
You can use the same methods to help students learn to understand such sentences and develop their ability to use complex sentence structures themselves.
The inquiries Generic patterns in texts , S caffolding students’ writing , and Learning to use more complex sentences also address this issue.
