Text complexity in the US Common Core State Standards: a linguistic critique.
Fang, Zhihui
Introduction
A flurry of national reports (e.g. National Center for Education
Statistics, 2014) suggest that academic achievement for K-12 students in
the United States has declined or remained stagnant over the past
decade. This lack of educational progress is believed to stem, at least
in part, from three troubling trends that have been widely reported in
research: (a) students' motivation to read and the amount of
(academic) reading decline as they advance in schooling; (b) subject
area content is delivered primarily via PowerPoint, lecture, oral
discussion, hands-on tasks, and performance-based activities, with
little use of written texts (and hence few opportunities for extended
reading and writing); and (c) students are rarely explicitly taught how
to independently read and write complex texts in subject area
classrooms.
In response to this situation, the National Governors Association
(NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) recently
released a document outlining a set of rigorous national standards for
school children. The document, called the Common Core State Standards
(CCSS) (www.corestandards.org), represents a sea change in
standards-based educational reforms. It recommends that 'all
students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing
complexity as they progress through school' (NGA & CCSSO, 2010,
p. 2), and that by the time they graduate high school, students
'must be able to read and comprehend independently and proficiently
the kinds of complex texts commonly found in college and careers'
(NGA & CCSSO, 2010, p. 2). These recommendations reflect the beliefs
of the CCSS architects that (a) texts of varying complexities are
central to literacy development and disciplinary learning; (b) the
complexity of school texts has steadily declined over the past several
decades; and (c) many students have trouble independently reading
complex texts in academic subjects upon high school graduation.
Similar movements to raise educational standards and make language
and literacy integral parts of subject area teaching can be found
elsewhere around the world. The National Curriculum in England
(Department for Education, 2014), for example, calls for teachers to
'develop pupils' reading and writing in all subjects to
support their acquisition of knowledge' (Department for Education,
2014, p. 10); and students are expected to be able to read fluently and
to understand extended prose. In Australia, recent policy initiatives
and research efforts have also become increasingly concerned with
language and literacy across the school curriculum; and as part of the
national literacy goals, students are expected to develop facility in
handling the distinctive language and literacy demands of school
subjects (ACARA, 2012; Love, 2009; Unsworth, 2002).
One central concept in the CCSS document is text complexity. The
concept has received much attention in recent discussions of the CCSS
(e.g. Gamson, Lu & Eckert, 2013; Hiebert & Mesmer, 2013; Moore,
Zancanella & Avila, 2014; Hiebert & Pearson, 2014). This essay
contributes to this conversation. Informed by systemic functional
linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), a theory of meaning that
interprets language as networks of interlocking options and views
grammar as a creative resource for making meaning, this article offers a
linguistic critique of text complexity as it was conceived by the
writers of the CCSS document. It also identifies some linguistic sources
of complexity that create potential comprehension challenges and
describes a pedagogical routine for coping with these challenges.
Understanding text complexity is key to its effective implementation in
curriculum development and classroom practices. A linguistic perspective
on text complexity is needed because (a) school knowledge is made
prototypically of language and presented to students primarily through
written texts; and (b) as the knowledge students have to learn becomes
more specialised and complex over the school years, the language that
constructs this knowledge also becomes progressively more dense,
technical, and abstract (Halliday, 2007; Schleppegrell, 2004). A focus
on language, while partial in the contemporary multimodal textual
environment (e.g. Kress, 2003; Unsworth, 2002), is nonetheless important
because language is often referred to as the 'hidden
curriculum' of schooling (Christie, 2012) and consistently shown to
be the primary source of variability in predicting reading comprehension
(Uccelli et al., 2014).
Deconstructing text complexity
The CCSS document defines text complexity as 'the inherent
difficulty of reading and comprehending a text combined with the
considerations of reader and task variables' (NGA & CCSSO,
2010, p. 43). It uses a triad of features to determine text complexity:
quantitative dimensions (e.g. word length, word frequency, sentence
length, and text cohesion), qualitative dimensions (e.g. structure,
knowledge demands, language conventionality and clarity, and levels of
meaning), and reader considerations (e.g. motivation, knowledge,
experience, purpose, and task sophistication). It also presents
grade-by-grade specifications for increasing text complexity across the
span of K-12 schooling.
There are several problems with this conception of text complexity.
First, the CCSS document conflates text complexity with text difficulty.
Text complexity is an inherent property of text, and can be described in
terms of its lexical, syntactic, discursive, and visual features;
whereas text difficulty refers to the degree of challenge that a text
presents to its readers in terms of its conceptual, linguistic, and
visual elements. Thus, although reader and task are important
considerations in any discussion of text difficulty, they are
technically not features of text complexity. In other words, while text
difficulty can vary based on text characteristics, reader profile and
task requirements, text complexity is a relatively more stable feature
defined by the internal properties of text.
