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1) REVIEW the Assessing Text Complexity strategies from VACCA VACCA & MRAZ.  If currently in the classroom it would be ideal if you conduct these assessments with your students. You can still complete this assignment if you are not in the classroom.

2) SELECT a text that are currently using or will be in a future lesson (this can be ANY book, informational text, poem, play, short story, etc.).

3) CONDUCT one of the readability assessments on your selected text.

4) POST your results in the column to the RIGHT with your NAME on it.

Discuss your rationale for choosing this text/selection, (i.e. is it particularly challenging for a

portion of your students?

What assessment did you conduct? What were the results of your text difficulty analysis?

Please complete by Sunday.

Activities Rubric

Yes | No | Does your “activity” work meet the following criteria?

Post COMPLETE answers to questions in #4 above on class Padlet.

Completed all work in satisfactory (or greater) quality and by Friday of each week.

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I chose a portion of a book called Steelheart, which I use for my ELA 8 section. I conducted the Fry Readability test and plotted my results on the Fry Readability Graph. The average amount of sentences per 100 words (I took two 100-word sections) was around 7.5, and the average amount of syllables was around 128. This put me on the Fry Readibility Graph at the 5th grade level, which I was honestly surprised by. Granted, Steelheart is one of the easier texts we read, but I didn’t know it was considered to be that easy.

Because I found this so interesting, I decided to conduct another readability test with a text I use in AP Literature, Pride and Prejudice. The excerpt I took from this text had about 156 syllables within 4 sentences, placing the readability at about the 10th grade level. Of course, I began realizing that this test does not account for vocabulary level and content matter. However, it seems to be a good indicator as to the base difficulty level of a text.

I chose these texts in order to compare and contrast the readability levels using the Fry Readability Graph. First off, I wanted to make sure that Steelheart was suitable for 8th grade. I’m realizing that it might be a little too easy for them, and perhaps I should suggest it to the 7th grade teacher. The content in the book is definitely for middle school, even if the readability level is at the elementary level. It is nice, however, that 8th graders do not have an issue reading Steelheart, and can therefore enjoy it.

I chose Pride and Prejudice in order to see how an older text from the 18th century would do on such a graph. I was mostly curious as to where it would fall. The language and style of Jane Austen’s English is particularly difficult for students, and so I thought that the book should really rank higher in difficulty level as opposed to falling within the range of 10th grade.

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-I  chose “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for this exercise. I chose this text because “Frankenstein” is a book I regard as being instrumental in terms of the genre of science fiction. I also find the book to be an interesting look at humanity and since it’s been around for a while, it’s an interesting way to trace how perspectives over time have (or haven’t) changed. As well as this, it’s a popular text that’s withstood the test of time for good reason.  Since it’s been in existence for a substantial period, it has a lot of related material- such as movies, other books, art, and more.

-The assessment  I chose to conduct was the Fry Readability Graph. Based on the three passages  I utilized, “Frankenstein”  averaged out to 9 sentences and 147 syllables per passage. This puts the text in Grade Level 9, which I both expected but was also surprised by. Compared to other literature from the 17th century, the language is more tangible than other texts. I also don’t remember having to read “Frankenstein” until I was in college, nor do I remember my sister having to read until she was in 11th grade- so that definitely contributed to my surprise with the results. I do think the text would be interesting to teach within a 9th-grade setting, but I'm also unsure if content-wise it's at a Grade 9 Level. Granted, I do need to do a re-read of "Frankenstein".

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-The book I chose is "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas. I chose this text because it is my favorite book and I was genuinely curious what the difficulty level of reading it was. Since this book is considered a classic and since I like it so much, I wanted to see if it is something that I could realistically recommend to people based on its reading level.

-The assessment I used is the Fry Readability Graph. Using three random passages, I found that "The Count of Monte Cristo" averages 3.4 sentences per 100 words and 130 syllables per 100 words which, according to the graph, puts this book at a 9th grade reading level.

-This shocked me to the point that I audibly exclaimed "What?!". That would mean that theoretically, anyone with a 9th grade reading level could read this. While I do not remember struggling with the book since I read it post-undergrad, I also do not remember having that easy of a time reading it. Even going through the three random passages, I was thinking that this would clock in at a 12th grade level at least.

-While the Fry Graph does a great job of predicting readability at a structural level, I think it fails to capture other important factors that affect readability like vocabulary, subject matter, and style. This is a story that takes place in post-Napoleonic France, so without an understanding of that time period or familiarity with some of the more mature subject matter and concepts that the story tackles, it would require the googling of a word or research into an event or location to understand the book fully. Looking at the passages, I also noted that Dumas uses many clauses in his sentences and addresses multiple ideas in them which leads to more complicated sentences that a 9th grader could easily struggle with.

