What Kind of Texts Should Be in Textbooks so that Students Can Easily Perceive and Understand Them

When we talk about textbook writing, we often mention that the textbook should be written in simple language. But what does this really mean?

“Written in simple language,” explain associate professors of Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, PhD in Education Olena Pavlyk and Liudmyla Lysohor, “is an approach to creating a text when it can be understood even by people who are not experts in a particular field.”

On the other hand, when working with the text of a textbook, the student must demonstrate reading literacy – that is, the ability to interact with the text in a broad socio-cultural context, that is, in situations where there is a need for reading.

Olena Pavlyk and Liudmyla Lysohor provided insight into the peculiarities of reading perception of students of different ages, and also gave recommendations on what the textbook should pay attention to so that it becomes an efficient learning tool.

PREREQUISITES FOR PERCEIVING AND MEMORIZING TEXTS

To read efficiently and complete a task, the reader must have a particular set of qualities. PISA, an international study of the quality of education, names motivation, pre-exising knowledge of the subject of reading, personal experience and other cognitive skills as the main ones among them. All this is called the psychological basis of reading.

Motivation to read is one of the key factors that affects memorization and duration of information retention. The text should therefore contain (the so-called motivational hooks) motivational elements (tasks related to the text, a selection of interesting facts, etc. – Ed.).

Pre-existing knowledge is the logic of providing insight into any conceptual system of all branches of knowledge. It is therefore the basis that will allow the child to quickly understand the text and new concepts.

The capacity to understand the text is also affected by the student’s physical condition at the time of reading – vision indicators, mood, well-being as well as interest and level of reading skills. However, it is also influenced by external factors – the format and number of texts, complexity of the language, etc.

Text readability refers to how difficult it is for students to decode the text and how deeply they understand the content of the information.

The state examination of textbooks provides for checking the age compliance of students with the needs and clarity of the text, but at the same time there are no criteria for determining the complexity of the text and its compliance with students’ reading capabilities. For example, the text may be clear, but at the same time so complex that it might be necessary to reread it several times to understand it.

However, the linguistic complexity of the text influences not only the quality of the child’s education, but also the quality of teaching the subject by the teacher. Today we see elements of assessing the complexity of the text in the scientific and pedagogical expertise of future educational publications. Whereas in the European practice, assessing the complexity of the language of textbooks is mandatory.

RULES FOR USING TERMS

The linguistic complexity of the text is determined based on a number of quantitative and qualitative indicators, and the reader’s background must be taken into account.

The linguistic and informational (or cognitive) text components are parts of linguistic complexity.

A linguistic component is an objective value determined by the readability of a text, abstractness, narrativity, coherence and lexical diversity.

The information component of the text is determined by the clarity of development and interrelation of the conceptual system, the ratio of abstract and concrete concepts. The textbook should not be overloaded with concepts and terminology, and maintain harmony between abstract and concrete concepts. It is necessary to keep in mind students’ age characteristics because, for example, primary school students are not yet ready to perceive abstract information.

The content of the textbook text should provide insight into concepts gradually (from the simplest to more complex ones), have a clear structure, and use additional tools (primarily visualization) to explain concepts and their interaction.

The experts say that some studies of reader perception prove that one term in the educational literature should be presented with several explanations using different visualization tools, shown from different perspectives. There must be at least two images to explain each term.

The information complexity is assessed on the basis of reader’s psycholinguistic capabilities:

• scope of the random-access memory: how the child will use the received information during the lesson and how it will be used immediately after receiving it;
• long-term memory: providing long-term storage of information with the ability to reproduce it after some time;
• attention;
• personal experience: knowledge about the surrounding world and connections in it, experience in solving life situations;
• motivation level;
• scope of vocabulary;
• language proficiency level;
• initial level of awareness of the subject being studied.

TEXT READABILITY INDICES

The readability of texts is determined using various readability indices (indicators of the complexity of perception or understanding of texts), that is, mathematical formulas that estimate the complexity of reading and understanding individual texts. As a rule, to create such formulas, fairly simple indicators are taken into account – the number of words, letters, syllables, etc.

Readability can be linguistic or typographic. Print readability is determined by fonts, print and paper quality, colors, contrast, etc.