From a linguistic perspective, a text can be complex along two
dimensions: lexical density and grammatical intricacy. Lexical density
is the proportion of content words (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, most
adverbs) to the total discourse (Halliday, 1989). It can be derived from
dividing the total number of content words by the total number of
clauses in the text. This measure determines the informational density
of a text; a higher score means more information is packed into the
clause. Grammatical intricacy, on the other hand, refers to the patterns
of the organisation of sentence (called clause complex). It can be
derived from dividing the total number of clauses by the total number of
sentences. The higher the index, the more grammatically intricate the
text. As illustrated in Table 1, a text can become complex by being
either lexically dense (i.e. packing a large number of content words
into each clause through embedding as well as use of adverbial and
prepositional phrases) or grammatically intricate (i.e. building up
elaborate sentences through subordinate and coordinate relations).
Different ways of meaning (e.g. speaking and writing) engender
texts of different complexities (Halliday, 2005). In informal spoken
contexts, complexity is accomplished largely through 'prosodie
structuring and clause chaining with conjunctions and discourse
markers' (Schleppegrell, 2001, p. 454), whereas in written academic
contexts it is accomplished largely through 'hierarchical
structure, lexicalisation of logical links, and clause-linking
strategies of condensation and embedding' (Schleppegrell, 2001, p.
454). Therefore, it is erroneous to assume, as the CCSS document seems
to do, that spontaneous spoken texts are less complex than written
academic texts. As Halliday (1989) has demonstrated, both types of texts
are complex, but their complexities are manifested differently. As a
general tendency, the more natural, un-self-monitored texts (e.g.
spontaneous speech) and texts that are oriented towards events and
processes (e.g. personal genres such as recount and narrative) tend to
have higher grammatical intricacy and lower lexical density. By
contrast, the more planned, distilled texts (e.g. written texts of
academic disciplines) and texts that are oriented towards things/ideas
and their relations (e.g. factual and analytical genres such as
explanation, report, and exposition) tend to have higher lexical density
and lower grammatical intricacy.
Not only does text complexity vary along the
'spoken-written' continuum and by genre, it also differs
across disciplines. While texts in academic disciplines are generally
lexically dense, they differ in the lexical and grammatical patternings
that contribute to this density (Fang, 2012; Fang & Schleppegrell,
2008). For example, science texts often use (a) technical terminology to
construct non-commensensical interpretations of the world; (b) expanded
noun phrases to pack a heavy load of information into the clause; (c)
nominalisations to build technical taxonomies, distil information, and
create discursive flow; and (d) logical metaphor to develop logical
reasoning and advance argument. History texts, on the other hand, are
often constructed in abstract language that infuses the historian's
ideological perspectives. The abstraction is typically realised through
the use of (a) generic nouns, which refer to groups of people, classes
of things, documents, or institutions; (b) nominalisations, which turn a
series of events, an action, a quality, or time sequences into abstract
'things' that allow historians to ascribe judgment and expand
information; (c) evaluative words and phrases to indicate affect,
judgment, and valuation; (d) a sandwich texture that juxtaposes
narrative recount of historical events with abstract explanation and
interpretation of these events; and (e) within-clause realisation of
causal relations that conflates causality and temporality. Mathematics
texts typically draw on meaningful configurations of language,
symbolism, and visual display to construe mathematical knowledge,
processes, and reasoning. In language arts, language patterns of all
kinds are used in literary and nonliterary texts in order to entertain
and inform readers. These patterns are motivated in that they enable
disciplinary experts to present information, structure text, infuse
perspective, and develop argument in ways that are consonant with the
norms and values embraced by particular communities of practice (Hyland,
2004). As Biber (1992) has observed, text complexity is a
multidimensional construct, with different types of structural
elaboration reflecting different discourse functions and different kinds
of texts exhibiting different complexity profiles.
These varying complexities 'emerge from and realise the
different purposes and contexts of language use in different
situations' (Schleppegrell, 2001, p. 451). They imply different
ways of knowing and of learning, and present different degrees of
challenge to the reader. Some lexicogrammatical patterns that contribute
to text complexity are more familiar to children, whereas others are
less familiar to them and hence pose greater comprehension difficulties.
An important question to ask, then, is: What lexicogrammatical
configurations of text complexity are potentially more challenging to
children? Instead of addressing this question, the CCSS document devotes
the lion's share of its attention to quantitative dimensions as a
key index in determining what texts students should be reading at
different grade bands.
Commonly used quantitative measures (e.g. Fry, Flesh-Kincaid,
Lexile) employ either readability formulas or prediction equations.
These measures have been widely criticised for their reliance on surface
level linguistic features such as word length (the number of syllables
per word), word frequency (the number of times a word appears), and
sentence length (the number of words per sentence). For example, Perera
(1982) showed that (a) short words can sometimes be more difficult to
read than longer words; (b) words that are familiar to a reader with one
meaning or in one grammatical context may become unfamiliar to the
reader when used with a different, less common meaning or function; (c)
sentences with the same vocabulary and of the same length can vary in
difficulty because of the order in which the words appear; and (d)
shorter sentences can sometimes be more difficult to comprehend than
longer sentences due to the use of ellipsis or wording differences.