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For my text readability study, I selected The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon and used the Fry Graph to determine its approximate grade level. In my three sample passages, I found an average of 5.495 sentences per 100 words and 124.30 syllables per 100 words. According to the Fry Graph on p. 109 of the Vacca et al. text, the point of intersection would be in the upper part of the sixth grade reading level. Although I agree that the readability of the text itself is at a sixth grade level, the content matter belongs more to an early high school range, ninth or tenth grade, which is why I intend to use it in a future lesson. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is written from the first person perspective of a fifteen year old boy on the autism spectrum. My rationale for choosing this book is that its point of view offers readers neurodivergent representation. By putting us in Christopher’s shoes, we see life through his eyes and with his accompanying thoughts and reasoning. It provides an avenue of comparison between neurotypical and neurodivergent thinking, allowing students to recognize both similarities and differences they may or may not have. However, it is for this very same reason that I believe the text placed lower on Fry's grade level scale. As the first person narrator, Christopher prefers succinct, clear sentences; he doesn’t use metaphors or other figurative language; and he likes to illustrate some parts of the book through numbers or images. The result is an easy-to-read text with a complex perspective fit for early high school education. Therefore, while Fry is a good starting point for text assessment, its emphasis on sentence length and word complexity could present a bias on behalf of more normative, classic writing styles.

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Next year, for our last novel study in my 7th grade advanced ELA classes, I hope to have some cross curricular planning with their social studies class. At the same time they are learning about World War II, I plan to do a thematic novel study using "book clubs" by assigning them novels based on their reading level. (They will not know which novel is the "harder" to read.)

The two novels I chose are Farewell to Manzanar and Night. Both discuss WWII but from two different point of views, I believe this will jumpstart good class discussions on the different experiences the main characters of the novels have.

Using the Fry Method I determined that Farewell to Manzanar is right at a 6th grade reading level and Night is around a 9th grade reading level. These will work perfectly considering the students are placed in their classes by math scores and not ELA scores, meaning some of the students may be put in "advanced classes because of math but do not have the same skill level in ELA and vise versa." Using thematic novel studies can help with differentiation to allow students to be challenged at a pace and rigor that is beneficial to their personalized learning experience.

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I chose the book Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis because it is currently the only novel study that we use with all of our fourth grade students at my school. Since the majority of our whole-group instruction involves short passages and poems, rather than novels, all of our other novel studies are conducted in small groups or "book clubs."

Using the Fry Readability Test (Vacca, et al., 2017, p. 209), I determined that Bud, Not Buddy is a beginning of the year fifth grade level text (5.0). It has an average of 5 words per sentence and an average of 129 syllables per 100 words. Interestingly, it was the sentence length that pushed this into the fifth grade range, as the syllables per 100 words could be indicative of several different grade levels.

Furthermore, I looked up the Lexile level, which is 950L, and the Guided Reading level, which is Level U. Sometimes Guided Reading levels can be more useful than Lexile levels (in my experience) because they consider thematic context and content in addition to sentence and word complexity. Scholastic Book Wizard (a website that I have found very useful over my years as a teacher) classifies Bud, Not Buddy as a 5th-7th grade level text.

It was illuminating for me to discover that none of these measures (except for the "stretch" Lexile range shown on p. 108 of our text) considers this text to be fourth grade level. Considering this, I think it is appropriate that we read this text aloud to our students as part of our instruction. Although it is not a "read aloud" text (distinguished from instructional text), we have provided an audio version for our students. Last year, we physically read the text aloud to our students. This year, one of our fourth grade teachers recorded herself reading the text, and we uploaded these recordings to our Google Classroom, which allowed our students to listen to the recordings or read the text silently. We found significant improvement in comprehension with the audio recordings because students were able to listen to the recordings multiple times and revisit the recordings when answering comprehension questions about the text. Having learned that this book, which we read in January each year, is considered a BOY 5th grade text, I am quite pleased with and impressed by my students' abilities to understand the material and grapple with the text's themes and issues.

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Bud Not Buddy is a GREAT book! Thanks for sharing!! 

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Bud Not Buddy is a GREAT book! Thanks for sharing!! 

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I chose Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech because I asked my students to read and analyze the first part of the speech this year. This part of the speech is not as familiar, but I wanted them to see the parallels between this part of the speech and The Declaration of Independence and The Emancipation Proclamation. This exercise fell flat and I wondered if it was because the text was too difficult for my 8th Graders.

I chose to use the Lexile reading score. I have always wondered if there was a way to determine the Lexile level of a primary source. After a bit of searching on the internet, I found that the Lexile site has a free Lexile Text Analyzer.  Based on the excerpt of the text that I assigned to my students, the analyzer determined that the Lexile range was 1010-1200. According to Vacca, Vacca, and Mraz, this range would be a "Stretch Lexile Band" for grades 6-8. With that information, I can see now why many of my students struggled with this text.

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The Princess in Black - Shannon Hale & Dean Hale

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Molly Kearns

I selected the book Princess in Black by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale. As a kindergarten teacher, I generally work with simpler texts than this one, but I have several above grade level readers and therefore have several books from the Princess in Black series in my classroom. The series was recommended to me a few years back by another pretty advanced reader. Many students have told me their families read these books to them at home, and some try to pick it up and “read” it in our classroom even though it seems to be far above their abilities after just flipping through some of the pages. I was curious exactly how readable this text was for the majority of my students and what my more advanced readers may be capable of reading on their own.

