Reading demands in secondary school: Does the linguistic complexity of textbooks increase with grade level and the academic orientation of the school track?

Abstract

An adequate level of linguistic complexity in learning materials is believed to be of crucial importance for learning. The implication for school textbooks is that reading complexity should differ systematically between grade levels and between higher and lower tracks in line with what can be called the systematic complexification assumption. However, research has yet to test this hypothesis with a real-world sample of textbooks. In the present study, we used automatic measures from computational linguistic research to analyze 2,928 texts from geography textbooks from four publishers in Germany in terms of their reading demands. We measured a wide range of lexical, syntactic, morphological, and cohesion-related features and developed text classification models for predicting the grade level (Grades 5 to 10) and school track (academic vs. vocational) of the texts using these features. We also tested ten linguistic features that are considered to be particularly important for a reader’s understanding. The results provided only partial support for systematic complexification. The text classification models showed accuracy rates that were clearly above chance but with considerable room for improvement. Furthermore, there were significant differences across grade levels and school tracks for some of the ten linguistic features. Finally, there were marked differences among publishers. The discussion outlines key components for a systematic research program on the causes and consequences of the lack of systematic complexification in reading materials.

Task complexity in history textbooks: A multidisciplinary case study on triangulation in history education research

“…We follow the well-established second-language acquisition (SLA) tradition of analysing language performance by assessing the multidimensional construct of linguistic complexity in terms of syntactic, lexical, and discursive elaborateness, variation, and inter-relatedness, as well as of language use and human language processing. Similar measures have been used in previous research to assess the adaptation of reading demands in German geography schoolbooks to different school types and grade levels (Berendes et al, 2018). The general linguistic complexity of student answers, which relates to research on tasks in foreign-language learning (Alexopoulou et al, 2017) provides first insights into the relationship between task complexity and general linguistic complexity.…”

Syntactic Complexity in Adapted Teaching Materials: Differences Among Grade Levels and Implications for Benchmarking

“…Syntactic complexity is generally construed as the variety and degree of sophistication of the syntactic structures that are present in a text (Housen & Kuiken, 2009;Lu, 2011;Ortega, 2003;Pallotti, 2009). As part of the larger construct of linguistic complexity (Bulté & Housen, 2014), it has been considered to be a critical component in assessing the readability or comprehensibility of original and adapted reading texts for both first and second language (L2) readers (Berendes et al, 2018;Crossley et al, 2007;Frantz et al, 2015;Gamson et al, 2013;Graesser et al, 2011;Stevens et al, 2015), as well as a useful index of language proficiency (e.g., Bulté & Housen, 2014;Lu, 2011;Norris & Ortega, 2009), language development (e.g., Crossley & McNamara, 2014;Lu, 2009;Yoon & Polio, 2017), and the quality of language production (e.g., Biber, Gray, & Staples, 2016;Kyle & Crossley, 2018;Lu, 2017;Yang, Lu, & Weigle, 2015).…”

Assisting students’ writing with computer-based concept map feedback: A validation study of the CohViz feedback system

“…Regarding the validity of CohViz, we assessed the convergent and divergent validity of the CohViz system with automated measures from well-established assessment systems [36][37][38][39], as used for example by the well-known system Coh-Metrix [40]. As CohViz was predominantly designed to provide feedback on the cohesion of students' writing, we focused on the number of fragments as the central indicator of cohesion provided by CohViz and compared it with convergent (i.e., argument overlap, semantic overlap) and divergent (i.e., syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and word concreteness) linguistic features of text cohesion.…”