According to Hiebert (2011), readability formulas tend to inflate the
difficulty of informational text that repeatedly uses certain uncommon
words central to its topic but understate the difficulty of narrative
fiction that uses a lot of dialogue. Other scholars (e.g. Graesser,
McNamara & Louwerse, 2004; Templeton, Cain & Miller, 1981) have
criticised readability formulas for failing to take into account
additional factors that also affect comprehension, such as conceptual
difficulty, interest level, text structure, text cohesion and coherence,
and a reader's background knowledge and cognitive aptitude. For
these reasons, Perera (1982) suggested that a more thorough examination
is needed of vocabulary, sentence structure, and other aspects of
linguistic complexity not revealed by measures of word or sentence
length (e.g. literary devices, idiomatic expressions). She further noted
that 'informed judgments by a thoughtful teacher may have
advantages over the application of a readability formula' in
selecting/writing reading materials and in planning reading instruction
(Perera, 1982, p. 101).
A further criticism of readability formulas or prediction equations
is that all of the quantitative measures give a single, summative
measure of a text's complexity in terms of grade equivalent or a
continuous score. Such 'omnibus' measures do not tell teachers
which parts of the text are more or less challenging; nor do they give
teachers any insight into how the text can be used or taught. Moreover,
an emphasis on a single, static measure and the reader-text match can
lead teachers to overlook texts that are above or below the required
complexity level of a particular grade band but may offer more relevant
and timely content or have the potential to entice and engage students
in reading/ learning. Some children, for example, struggle with simple
school-based texts, but revel in reading pop culture texts (e.g. Pokemon
cards) that often contain more complex vocabulary and syntactic
patterns. For these reasons, Hiebert (2014) suggested that the
quantitative measures should only be a starting point in the assessment
of text complexity, much in the same way that a number on a medical exam
is the starting point that triggers further evaluation.
To be fair, the CCSS writers were not unaware of these limitations,
as they also recommended the inclusion of qualitative dimensions as an
additional indicator of text complexity. The four qualitative measures
of text complexity--levels of meaning or purpose, structure, language
conventionality and clarity, and knowledge demands--were, however, not
described with the same level of specificity or sophistication as the
quantitative measures. In fact, the description is provided in
dichotomous terms (e.g. simple vs complex, clear vs ambiguous, explicit
vs implicit, conventional vs unconventional, literal vs figurative,
single level vs multiple levels, low intertextuality vs high
intertextuality). Such a cursory account fails to pinpoint the exact
sources of text complexity that likely engender comprehension
challenges. As noted earlier, not all complexities are equally
challenging for comprehension (because of reader characteristics); and
complexity does not necessarily correlate with difficulty. In fact,
sometimes greater complexity may make the text more comprehensible
because simplified or engineered texts can obscure semantic relations
and disrupt discursive flow in ways that make the text less coherent and
thus more challenging to comprehend (Beck, Omanson & McKeown, 1982).
The CCSS document does not address such important questions as: (a)
Which particular lexical, syntactic, and discursive features are likely
to cause reading problems? and (b) What is it about these features that
make them potentially challenging to students? Nor does it emphasise the
need to understand the rationale behind particular configurations of
complexity. Texts are complex for functionally different reasons, and
understanding these reasons is key to developing critical
reading/writing skills and disciplinary literacies. In short, the CCSS
document is of limited value to teachers in assessing text difficulty
and planning instruction with text.
Linguistic sources of comprehension difficulties in complex texts
Hiebert (2014) stated that 'teachers need guidance on what
features of texts contribute to making comprehension challenging for
students' (p. 5). Recognising this need, this section describes
five linguistic sources of text complexity that have been documented to
present comprehension challenges to school children: specialised
vocabulary, grammatical metaphor, expanded nominal groups, intricate
sentences, and pronouns (Fang, 2006). These linguistic features, common
among academic and disciplinary texts, are well motivated: they
configure in functionally different ways across different genres,
disciplines, and contexts. Texts with greater concentrations of these
features are generally less familiar to students and hence present a
greater challenge for reading comprehension, above and beyond unfamiliar
topics. An awareness of the lexicogrammatical patterns that can cause
comprehension difficulties gives teachers a principled basis for
designing reading instruction that helps students work through
challenging texts.
Three disciplinary texts--one each in science, history, and
mathematics (see Table 2)--are used to exemplify the five linguistic
features identified above. Text 2 (science) is an excerpt on
environmental science from A Window on Eternity written by two-time
winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Wilson (2014), that examines the near
destruction and rebirth of Gorongosa, one of the biologically richest
places in Africa. Text 3 (history) is taken from The World Must Know
(Berenbaum, 2006), an historical account that examines the atrocities of
the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Text 4 (mathematics) is an excerpt from a popular geometry textbook in
the U.S. intended for ninth grade by Charles, Branch-Boyd, Illingworth,
Mills and Reeves (2004).
