Now that we’ve discussed both sides of reading level debate, we’ll move on to our discussion on language development and text language.
If you read the last article, you know that it’s difficult to define someone’s ability based on a single level.
On top of that, it’s also challenging to analyze the text language and give each book a clearly defined “level”.
That’s why it’s important to look beyond the level of the book, and also look at the patterns in text language as children move through the school age years.
Understanding the text language and specific skills in books across the grade levels will give us a better understanding of WHY certain students may struggle; and will give us an idea of language skills we may need to address.
There’s also a two-way relationship between text language and language development.
On one hand, developers of texts have typical development in mind when they create educational materials; meaning we’d hope that the text language at each grade level would be equivalent to the language skills we’d be expecting at that age.
We also know that exposure to text language causes further growth; so the shear fact that children are reading books would cause them to learn the concepts they’re seeing over time.
So looking at the type of text language across grades can give us insight in to the skills students are likely to learn simply because of exposure.
The challenge is till that there’s a wide range of “normal” development; meaning that texts designated for a certain grade level might not always be a perfect fit for every kid.
But still, seeing the patterns in text language can give us a general guideline to follow so we aren’t going in blind.
We’ll start in Kindergarten and move up through high school (you’ll notice that the delineation of grade level becomes less defined as we move up through the grades).
Kindergarten
Kindergarten is the time when students are first expected to start real “reading”.
At first, they start with very structured and predicative texts with sentences that may have the same simple sentence structure repeated over and over again with many of the same words.
Sentences may be only 2-3 words long, but they gradually increase over the year. Most of the content is talking about the “here and now” and includes concrete vocabulary that’s likely to be familiar to most 5-6 year olds.
A large portion of the words can be decoded phonetically and have a 1:1 correspondence between letters and sounds (Fountas & Pinnell, 2017; Montgomery County Public Schools, 2009).
1st grade
This where the largest amount of growth happens for the majority of children.
By the end of first grade, most students are reading texts that have much longer simple sentences. Some are starting to include compound sentences with prepositional phrases, with varied sentence structures and different words.
We’re starting to see language that uses rules of inflectional morphology; such as markers of verb tense, plurals, contractions, and possessives. We’re also starting to see some compound words.
The concepts are becoming more abstract and are less likely to be familiar to all students; and true story episodes are included. The spellings are becoming more complex, and students need to know that there are many spellings that don’t have a 1:1 correspondence between letters and sounds; such as “ch”, “sh”, and “th” (Fountas & Pinnell, 2017; Montgomery County Public Schools, 2009).
Grade 2
In second grade texts, there are still some simple sentences, but complex sentences appear more and more. There’s a big increase in words with multiple syllables and morphemes. There’s also an increase in story elements, as well as more advanced spelling concepts.
This could include things like vowel digraphs, some sentences in Sentences are mostly simple with some complex; many difficult words with multiple syllables and morphemes; including both prefixes and suffixes.
There are many words with inflectional endings as well like in the earlier grades, and there’s an increase in different types of punctuation used. Students read both fiction and nonfiction texts (Fountas & Pinnell, 2017; Time4Learning, 2017).
Grade 3
In third grade, all of the concepts I mentioned for second grade continue to build. More difficult concepts are introduced in to texts, and there’s a massive boost in the difficult of vocabulary because this is when the “reading to learn” shift is beginning.
Texts also include an increasing amount of words with more advanced orthographic concepts; for example words with multiple morphemes.
A lot of curricular materials will refer to some of these more difficult spellings as “irregular” or called them “rule-breakers”, which is misleading and inaccurate. What this really means is that these words don’t have a 1:1 correspondence between sounds and letters.
They’re not breaking the rules, they’re just following less obvious rules (Fountas & Pinnell, 2017; Nippold, 2017).
Grades 4-5
In fourth grade, the “reading to learn” shift has officially happened for most students. Texts have long, syntactically complex sentences. The amount of morphologically complex words continues to increase, as does the complexity of story elements and episodes, as well as the topics of nonfiction texts.
Many books also contain cohesive devices called lexical substitutions instead of directly explaining unfamiliar word meanings.
Lexical substitutions occur when words or phrases are used in place of other synonymous words/phrases that’s already been mentioned. For example, a “walking trail in the woods” may be referred to as a “long, winding path” in a following sentence.
This makes texts more ambiguous and requires students to use metalinguistic awareness skills to infer the meanings; and also refer back to the original word.
This use of cohesive devices becomes more advanced as students progress through 4th and 5th grade (Nippold, 2016).
Grades 6-8
As students come in to the middle school years, the amount of different abstract nouns, adjectives, and verbs increases; as does the syntactic complexity of sentences.
Where the texts in the earlier grades were more explicit in their explanations of unfamiliar words, a large portion of the new and difficult terminology isn’t directly explained each time it’s used in texts.
