In preparing a third grade student last year for her end-of-year exams, I thought a certain passage might be a good fit for her reading level. The passage had been suggested as appropriate preparation for an end-of-year test for third graders in New York State. I gave it a go. The results were disastrous. Why?
The setting of the passage is a rural farm building and its surrounding snow-covered fields in 19th century Russia. My student lives in the suburbs of Atlanta in the 21st century. She has almost no experience with snow.
The main character is a hare. My student has no experience with rabbits or hares.
Certain ideas a 19th century rural Russian child might be familiar with have no meaning for my student. “Threshing-floor,” “hoarfrost,” “open granary,” “lair,” and “peasants” are words from the story which baffled my student.
I decided this passage was inappropriate and decided to scrap using it. But recently I discovered that a teacher had done a reading analysis on that same text and found it was written at at sixth grade reading level.
A sixth-grade reading level test offered as a sample text for third graders preparing for their final exam. Hmm.
When I was in college, I was baffled while reading an assigned text. I read the first page five times, gaining almost no meaning from the words. I did a number of words per sentence analysis of the first page and discovered that the average number of words per sentence was 54. The author of the text might have known his subject matter, but he did not now how to write legibly.
Years ago Edward Fry created a graph for estimating the readability of a text. (It is produced below.) If you look closely, you will see that the number of sentences per 100 words is high for first graders, meaning young children will be able to read small sentences. When I was in 13th grade, according to Fry, I should have been able to read 3.6 sentences per 100 words. That is about 3 and a half sentences of 28 words each, a big difference from almost two sentences of 54 words each.
As a comparison, the Bible in English has an average of 16.7 words per sentence. Books with a great deal of dialog usually have fewer words per sentence.
My point is that if your child is having a hard time reading a text, don’t immediately conclude that it must be your child’s fault. It could be the author’s.
comicphonics for early readers 