Specialised vocabulary
Two types of specialised vocabulary can present comprehension
challenges when reading texts in academic disciplines. One type is
technical vocabulary, which includes words and phrases experts use to
capture key disciplinary concepts. Technical terms such as species,
pollinator, symbioses, and euglossine bees in Text 2--are essential to
the creation and organisation of specialised knowledge in specific
disciplines. Without them, disciplines as we know them today would not
have existed. Because of its low frequency of occurrence outside of
disciplinary contexts, technical vocabulary tends to be less familiar to
students and can thus create reading problems. Another type of
specialised vocabulary is commonplace words and phrases that take on
special meaning in particular contexts or disciplines. Words--such as
product and sides in Text 4--are usually familiar to students because of
their high utility in the everyday context, but they can pose
comprehension difficulties when used in a different, non-vernacular
sense. Comprehension problems can exacerbate when a heavy load of
specialised vocabulary is present in a short chunk of text.
Grammatical metaphor
Grammatical metaphor is a key feature of academic and disciplinary
texts. It refers to linguistic choices that realise meaning in ways that
are incongruent with how humans typically construe their everyday
experience. In congruent realisations things are presented in nouns,
processes in verbs, qualities in adjectives, circumstances (i.e. when,
where, how, in what manner, to what extent) in adverbs or prepositional
phrases, and logical-semantic relations in conjunctions. In incongruent
realisations processes, qualities, and circumstances are presented in
nouns, and logical-semantic relations in nouns, verbs, or prepositions.
One prominent type of grammatical metaphor is nominalisation, which
involves the use of a nominal group as a substitute for another
grammatical class or structure (e.g. verb, adjective, adverb,
prepositional phrase, conjunction or clause). For example, this 24-word
sentence from Text 3--The location and operation of the camps were based
on calculations of accessibility and cost-effectiveness--the hallmarks
of modern business and administrative practice.--contains seven
nominalisations (underlined). It can be expressed in the more congruent
language of everyday life as 'The Nazis determined where the
[concentration] camps were to be located and how they were to be
operated by calculating how accessible and cost-effective they are. This
is characteristic of how modern business and administration
operate.' The grammatical shifts from verb, adjective, and clause
to nominal group that accompany the transference from congruent to
incongruent ways of realising meaning are shown in Table 3. Note that
these shifts also involve the disappearance of historical actors (the
Nazis) who were perpetrators of the activities.
All three texts in Table 2 are populated with nominalisations, as
can be seen in Table 4. Some of the terms, such as inbreeding and
symbioses in Text 2 and product in Text 4, have also become reified as
technical or semi-technical concepts with specialised meanings. They
work in conjunction with technical vocabulary and other nominalisations
to create an abstract textual world that is alienating to students and
presents comprehension challenges to them.
As these examples demonstrate, nominalisation has consequences for
the organisation of the clause and even subsequent sentences. By
synthesising or condensing prior discourse into a nominal group that
then functions as participant in a new clause, nominalisation helps
create a cohesive text that flows. For example, 'such
symbioses' in Text 2 reintroduces the idea presented in the
previous three sentences (i.e. about the interdependency of species) as
a nominal group that then becomes the subject of the first clause of the
last sentence. Similarly, 'the killing' (second sentence) in
Text 3 distills the message from the first sentence (massacre in
concentration camps) into a nominal group that then serves as the topic
of discussion in the sentence. From this perspective, nominalisation is
an important grammatical resource for organising information and
developing argument in a text.
At the same time, however, nominalisation creates a discourse that
is simultaneously dense, technical, abstract, and nebulous, making the
text much more difficult to comprehend and critique. By compressing and
distilling what is normally expressed in a clause into a nominal group
that becomes merely a grammatical participant in the clause,
nominalisation increases the informational load (i.e. density) of the
clause. It also creates abstraction and technicality by suppressing
agency and eliminating concrete referential information. In other words,
by ways of nominalisation, discursive vitality (with actors actually
engaging in action) is transformed into a stasis or an abstraction. This
has the effect of naturalising something that is fuzzy and opaque,
making it sound technical, precise, stable, and authoritative. It also
masks power relationships by downplaying individual responsibility for
an action or completely removing people or other agents from the
picture.
For example, in the first sentence of Text 2, the agents
responsible for the loss of tree and insect species are hidden and have
to be inferred from the surrounding text. In the first sentence of Text
3, the party responsible for selecting and operating the site for
concentration camps is buried and has to be recovered for reading
comprehension. Similarly, in Text 4 the actor responsible for measuring
the interior angles of a polygon and adding up these measures is buried
so that the focus is on the mathematical concepts of measurement,
addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division, rather than on the
concrete mathematical processes of measuring, adding, subtracting,
multiplying, and dividing. Because nominalisation tends to obscure many
of the semantic relations that are otherwise transparent in the clause
structure, it reduces the reader's sense of what is truly involved
in an interaction. As such, nominalisation is an instrument of
manipulation prized by experts in many disciplines. Students who do not
understand how nominalisation works will be less likely to recognise the
hidden meanings and less likely to develop as critical readers and
writers.
