day 176: summertime —beginning reading help—readability levels part i of iv

                                            Readability Levels of Books


If your child goes to school, he is likely in a “reading group," that is a group of children from his class in which all of the students read at about the same reading level. Your child’s teacher chooses readers/stories for each group of children based on that group’s (the children in that group’s) reading level.


To practice with your child at home, you will want to do the same thing—but in a one on one, rather than small group, situation. How do you know what level is appropriate for your child?


I will enumerate some tips for choosing books at your child’s reading level, primarily for word-calling purposes. First, though, a small peak at readability levels will help you in determining your child’s reading level.


Readability is based on many factors. Many readability scales use one of a few simple formulas available in which the number of words in a passage or story is divided by the number of words—and a readability level is derived based on the number of words each sentence contains (on an average). Other formulas use the number of syllables, considering that a sentence that contains twenty “one-syllable” words is certainly easier to word call than a sentence that contains twenty “three-syllable” words.


In both of those cases, the readability level is based on word calling, which is an accurate portrayal of early readers since children do not focus much on comprehension at that level of reading. (And if the class does focus on comprehension, it is usually just literal comprehension—what happened, who the characters were, etc.)


As students progress in their reading, we want them to not only be able to sound out words in a passage or story, but we want them to derive meaning from those words. Formulas for readability of a text based on comprehension is much more difficult to assess (though definitely counting number of words with longer syllables demonstrates a higher comprehension level than just merely counting the number of words).


So many things come into play when considering readability of, say, a chapter book of 150 pages. A book might be short but extremely difficult to comprehend due to the vocabulary used (which some formulas do not consider). Likewise, a book can be very long but have extremely immature vocabulary and not be difficult to comprehend at all.


In our language arts and composition books, we give students passages to write from at least half of the time for factual writing in the early grades, lessening as students learn to find appropriate sources themselves, etc. In choosing these passages to write from, comprehension is extremely important. In order to write from source material, a much higher level of comprehension must be realized than merely that of sounding out the words. In choosing passages for students to read, take notes from, and write from, we consider readability in terms of word calling first, then we consider sentence structure. Sentence structure includes the length of the sentence, the type of sentence (i.e. what we learned as compound, compound-complex, etc.), the type of and length of sentence openers a sentence contains (prepositional phrase openers, adverb openers, etc.), and finally, the vocabulary of the passage.


How does this apply to your reading with your student this summer? Join us in the next blog to learn more.