This means that students have to use their “meta” skills to use context or word parts to figure out what unfamiliar words means. Reader must frequently infer meaning of unfamiliar words through context, many of which are abstract nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
As we move up the grade levels, it gets more and more difficult to pinpoint what specific skills are coming up in each grade level; which is why I’ve lumped many of these grades together.
Beyond this point, each one of these advanced language skills that I’ve mentioned (e.g., cohesive devices, syntactic complexity, use of morphologically complex words) become more and more advanced.
By the 8th grade, most texts include many long complex sentences with embedded clauses with a large amount of lexical ambiguity (Sun & Nippold, 2012; Nippold, 2017).
Grades 9 and up
I wish I had more information to give here, but the majority of the resources out there don’t give a lot of information about defining features of each high school grade; or college for that matter. Much of that is because at this point, there’s a wide variability among students as far as what is “normal”.
At this age, reading habits have become ingrained. Students who have developed the habit of reading are advancing at rapid rates. They’re learning more difficult language, for example like derived adjectives.
Some people learn certain linguistic skills in their lifetimes if they don’t continue to read; so habits and environment play a huge part in the amount of language they learn. In other words, those who haven’t developed the habits of a lifelong reader aren’t advancing nearly as much as those who have (Hiebert, 2012; Nippold, 2016).
A couple fun facts and resources:
One of the most frequent questions I get from SLPs is “Where can I find good books/reading passages for my students to read?”
Even with the discussion above, none of us have time to analyze text language to see if it’s appropriate for our students.
For those of you who are looking for a great resource with endless reading passages to use with your students, I highly recommend checking out Readworks.org.
This website is free and contains a massive amount of reading passages divided up by grade level from Kindergarten through 12th grade, with both fiction and nonfiction passages across multiple content areas.
This has become one of my go-to resources.
But that brings us to another question: What are students actually reading these days (outside of school)?
According to this article in the Huffington Post (2012), most high school students are reading books at a 5th grade reading level.
On the surface that sounds a bit concerning. You’ll see in the article, that some feel that high school students should be at liberty to choose “whatever they want” to read.
But other’s feel that we shouldn’t settle, and that students should be pushed to read more challenging books so they’re prepared for college or other technical fields after high school.
What’s not completely clear from the article is whether or not this study is referring to what students read for leisure, or if it’s taking school assignments in to account.
Here’s a more interesting fact: Most popular books read by adults are lower than a 9th grade reading level according to this article in the Content Strategist (Snow, 2015).
In other words, kids aren’t the only ones picking books that are “easier” for them to read.
As a lifelong reader myself, I question whether these patterns are a concern or a natural human tendency. I read technical research reports on a regular basis, so I do my fair share of challenging reading.
But when I look at the books I read for fun, even if its nonfiction, I doubt any of these would be higher than a 9th grade level either.
Now that we have blogs and podcasts that deliver information in conversational language, most of us prefer this to technical reports. The verdict is still out as to whether this has always been the case, or if it’s a newer pattern in the age of technology.
There are also many adults who never pick up a book again after finishing school, so that’s another conversation.
With so many people turning to video games and texting over books, some of us have adopted a “some reading is better than no reading” attitude, which may or may not be true depending on what you plan on doing with your life after high school.
Coming up in the language development series is an in depth review of a landmark study by Loban (1976) that looked at key indicators of language growth from Kindergarten through 12th grade. The syntax article will be the last article in the series for now; but there may be some additional articles in the coming months.
To learn more about which language skills are important to track over the school-age years, check out this free glossary for SLPs.
This glossary will help you to:
- Identify the key skills that are relevant to language growth.
- Determine what syntactic skills indicate continued progress.
- Get clarity on which skills are highest priority for academic success and language comprehension.
>>>Click here to sign up for the glossary.<<<
References
Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (December, 2017). About leveled texts. Retrieved from: https://www.fandpleveledbooks.com/aboutLeveledTexts.aspx#CCSS
Hiebert, E. H. (December, 2012). Readability and the common core’s staircase of text complexity. Retrieved from: http://textproject.org/assets/text-matters/Text-Matters_Readability-and-Complexity.pdf
Huffington Post (March, 2012). American high school students are reading books at 5th-grade appropriate levels: Report. Retrieved from: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/22/top-reading_n_1373680.html
Montgomery County Public Schools. (December, 2009). Key 1: Read at advanced levels in grades K–2: Description and examples of reading text levels. Retrieved from: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedfiles/curriculum/english/elementary/7keystextlevels.pdf
Nippold, M. A. (2016). Later language development: School-age children, adolescents, and young adults
ReadWorks (December, 2017). ReadWorks.org. Retrieved from: https://www.readworks.org/
Snow, S. (January, 2015). This surprising reading level analysis will change the way you write. Retrieved from: https://contently.com/strategist/2015/01/28/this-surprising-reading-level-analysis-will-change-the-way-you-write/
Time4Learning. (December, 2017). Second grade overview. Retrieved from: https://www.time4learning.com/education/second_grade.shtml
