Assessing Text Complexity

Teaching is a demanding profession–intellectually, physically, emotionally. Everything clamors to be the top priority. Assessing text complexity is something that happens for most teachers in an instant, and usually only the first time they decide to use a text. It boils down to, “Can I teach this? Will it be too hard for my students?” Seems pretty easy. We know, almost instinctively after skim-reading a text, the answers to these questions. Why dive any deeper?

It’s like sleeping (in a hammock, or anywhere else). A person can cut corners with their sleep and function the next day, but if they sleep a healthy amount every night, they’ll be better off in the long-term. Assessing text complexity can help us plan better, leading to stronger results in exchange for less ongoing effort.

What Does Text Complexity Mean?

The idea of text complexity has been around for over a century. It started as a way to assess the “readability” of texts, and it focused heavily on quantitative matters–namely word and sentence length. One need only see how books like Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain are quantified as at the third- to fifth-grade level to know that there’s more to the story than length in determining readability.

When the Common Core State Standards were adopted, they incorporated three factors to help teachers determine text complexity. The first was quantitative, as described above. The second was qualitative measures, which the Common Core defines as meaning and purpose; structure; language conventionality and clarity; and knowledge demands. This factor accounts for the many other complexities that students need to consider in reading a text. 

The third factor was reader and task demands. For example, how prepared or interested each reader is may determine how complex the text is for different students. It may also matter what tasks students are being asked to do with the text. For example, if they need to read it independently or what they need to produce after reading the text.

How to Determine Text Complexity

There are some great resources for analyzing text complexity (and its intersection with culturally relevant texts) in Achieve the Core’s Text Analysis Toolkit if you are looking for something in-depth and systematic.

My approach below is a little more in-the-moment.

1. Read the text. Even if you have read it before. Even if you think you know it. Even if you don’t have time. If you don’t have time to read it, you don’t have time to assign it (and the students don’t have time to read it either). I am unwavering about this.
2. Make notes with a beginner’s mind. In Zen Buddhism, beginner’s mind is a mindfulness practice of approaching a task like a beginner. This approach releases you from expectations and assumptions of how things should go. Approaching each text you teach with beginner’s mind puts you in the position of your students so you can better anticipate the instruction they will need. When you rely on your previous familiarity with a text, you might be teaching to details they can’t even get to because of some larger confusion with the text. If you have read the text, this is a little harder, but put As you put yourself in the shoes of the students, the first-time readers, notice what would throw them off. Chances are, it will stick out to you, but if it doesn’t, consult the three measures of text complexity.

Getting to What’s Essential

There will be a multitude of teaching opportunities in any text, but, alas, we cannot teach everything about every text, which is really a good thing because no student wants to hear all that. In their words, it’s “doing too much,” even doing the most. In continuing my steps for assessing text complexity, I

3. Filter the notes. In looking back at all the complexities from step two, there are two questions to consider.

• What complexities, if not addressed, would inhibit students from gaining access to the central meaning of the text?

The answer cannot be all of them. Everyone can tolerate a little confusion that they have to figure out (or skip). If the complexities blockading the central meaning are addressed, it is more likely that students will have the bandwidth to wrestle with other complexities. Our brains are wired to seek out meaning, so by facilitating that process, students can understand the essential content in our courses and connect with their classroom community.

• What complexities are a natural opportunity for teaching the standards I have selected for this lesson?

This question can also help winnow the list, but I also love it because it turns complexities into learning opportunities, and that’s the lesson I want all my students to see about obstacles and challenges. So if there’s a lot of tricky figurative language, teach and assess around figurative language. Crazy structure? Teach and assess to structure. Maybe this is obvious to other people, but I spent a long time trying to sidestep or minimize the complexities of text. Not only is that invalidating for students (they read something that was confusing and now we’re going to pretend it’s not confusing, huh?), it wastes an opportunity for authentic learning. I don’t teach figurative language or structure when either one is squeaky clean or obvious. It’s condescending AND has no real buy-in for students, who are like, “Duh, Ms. B? Was that, like, hard for you?”

Choosing an Instructional Approach

4. Allocate your air time. Once I’ve decided what’s essential to be taught, I decide how I will teach it. We only have so much air time in class, but I have four basic approaches to teach, some without me ever speaking.

• Frontload it. Tell the students what the tricky thing is before they read it. This works well for background information that requires some explanation. This should take less than 10 minutes of instructional time, ideally no more than 5.
• Writing on the text. This works well for vocabulary. If it is a term with a fairly simple explanation, I will footnote it so the students that need it can access it. I also use it to underline key passages or number sections of the text. These annotations can help students find the main idea or understand the structure. Prepared in advance, this takes no class time.
• Make a small-group discussion question about it. This way, the students have to figure it out together. This works best for little complexities that they could figure out from the text, like what a word or a certain part means. This takes a little class time, but if it is part of an existing routine of small-group discussion, it is fairly unobtrusive.
• Use gradual release of responsibility. If this is the marquis complexity that goes with the assessed standard for that day, then I may be modeling, leading a class-wide practice, leading small-group practices, or independent practice (or some combination of these). This takes basically the whole class, so it is reserved for priority standards and the complexities that teach them.

Text Complexity Raising Rigor in Reading

There are a lot of ways to raise rigor when teaching reading. I will not use a pile of work or pages to make reading rigorous. I will not withhold help to make reading rigorous. Instead, I will acknowledge the complexity of the text I have chosen for us, and I will teach into it. As the year progresses, the students and I will accumulate evidence that we can stare down any text that comes our way, and that we are rewarded with meaning and community for doing so, even if we don’t figure everything out. This daily act of living at our edge as readers raises the rigor on rigor.

But text complexity is only one component of a lesson that will improve the reading of every student in the room. To get my FREE four moves every literacy lesson plan needs template, click HERE.