Text Complexity: Primary Teachers’ Views

Abstract

The research question was, “What text characteristics do primary teachers think are most important for early grades text complexity?” Teachers from across the United States accomplished a two-part task. First, to stimulate teachers’ thinking about important text characteristics, primary teachers completed an online paired-text comparison task. While doing the task, teachers were asked to decide which texts in pairs were more complex, and they were also asked to think about which text characteristics mattered most for their decisions. Next, teachers completed a questionnaire, with primary focus on the text characteristics teachers thought mattered most for early grades text complexity. The teachers emphasized word decodability, word frequency, pictures, and word meanings, and they also referenced other characteristics. Their outlook has implications for implementation of the Common Core Standard on text complexity for young children learning to read.

Keywords:

• Common Core
• text complexity
• primary-grades teachers
• text characteristics
• text difficulty