Instead, linguistic readability depends on the number of letters in words and words in sentences (the level of aggregation of language units). In other words, the more elements a particular object contains, the more difficult it is for the reader to determine the relationships between the elements. Therefore, when analyzing a textbook for readability, you should pay attention to the length of words, sentences, and the overload of sentences with extra words.

For example, for children aged 6-7 years, the optimal sentence length is 6-7 words, for 8-14-year-old children this indicator is 10-15 words. Therefore, when a sentence in a textbook consists of 30 words (as said by the experts, these cases are frequent), this significantly affects the child’s ability to understand and remember information.

You should also pay attention to the lexical content of the text: whether it consists of words that are familiar and understandable to a child of the relevant age.

The length of a word also matters: when we choose a word from a synonym series, it is worth remembering that the shortest one will be both the most understandable and the most commonly used. According to the results of research that experts rely on,

words that have more than three syllables are not so well retained in one’s RAM, which means that they are not transferred into the long-term memory.

Experts warn that:

• the longer the word, the lower the degree of its clarity for the student;
• the longer the sentences and words in them, the harder it is to read the text;
• these are short sentences that provide for clarity and understanding of wording.

The most common one today is the Flesh-Kincaid reading ease index. To get the correct result, take texts with a volume of at least 100 words for analysis. The index has modifications, and there are also calculations for Slavic languages.

The Flesh-Kincaid index is calculated using the formula:

FKG mod SIS= 0.36×ASL + 5.76 ×ASW – 11.97,

where

• ASL is the average sentence length (average number of words in a sentence = number of words/number of sentences);
• ASW is the average number of syllables in a word (the number of syllables divided by the number of words).

As a result, we get an indicator ranging from 0 to 100 points:

• 70-80 points indicate that the text is easy to read and the level of its understanding and mastering by students is high (if we are talking about textbooks and educational publications);
• 60-65 points mean that the reading ease is average, which is common to mass media;
• 50-55 points – it is the level of business texts and professional publications as well as high-quality fiction;
• less than 30 points are an indicator of complicate scientific texts.

Another index is the lexical diversity indicator (TTR). It is calculated as the ratio of unique lexical constructions (for example, the word “book” used in different forms several times will be considered as one unique lexical construction) to the total number of words in the text. The indicator ranges from 0 to 1, and the higher it is, the richer the lexical composition of the text is. However, this also requires the reader to have a broader knowledge of words and their meanings, i.e. better previous learning experience and reading skills.

It is also worth remembering that children’s perception is characterized by the concreteness of thinking as abstract concepts for them (especially for younger ones) are detached from reality. It is therefore also necessary to ensure that a decrease in lexical diversity (if a textbook for the relevant age is to be written) does not lead to an increase in the abstractness of the text.

WHAT TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHEN CHOOSING A TEXTBOOK (LINGUISTIC ASPECT)

Thus, in order for texts to meet educational tasks and students’ age characteristics, to be readable and perceived efficiently, it is important to observe the following rules:

• give preferences to frequent vocabulary: the more often a word or concept is used, the faster it will move from short-term to long-term memory. You should repeat words in different contexts – for example, in the text, text tasks, group work, etc. as well as in the other paragraphs of the textbook;
• limit the number of terms (new concepts) on a page. According to research, a child in grades 5-6 can learn up to 2,500 new terms during the school year, while some current textbooks contain up to 6,000 terms;
• use proper names and details that explain or name concepts. This is how critical and imaginative thinking is formed, and this allows the child to use concepts faster. Here it is also advisable to resort to analogies in order to transmit abstract concepts to the level of concrete ones, which means the level of competencies;
• try to use the optimal sentence length (recall: for children aged 6-7 years – 6-7 words, for 8-14-year-old children – 10-15 words);
• among synonyms give preference to shorter ones;
• but also avoid using too short sentences one after the other, because the child should gain experience of the richness and diversity of speech patterns. There is also a caveat here: complex sentences are perceived better than artificially simplified ones, which reflects the natural logic of human thinking.

This material was prepared for the Learning Together project and published on the NUS portal following the results of the Autumn School for Creators of Modern Educational Materials organized by the Learning Together project + the EU project at the end of 2021.

This document was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.