Under the Lens of a Bookworm: A Dissection of Children’s Materials
Contributing Author: Donna Pamella Gonzales
This article was written for the 2021 Corpus Roundtable event hosted by the TalkTogether team.
I love to read books. I grew up with the likes of Dr. Seuss and the Little Golden Books, then transitioned to mystery and romance pocket books, until I found myself reading thicker romance and thriller novels as well as the huge volumes of encyclopedias. I recall finding myself totally immersed in a story that nothing, and I mean nothing, even the calls of my mom to eat, could distract me. I would read anywhere–even in a moving vehicle or in the dark–and any time I got the chance. The library became a safe haven for me. Reading for me became a source of comfort and relaxation, of trivia and general knowledge (Of course, reading for school was a totally different thing!).
As I got involved in the field of education and research, especially in the development and management of instructional materials, books became more than just a source of enjoyment and relaxation. The words, the sentences, the parts of the book that I just took for granted acquired a whole new meaning. Books now became specimens of scrutiny, dissected up to its basic parts, and viewed under various lenses. It made me wonder about what makes children want to read, what books are good for them to read, and how you can actually perk their interest for reading.
Why do Filipino children read?
In 2017, a survey was conducted by the National Book Development Board (NBDB), an agency under the Department of Education (DepEd) of the Philippines whose mission is to ensure an adequate and accessible supply of quality books for the global market through the continuous development of the book publishing industry. They wanted to know what motivates Filipinos to read. According to 1,200 youth respondents aged 6 to 17 years old, their top motivation for reading is to learn more or new things, with improvement of reading ability, grammar, comprehension and vocabulary following at second place. Reading for leisure came in at third.
Again, I felt the gears in my brain turning, churning out more questions (Overthinking is real!). Is knowing that they would learn from reading enough to get them to read? Would they read books only when they are easy for them to understand? How do we help them pick books that suit their reading goals and skills?
What makes a book easy or hard to understand?
Based on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Text Complexity Model [1], measuring text complexity involves three parts; namely, quantitative measures, qualitative measures, and the reader and task. Thus, a book, for its level of understanding to be determined, involves not just counting how many difficult highfalutin words and long sentences it contains, but also getting experts to evaluate the structure, the language, the meaning of the text, and even how the reader actually relates to it.
I never consciously thought about books as being easy or hard to understand based on their word and sentence lengths. I probably just saw words that I didn’t understand and didn’t really think what it meant in terms of book difficulty. Easy books were those I could read in one sitting. The harder ones needed more time and concentration to understand. Yet, how can text complexity models help with matching books to their readers?
Book levelling
Different text complexity models have been the basis of several tools in determining the level of a book, for its appropriateness for a child of a certain age, grade, or reading level, though mostly concentrated on the quantitative aspect of it. In Portia Padilla’s presentation of the book levelling protocol that the TalkTogether team developed for Filipino and Kannada, she noted that the majority of existing tools were Anglocentric or English-based, and WEIRD or centered in the experience of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations. Guided by the text complexity model, the TalkTogether team developed a book levelling tool and used it on a selection of Filipino and Kannada books that included award-winning, best-selling, and recommended books, fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry, and books across different publishers and publication years. The levelling tool took into consideration the expert ratings of two independent people on which age band the overall content, organization, language, illustrations, and design of the book was best for. These qualitative assessments were validated by quantitative measures such as the number of words and lengths of sentences in the books and subjective ratings of when children first understood a set of words. The team found that the average number of words and sentences of books increased across age bands, and that books levelled for older children contained words that were later-acquired.
In parallel, Leonor Diaz developed a text complexity assessment framework [2] to use as a book levelling tool for Filipino books. This involved the participation of 1826 students from 3 provinces whose reading comprehension levels were determined by a series of assessments. Experts and teachers were also asked to rank and level the texts on what they believe was just right for that particular level.
Looking at all these tools, just to be able to measure book levels qualitatively looks so tedious to do, more so the quantitative part. Imagine having to count each word at a time, and in Filipino for that matter. Fortunately, in this age of technology, it can already be done through a software, such as the SukatWika [3], a psycholinguistic tool developed by the University of the Philippines (UP) as a collaboration between UP CIDS and the College of Engineering. SukatWika can easily generate the word- and text-level metrics relevant to the development of reading materials. Similarly, developed within the TalkTogether project is the language parser called ALFA (Automatized Linguistic Frequency Analyser) by Aakash Agarwal to help with the quick generation of metrics.
One point of consideration though for levelled books is that it may limit a child’s reading skill, a concern that Portia Padilla also raised during her presentation, citing Dzaldov and Peterson [4] and Glaswell and Ford [5] on the potential of book levelling to decrease a child’s exposure to diverse texts and learning experiences. This raises even more questions. Would exposing them to books only identified for their level stop them from reading more? Does this mean that children should be given books of different levels to improve their reading skills? Would getting children to actually validate the book’s readability level help improve these book levelling tools more? They are, after all, the target audience.
Moving forward
Knowledge of a book’s level can equip parents to decide on which books are good for their children. Going back to the NBDB survey mentioned earlier, 72% of the Filipino youth say that their parents encourage them to read. Hence, educating parents on what levels of books are good for their children would allow them to become more aware of the books that they give. It also gives parents a chance to find out if their child has books at different reading levels, aside from their own.
I have a distinct recollection of transitioning from books with big fonts and fewer words to books with smaller fonts and longer sentences. On hindsight, I probably knew that there were different reading levels based on the books I had but I just didn’t mind it because all I wanted was to read. Being able to read different leveled books made it easy for me to progress to more complex ones. I guess I was lucky to have access to books at a young age as I grew up with a grandfather who was a voracious reader, parents whose business provided me with an oversupply of second-hand books and magazines, and a well-stocked library in school. Would children without any access to books understand the joy I get from reading?
There’s actually a lot more to books than what meets the eye, to borrow a line from a popular ‘90s sci-fi adventure movie. There are still a lot of new solar systems and galaxies to explore, a lot of questions that need to be asked and answered. This is just the beginning.
About the Author
[1] Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Text Complexity Model. Accessed from https://www.ccsoh.us/cms/lib/OH01913306/Centricity/Domain/207/A%20Beginners%20Guide%20to%20Text%20Complexity.pdf
[2] Diaz, L. (2013). Assessment of text difficulty: A model for Grades 1 to 10 Filipino texts. Doctoral Dissertation. University of the Philippines Diliman.
[3] Lucasan, K.L., Aquino A., Santelices, F. P., and Ocampo, D. (2019). SukatWika: An analysis software for linguistic properties of texts. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Language Technologies for All (pp.31-35). https://lt4all.elra.info/proceedings/lt4all2019/pdf/2019.lt4all-1.9.pdf
[4] Dzaldov, B.S. & Peterson, S. (2005). Book leveling and readers. The Reading Teacher, 59, 222-229.
[5] Glasswell, K., & Ford, M. (2011). Let’s start leveling about leveling. Language Arts, 88(3), 208-216.
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