This trade-off between a gain in textual information (facilitating
discursive flow) and a loss of ideational information (suppressing
agency) favours the specialist and disadvantages the novice.
Nominalisation backgrounds information that disciplinary experts are
able to retrieve (from either preceding text or prior knowledge) for
understanding, but novice or uninformed readers are not able to recover
for comprehension. Because reading comprehension always involves
activation of prior knowledge, the lost information makes it especially
daunting for those without appropriate content knowledge to properly
identify the processes and participants involved in a given situation
and how they relate to one another. As Halliday and Martin (1993)
observed, grammatical metaphor such as nominalisation 'sets apart
those who understand it and shields it from those who do not' (p.
21). It is not surprising that students find highly nominalised
discourse inaccessible, often seeing it as boring and vague.
Another type of grammatical metaphor that presents a potential
challenge for reading is logical metaphor, which realises semantic
relations between two clauses in non-congruent ways. In congruent
realisations, logical links between two clauses are realised in
conjunctions; but in non-congruent realisations, logical links are
realised clause internally in nouns, verbs, adverbs, or prepositions.
This way of using language makes the logical connections in the text
more difficult to discern for students, especially those lacking
appropriate background knowledge and/or language proficiency. For
example, Text 2 is an environmental science text that offers
causal/consequential explanations about the extinction of plant and
animal species in Gorongosa National Park. The logical connections in
the text are realised through verbs and prepositions. In the first
sentence, the verb phrase 'results in' offers a consequential
explanation, i.e. the loss of a single tree species causes the
elimination of insect species. The second sentence is what Fitzgerald
(2014) called an 'asyndetic construction,' which realises
causality not through an explicit marker (e.g. conjunction) but through
the modal verb can. It means that the disappearance of a key pollinator
likely has the effect of causing multiple plant species to become
extinct. In the third sentence, the prepositions from and with construct
causal explanations, suggesting that (a) honeybees suffered a die-off
probably because of the human use of pesticides and inbreeding among
honeybees; and (b) some crops declined because honeybees suffered a
die-off. The last sentence constructs a consequential relation through a
verb denoting the relational process (mean), suggesting that the
extinction of one partner species causes the other species to die too.
When causal explanations are constructed with linguistic resources other
than the usually familiar resource of conjunctions (e.g. because, so),
the true causes of and eventual solutions to environmental problems are
obscured. This, coupled with the burial of agency through
nominalisation, can impede students' comprehension of environmental
texts and inhibit their active participation in solving environmental
problems (Chenhansa & Schleppegrell, 1998).
Similarly, in Text 3, the verb phrase (were based on) in the first
sentence implies causation: accessibility and cost-effectiveness
determined where concentration camps were to be located and how they
were to be operated. The use of 'from' in the third sentence
suggests that because killing Jews became an industry, German
corporations were able to make good profits. Fitzgerald (2014) suggested
that the reason authors make causal relationships implicit could be
varied interpretations, political sensibilities, lack of evidence, or a
combination of these. From a discursive point of view, by construing
causal relations within clauses (through verbs, nouns, or prepositions)
rather than between clauses (through conjunctions), authors have
available to them a much wider array of linguistic resources to
delicately explain how one thing leads to another (Martin, 2002). At the
same time, such within-clause logical reasoning necessitates the causes
and effects to be constructed as abstract 'things', often in
the form of nominalisations. In short, grammatical metaphor makes
explanations less accessible to comprehend or critique for students.
Expanded nominal group
Texts in academic disciplines tend to be lexically dense, meaning
that they pack a large quantity of content words into individual
clauses. Expanded nominal groups are a key contributor to lexical
density, as they enable the author to pack a heavy load of information
into the clause (Fang, Schleppegrell & Cox, 2006). According to
Halliday and Martin (1993), lexical density is typically 2-3 for
spontaneous speech and 4-6 for general written texts, but can be 10 or
higher for specialised texts in academic disciplines. The following
sentences from Texts 2-4 have a lexical density score of at least 10,
and it is the expanded nominal group (italicised) that renders them
informationally loaded:
* The loss of a single tree species often results in the
elimination of multiple moth, beetle, and other insect species dependent
on it.
* The location and operation of the camps were based on
calculations of accessibility and cost-effectiveness --the hallmarks of
modern business and administrative practice.
* The sum of the measures of the interior angles of a polygon
equals the product of 180[degrees] and two less than the number of
sides.
* The measure of each angle of a regular polygon equals the sum of
the angle measures divided by the number of angles.
Lexically-dense texts present greater processing demands than
lexically-sparse texts because of the limits of human working memory.
When multiple expanded nominal groups are present in a single clause,
the clause can be especially dense and difficult to process.
Complications for comprehension can occur when one nominalisation is
embedded within another to create an expanded nominal group that is
simultaneously dense and abstract, as the three examples above
illustrate.
