Over the next couple of months, I’m going to be posting some excerpts from Reading Reconsidered here on Field Notes. This is the beginning of Chapter 1, which discusses Text Selection and Text Complexity. Chapter 1: Text Selection One of the most important topics in teaching reading is text selection, the process by which teachers choose…
I recently came across a fascinating blog post by Mike Murphy, who teaches English at Boston’s Nativity Prep. Mike and his colleagues had taken a couple of ideas from Reading Reconsidered and combined them in new ways. The first was text complexity and the idea that there are specific types of text complexity- that Oliver Twist…
In part one of this post I wrote about text complexity and five particular challenges complex text posed to developing readers who weren’t intentionally exposed to them, I want to spend a bit more time looking at one of those challenges—non-linear time sequence. People tend to think of non-linear narrative sequence as consisting of flashbacks, flash-forwards,…