Investigation A
Reading materials at curriculum levels 2 and 4
Use Web VP to examine the difference between reading materials at curriculum levels 2 and 4.
- Copy and paste into Web VP the first passage from the associated material Measuring readability .
- Do the analysis.
- Copy and paste the second passage and do the analysis.
- Fill in the table below with the percentages shown in the analysis.
- Look at the results and compare the two passages.
- What differences do you notice, and what does this mean for students as they progress from level 2 to level 4?
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Level 2 Bats |
Level 4 Ferns |
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First 500 words |
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First 1000 words (1–1000) |
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Second 1000 words (1001–2000) |
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Academic words (from AWL) |
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Off-list words |
The off-list words are those that are not frequent in general use (in the first 2000 words) or across many academic areas. They are mostly technical words , such as ‘forestry’, ‘logging’, ’bats‘, ’ferns‘, ’leaflets‘, ’fronds‘, and ’sporangia‘. In stories, they may be unusual descriptive words, such as ’gleaming‘ or ’quiver’.
How do vocabulary levels relate to reading levels?
More complex texts will have more specific vocabulary. They will also have some more complex sentences. (See the inquiries Generic patterns in texts and Finding information in complex texts .) Vocabulary is only one of the issues considered in deciding the reading level of a text. However, it is a very significant one, and the Elley Noun Count (Elley and Croft, 1989) is the method used to identify the approximate reading levels of Ministry of Education texts such as School Journal stories. Comparing the vocabulary in texts that you know your students can understand with the vocabulary in a text that you are considering using will indicate whether the new text is at the right level.
The Ministry of Education has provided information and models of texts at different levels to help teachers of English language learners, in the resources English Language Learning Framework: Draft (2005) and English Language Intensive Programme: Years 7–13 Resource (2003b).
Research into extensive reading tells us that the level of difficulty or accessibility of a text cannot simply be determined by doing a noun count or by making a judgment about the vocabulary frequency or structural complexity. Features of vocabulary and syntax, organisation, and layout … also contribute to a text’s complexity … judging the difficulty level of a text depends on who is to read it and what they need to do when they have read the text … the reader’s … skills and background knowledge interacts with the nature of the [reading] task to make the text more or less difficult to read.
(English Language Learning Framework: Draft, 2005, page 45.)
Because readers need to understand at least 95 per cent of the words in a text to read it easily, consider the following questions:
- What teaching practices can help your bilingual Pasifika students work well with texts in which more than 5 per cent of the words are unknown?
- How can you help your bilingual Pasifika students learn the words they need to know?
ESOL Online has many vocabulary learning resources that can help you address these questions.