Intricate sentence
Texts that are grammatically intricate contain long sentences, each
strung together with multiple clauses through coordination and
subordination. Grammatical intricacy is a feature of spontaneous speech.
It does not typically present a problem for listening comprehension
because in listening, text is processed 'largely at the level of
meaning' without conscious attention to wording (Halliday, 2005, p.
350). In reading, by contrast, text is processed at the level of
wording, with the reader predisposed to 'take a synoptic view of
what it means' (Halliday, 2005, p. 344). This means that texts with
high grammatical intricacy tend to be difficult to follow when read. As
Perera (1982) noted, while length per se does not necessarily make a
sentence easier or more difficult to comprehend, a long sentence that
contains several clauses with complex logical-semantic relationships
among them are very often hard to read. The following two sentences from
Wilson's (2014) A Window on Eternity each encode a series of
logicosemantic relations (underlined) through subordinate and coordinate
clauses that can be difficult to untangle for inexperienced readers.
* At the terminal of one of the gorges is one such cave, from which
a stream flows, and which may have been occupied by humans and the
ancestors of humans since humanity began, making it potentially prime
site for further archaeological exploration, (p. 29)
* And now that the rain forest of Mount Gorongosa is also saved,
and providing the water distribution of the park is protected, and
providing the long-term effects of climate change are not overwhelming,
there is no reason to fear that the ecological cycle that worked for
thousands of years in the past will not go on for thousands of years
into the future, (p. 53)
Pronoun
A pronoun is a word that replaces a noun in a sentence. It is a
powerful device for establishing cohesion in a text and for avoiding
cumbersome repetition. Pronouns such as personal pronouns (e.g. it, he,
we), demonstratives (e.g. this, such, those), and relative pronouns
(e.g. who, which, that) can create comprehension problems for readers if
their referents are not transparent. Referential ambiguity can arise
when (a) multiple referential possibilities exist for a pronoun; (b) the
distance between a pronoun and its referent is so great that it impedes
the recognition capability of the reader's working memory; or (c)
the precise referent for a pronoun is difficult to pinpoint in the text.
The first sentence in Text 2, for example, contains a pronoun
'it', whose referent (a single tree species) is far away at
the beginning of this 23-word sentence. The precise referent for the
demonstrative 'such' in such symbioses (last sentence) is not
easy to identify because it refers not to a particular word or phrase in
the text, but to the idea discussed in the preceding three sentences.
Identifying and tracking referents is a critical reading skill that
involves both content/domain knowledge and discursive insights.
Summary
The five linguistic features discussed above occur with regularity
in disciplinary texts; however, they may not always be all present in a
single text. These linguistic sources of complexity are not by
themselves easy or difficult to understand. The degree to which they
present challenges to reading comprehension depends not only on the
frequency, concentration, and context of their occurrences, but more
importantly on reader characteristics (e.g. motivation, language
proficiency, cognitive aptitude, background knowledge, literacy
experience) and task requirements (e.g. reading for enjoyment vs.
reading for detailed summary vs. reading to critique). This means that
reader and task factors should be 'among the first
considerations' when evaluating the potential impact of text
complexity on reading comprehension (Wixson & Valencia, 2014, p.
431). Teachers are in the best position to evaluate whether one or more
linguistic features present specific comprehension challenges to
particular readers in a given task. Understanding the various ways text
complexity is constructed, as well as the reasons behind and the effects
of these constructions, is the first essential step towards not only
assessing text difficulty but also, more importantly, providing
instructional support that enables students to cope with the challenges
of complex texts and develop as engaged and critical readers and
proficient writers. With an intimate awareness of, as well as explicit
knowledge about, text features and their potential impacts on
comprehension, teachers will 'regain a sense of agency and
creativity' and be better equipped to 'craft a tailored
approach to their classroom and their individual learners'
(Hiebert, 2014, pp. 16-17). This sense of empowerment is also key to
developing what Duffy (2005) called 'visionary' and
'entrepreneurial' teachers who do not have to rely on
prepackaged commercial programs but are capable of making independent,
informed decisions about curriculum and pedagogy.
Working with complex texts
Texts of varying complexities present different processing demands
for reading comprehension. Students need guidance in order to
successfully cope with these texts. Such guidance can be provided
through close reading practices. Rooted in literacy criticism and
recommended in the CCSS document, close reading is 'an approach to
teaching comprehension that insists students extract meaning from text
by examining carefully how language is used in the passage itself'
(Snow & O'Connor, 2013, p. 2). During close reading, students
engage in intensive analysis and critical examination of a text through
repeated readings in order to understand its main ideas and key details,
its craft and structure, and its voice and perspective. Fang (in press)
recently described a pedagogical routine for implementing close reading
with complex texts. Drawing on extant models of close reading (e.g. Fang
& Schleppegrell, 2010; Fisher & Frey, 2012; Rose & Martin,
2012), this routine consists of four phases, namely, engaging with the
text, zooming in on the text, playing with the text, and extending the
text.