I utilized the Fry Readability Graph for this assignment. I found that the average number of sentences in this book was 16.3 sentences per 100 words and 132.67 syllables, putting it in the second grade range. I think this is a pretty accurate assessment.

What makes this text more complex is the amount of multisyllabic words in a 100 word sample. However, most late first graders or beginning second graders would know their vowel teams, suffixes like -ed and -ing, the vowel-consonant-e pattern, and r-controlled vowels, all of which appear many times in this text (a few of my K students know these patterns as well). In our curriculum, y as an open syllable typically appears in second grade, which along with learning syllable types and decoding multisyllabic words, would appear in our second grade curriculum, making it the best fit.

Given that the content is fiction (lots of forests, animals, and monsters) with a lot of familiar vocabulary and the relatively short sentences, this would seem do-able for many mid-late first grade readers and some advanced kindergarteners to comprehend as long as they have been exposed to practice with decoding multisyllabic words and the phonics patterns described, and I could see this book fitting well in a first or second grade classroom, and for a few advanced readers in a K classroom as well given the appropriateness of the content.

Given the nature of pairing early phonics instruction with text selection, I think the Fry graph is a super helpful tool when used in combination with analyzing the phonics patterns necessary to read a text. I can imagine it would also be important to think carefully about the content of a given text and how appropriate it is for different ages of students developmentally.

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In my 7th grade social studies classroom, one of the books my students love most is Boxers by Gene Luen Yang. It is actually a graphic novel about the Boxer Rebellion in China during the height of Imperialism. Boxers is the first book in the set of Boxers and Saints, which details the Boxer Rebellion from the perspective of a Chinese boy. Saints details the same story, but from the perspective of a European boy. I do not require my students to read Saints but instead offer it as an extra credit opportunity for my students, which thankfully most take advantage of. I have my students read this book because it offers a diverse perspective of a time in history that is often glazed over in our euro-centric history classrooms and encourages students to compare and contrast two different sides of the same story. I also choose this book because it keeps students engaged and shows them that reading in classrooms and for fun isn’t just about sitting down with a chapter novel but can also expand to new literacies like graphic novels.

Using the Fry Readability Test, Boxers averages 9 sentences and 147 syllables per 100 words. The Fry Readability Graph also indicates that this book favors longer words over longer sentences, thus putting Boxers at the 7th grade reading level. I was surprised by this result because when I first chose Boxers for my classroom, I was told it was a book meant for high school students and my middle school students would struggle with the text. After using the book for 2 years, however, I do not see students struggle with the text as it is mostly dialogue-based, which tells me that the Fry Readability Test is a more accurate indicator of the readability of this book. That being said, I think the Fry Readability Test is not an adequate tool to use when evaluating texts like graphic novels or comics. In graphic novels, emotions and actions are depicted in media panels, not written. The Fry Readability Test seems to favor classically written and narrative texts more, especially since it was developed in 1977 before the widespread use of new literacies in the classroom.

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Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, written by Kevin Noble

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I chose Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, which I use with my ELLs, because it is a multicultural book that teaches Native American values in a fun and creative way. Even though it is a picture book designed for a younger audience, it has words that are unique to Native American culture, such as Navajo, Iroquois and Choctaw.

The three passages averaged about seven sentences per 100 words. They also averaged about 126 syllables. This puts the book at a sixth grade reading level however, it is on the verge of a fifth grade level. I am not surprised by this assessment due to the complexity of the words and the structure of the passages.

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The text I chose here was Dracula, as I’ve been slowly reading it in “real time” as part of the “Daily Dracula” project. As a future educator, this book is one that I think could be well-suited to middle grade ELA students, as there are cultural/historical motivations and influences to examine, several different narratives that unfold to tell one large story, and a variety of practical literary tools for analysis. I imagine this would be best suited to the higher end of middle grades, around 8th or 9th grade. The language, as explored below, is not incredibly difficult, but some of the content and the non-standard layout of the story may pose some challenges to some students.

I’ve utilized the Fry Readability assessment in order to assess the readability. I used texts from a couple of different entries, and calculated the reading level of them averaged, as well as individually to see if there were different reading levels depending on which narrator I was analyzing. I found that the average of all three samples was around 8th grade reading level, though it was closer to 7th grade than 9th grade. There were an average of 135 syllables per 100 words, and 4.3 sentences per 100 words. I was somewhat surprised by the reading level, as many people I know read Dracula in high school level courses. This indicates that a readability test, on its own, is not sufficient necessarily to determine whether a text is suitable or appropriate for a grade level; instead, it’s one quantitative piece to consider alongside questions of content area reading needs (qualitative measures) for a particular group of students (Vacca, Vacca, and Mraz, pg. 104).

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Thank you for the feedback!  I appreciate the suggestions as to how I could scaffold this using the Cloze procedure and a story guide -- the story of Dracula now (versus when it was published) clearly doesn't have the element of surprise in terms of his being a vampire (at least for most of the kids we're working with) but having a map and guide to follow alongside (potentially with a visual diagram of how the different characters are related to one another) would be beneficial for students as well! Thank you again!