Response to Book Leveling and Text Complexity

I have actually never thought about what makes some books harder to read over others. I thought the first article was something to think about because it is true that readers will never get better if they do not challenge themselves. Breaking a book down into different aspects that may make it challenging is important to do when trying to challenge readers. A student that might have a large vocabulary but struggles with the way different novels are organized, it may be smart to have them read books that will challenge them in this way. It also really interested me that students saw that vocabulary was one of the things that made a novel more challenging than others. This really opened my eyes to how i should choose novels and how I should challenge my students in their reading skills in the future. I loved how the second article stated that it is not just the language arts teachers job to teach literacy. I really think it is so important for all subject teachers to include literacy in their curriculum. I also really was interested to learn that the reading level of textbooks has gone down recently. I had never known this but it really had me thinking of the level of some of the textbooks for middle school I have looked at recently. Both of these articles had me really thinking about my future classroom the literacy I will include and not include.