EDUC193/293 Text Levels: Easy - Instructional - Hard 3/10/08

Subject: Text Levels: Easy - Instructional - Hard

From: Diane Hansford

Date: 3/10/2008 12:11

Message:

Dear Students, A number of you have been concerned about the different percentages which relate to Easy, Instructional and Hard texs. In Clay's text An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement, 1993:23, she states: an easy text is 95% -100%; an instructional text is 90% to 94% and a hard text is 80% to 89%. In the EDUC 193/293 Workbook on page 10, we put easy as 96% and above; instructional as 90% - 95% and Hard as 85% to 89%. These percentages came from Max Kemp's work. As you can see above, different authors use slightly different percentages. What is most important for you to remember is that when analysing a piece of text you need to consider ALL aspects of the reading. While the percentage tells you one thing, it can sometimes be inaccurate and you may need to look at the sources of information such as syntax to get an accurate picture. In the attached file, of Michael reading the Dandelion, you can see that although this comes out as a Hard text, if ignore the changes he makes to the tense, then this reading is not a hard text. For the purpose of Assignments 2 and 3, you should use the percentages that are in Clay to avoid confusion. Regards Di

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