Yesterday, I just talked to my friend about the various texts used in some specific discipline. She told me that at the beginning of this semester, she felt nervous and anxiety every day because of dozens of readings and homework assigned by her professor, which may be easy or may not. Nevertheless, she gradually got the sense and insight into the relationship between the task and the concepts since the purpose of her professor is to try to consistently challenge students to get out of their comfort zones, which is also the purpose of text complexity. Then, my friend really exclaimed that the potential abilities of human beings can be unlimitedly developed, and we could not know where the possibilities were if we did not have a try.
Through the Common Core, text complexity applied to all content areas is to help develop and grow our students’ abilities to comprehend multiple texts. I am thinking that, as a teacher, how I can consider the task and the text meet students and how to choose the kinds of texts I can out in front of students. According to the article, we can see three dimensions for measuring text complexity, qualitative, quantitative, and reader and task considerations, and each of them is connected with each other. These three approaches can help us teachers determine the relationship between the reader and the task and determine to choose the “just right” text for students. The video attached below is what I watched about the insight into text complexity and how to choose the “just right” texts for students. Just right texts mean the best right fit kind of texts which can be put in front of students, not too easy and not too difficult. Obviously, we should keep students’ learning background, vocab needs, reading abilities, etc, in mind so as to choose the most fit text for them. Also, to constantly challenge their reading comprehension and ability, we should adapt the texts to make more complex step by step. If we just increase much difficulty of texts, I think students will lose their confidence in learning and creation of thinking ability. Thinking in math, mathematics texts ostensibly map out, section by section, various problem-solving routines, replete with examples, sample problems, and student applications (Buehl 2011). We can obviously see different sorts of texts in math, such as graphs, charts, symbols, functions and so on, and the transferring of ideas of those texts is the most important comprehension ability students should master. When I tutor my friends about math, they often get sucked into the analysis of the graphs which include many information to solve problems. It seems like if they get rid of the written information that be replaced by graphs, they cannot handle it. One way I can do is to compare these texts and help students find the relationship among them, which is the opportunity for students to transfer their learnings. As what the speaker Sarah said in the video, thinking about text complexity is thinking about all the way we determine to choose.
Hi Shuqin,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post. The video helps further explain the idea of text complexity and what you meant by the "just right" text. Often times it may seem impossible to really find a good text for the majority of a class because a classroom contains various students who each learn differently and are at a different comprehension level. By really taking into consideration the difference between difficulty and complexity we can hopefully help straighten our thinking so that we can make it complex and difficult enough while making sure that both areas are covered. Much like you I believe that the graphs and other texts in math are the most difficult to understand at times just because these are particular to math. By integrating text as we Shanahan and Shanahan stated in last weeks readings, we can help further comprehension.
Thank you for enjoying my blog. As you said, it is hard for teachers to find a right fit text to meet every student's needs due to various learning comprehension levels and background, but we can take into consideration that to divide students into similar learning ability groups so that teachers can assign the best right text for each group. For math, it is teachers's responsibilities to teach the difference and similarity among various texts and then students should practice thinking about what kind of information they can observe and get from the texts.
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