During the first phase, teachers engage students in making sense of
the text through reading, questioning, and discussion. As students read
the text, they take notes, jotting down comments and connections, as
well as 'thick' questions (i.e. those dealing with the big
picture or large concepts and requiring thinking, searching, synthesis,
and inference) and 'thin' questions (i.e., those focusing on
specific details in the text). After reading, students get into small
groups to share their notes and discuss the questions they have
generated. Next, as a whole class, students share what they discussed in
their groups, marking the questions that are not answered and
brainstorming ideas that help them seek answers to these questions (e.g.
read further, check an outside source, and ask teacher). The reading and
discussion helps students gain a general understanding of the text,
providing a foundation for subsequent phases of the instructional
routine.
During the second phase, teachers help students zoom in on a
particularly challenging but important segment (e.g. 1-2 paragraphs)
within the text. Specifically, teachers engage students in reading the
text segment closely, deconstructing each sentence into meaningful
chunks and discussing the meaning and rhetorical functions of these
chunks. In this phase, teachers explicitly draw students' attention
to new or challenging lexical, grammatical, and discursive features,
helping them expand their linguistic repertoires for making genre/
discipline-specific meanings, such as those for building tension in
stories; construing technicality, density, abstraction, and
generalisation in factual texts; and evaluating issues and critiquing
texts in persuasive and response essays.
During the third phase, teachers design language-based tasks that
highlight and reinforce key or new language patterns from the text.
Using excerpts from the texts students have been reading, these tasks
can focus on developing students' understanding of (a) key
vocabulary; (b) authorial voice; (c) how information is packed to
increase density in disciplinary texts; (d) how information is
synthesized or distilled in a way that also facilitates discursive flow
in the text; (e) how information can be packaged and repackaged in ways
that accommodate the needs of audience, style, author purpose, and
discourse organisation; (f) how clause beginnings impact the
presentation of information and creation of discursive flow; and (g) how
everyday language can be used as a resource for making sense of
academic/disciplinary language (see, for example, Fang, 2010). They
provide opportunities for students to 'play with' novel or key
language features, helping them develop familiarity with and facility in
using academic and disciplinary language.
During the fourth phase, teachers guide students to write a new
text, first collaboratively and then independently, encouraging
imitation as well as 'playful innovation' (Myhill, 2013) in
language use. With narrative texts, for example, students use the
literary resources from the literature they have been reading in
constructing a new story that is different in content (e.g. characters,
events, and settings) from the model text. With factual texts, students
write a new text using the same content as the original text but in
wordings that are closer to what they might use themselves. With
analytical texts, students write a new text using the rhetorical
resources of evaluation and persuasion drawn from the model text.
Students can also write responses to the text they have been reading,
making personal connections with as well as evaluating and critiquing
the ideas and craft in the text.
It is important to note that work with complex texts must be
embedded within disciplinary experiences. The above instructional
routine needs to be used within units of study in which students engage
in reading, writing, talking, observing, listening, viewing, inquiring,
doing, and performing related to the topics or ideas significant to the
discipline. For example, in an 11th-grade environmental science unit
focused on increasing students' understanding of the impacts of
human activities on the environment, students can conduct observations
and experiments involving climate change, watch YouTube documentaries on
pollution (e.g. Farley, 2012), listen to the environmental outlook
series on the Diane Rehm show, and take field trips to witness sites of
environmental degradation. Additionally, they can read, discuss, and
respond to (orally and in writing) a range of books on environmental
issues--such as A Window on Eternity (Wilson, 2014), Silent Spring
(Carson, 1962), Sacred Ecology (Berkes, 2008), Fruitless Fall (Jacobsen,
2008), Food, Inc. (Pringle, 2003), The Omnivore's Dilemma (Pollan,
2006), Anthropology and Climate Change (Crate, 2009), Chesapeake Bay
Blues (Ernest, 2003), and even Waiden (pp. 138-158) (Thoreau, 1854)--as
well as textbook excerpts and the more up-to-date journal, magazine, and
website articles (e.g. Aktar, Sengupta & Chowdhury, 2009; Elliot,
2015; Plumer, 2013; Welch, 2015). Teachers can select passages from
these textual resources for close reading practices once or twice per
week using the instructional routine described earlier. Passages
selected for this purpose usually contain rich language resources with
which students are less familiar and which they can apply to their own
writing. Situating the language and literacy work within the context of
disciplinary explorations--where students engage in firsthand
experiences, use disciplinary methods, conduct inquiries, solve
problems, and interact with diverse texts--gives the experience purpose,
meaning, and usefulness.
Conclusion
The texts that students are expected to engage with become
progressively more complex across the span of their K-12 education. The
complexity is manifested in different ways across different genres,
disciplines, and contexts. To help students cope with text complexity,
teachers need to provide them ample opportunities to read, write,
discuss, play with, and evaluate a wide range of texts across multiple
domains in genre- and discipline-specific ways. However, simply
immersing students in complex texts is rarely sufficient in helping them
develop the literate capacity to independently comprehend and critically
evaluate texts of varying complexities. In other words, students often
need explicit support in their interaction with complex texts. To
provide such support, teachers need first to understand what it is that
makes a text complex and which features of the text make it challenging,
as well as the functionality of the complexity. They also need to
develop a range of pedagogical routines and strategies that are
effective for helping students work through challenging texts.
Developing these sorts of expertise is admittedly a significant
challenge in itself. The role of language and text in literacy
development and content learning is traditionally marginalised in many
teacher education programs across the US and internationally, with the
consequence that teachers are often found to lack adequate knowledge and
confidence in teaching about language and text (Fang, Sun, Chiu &
Truschel, 2014; Love, 2009). An emphasis on text complexity in the CCSS
document augurs a need to make explicit knowledge about language and
text a central concern in teacher preparation. Linguistically-informed
literacy pedagogies, such as those described by functional linguists
(e.g. Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008; Rose & Martin, 2012), can help
students better understand how language is used as a creative resource
to present information, structure text, develop argument, and infuse
ideology, thereby enhancing their text comprehension and critical
literacy development. They offer a powerful approach to understanding
and teaching text complexity in the CCSS era. Learning and enacting
these pedagogies can be, as recent research (e.g. Love, 2010;
Schleppegrell, Greer & Taylor, 2008) has shown, an exciting,
enlightening, and rewarding adventure for teachers.
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Zhihui Fang
University of Florida
Zhihui Fang is Professor and Head of Reading and Literacy Education
in the School of Teaching and Learning, University of Florida, USA. His
areas of expertise include literacy and language education, functional
linguistics, and teacher education. His recent research focuses on the
language demands of disciplinary reading and writing. He is particularly
interested in exploring the use of evidence-based language and literacy
practices to support disciplinary learning and socialisation.
Table 1. Lexical density and grammatical intricacy in Texts 1a-c
Text Examples Number of Lexical Grammatical
Clauses Density Intricacy
Text 1a: You can control# the 5 1.6 5
trains# this way, and if you do
that, you can be quite sure# that
they'll run more safely# and more
quickly#, no matter how bad# the
weather# gets.
Text 1b: If this method# of 3 4 3
control# is used#, trains# will
unquestionably# be able# to run#
more safely# and faster#, even
when the weather# conditions# are
most adverse#.
Text 1c: The use# of this method# 1 12 1
of controlling# unquestionably#
leads# to safer# and faster#
train# running# in the most
adverse# weather# conditions#.
* Examples are drawn from Halliday (1989, p. 79). Content
words are bolded.
Note: Content words are indicated with #.
Table 2. Sample texts in science, history, and mathematics
Text 2: Science Text 3: History Text 4: Mathematics
The loss of a single The location and The sum of the
tree species often operation of the measures of the
results in the camps were based on interior angles of a
elimination of calculations of polygon equals the
multiple moth, accessibility and product of
beetle, and other cost-effectiveness-- 180[degrees] and two
insect species the hallmarks of less than the number
dependent on it. modern business and of sides. The measure
Similarly, the administrative of each angle of a
disappearance of a practice. The killing regular polygon
key pollinator can was done coolly and equals the sum of the
threaten multiple systematically under angle measures
plant species. When the supervision of divided by the number
honeybees recently bureaucrats. German of angles. (Charles,
suffered a die-off, corporations profited Branch-Boyd,
probably from a handsomely from the Illingworth, Mills &
combination of industry of death. Reeves, 2004, p. 463)
pesticides and Pharmaceutical firms
inbreeding, some tested drugs on camp
crops dependent on inmates without any
their services regard for toxic side
declined with them. effects. Companies
When such symbioses bid for contracts to
are tight and highly build ovens and
specific, as between supply the gas used
some tropical orchids for extermination.
and euglossine bees, German engineers
the extinction of one working for Topf and
partner means doom Sons supplied one
for the other. camp alone with
(Wilson, 2014, p. forty-six ovens
125) capable of burning
500 bodies an hour.
(Berenbaum, 2006, p.
103)
Table 3. Congruent and incongruent linguistic realisations of meaning
Congruent Realisation Incongruent Realisation
where the camps were to be location (nominal group)
located (clause)
how they were to be operated operation (nominal group)
(clause)
calculating (verb) calculations (nominal group)
accessible (adjective) accessibility (nominal group)
cost-effective (adjective) cost-effectiveness (nominal group)
characteristic (adjective) hallmarks (nominal group)
how modern business and modern business and administration
administration operate (clause) practice (nominal group)
Table 4. Nominalisations in Texts 2-4
Text 2 Text 3 Text 4
loss location sum
elimination operation measure
disappearance calculations product
combination accessibility
inbreeding cost-effectiveness
symbioses the hallmarks
extinction practice
doom the killing
supervision
death
regard
effects
extermination
