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2015-2016 Literacy Colloquy Presentation

Dr. Laura Tortorelli


Tuesday, February 23rd
11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Erickson Room: 133F

Beyond Readability: What Makes Complex Text


Difficult for Young Readers?
The Common Core State Standards call for increased text complexity beginning in second
grade. Text complexity is usually measured with readability statistics, including measures of word
length, word frequency, and/or sentence length. Theoretical research on text complexity, however,
indicates that measures of overall discourse structure, including measures of genre and cohesion, may
be equally important for understanding how children process texts. New technologies like the CohMetrix Text Easability Assessor (McNamara, Louwerse, Cai, & Graesser, 2005) make it possible to
automatically evaluate texts and obtain quantitative measures of genre and cohesion. My research
explores the relationships between measures of text complexity at the word, sentence, and discourse
levels and reading fluency for children in the early elementary grades. Using the RAND model of
reading comprehension as a theoretical framework, my work highlights how reader, text and task
factors interact in an iterative process.

Laura S. Tortorelli is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Grades Reading in the Teacher


Education department. She graduated with her Ph.D. in Reading Education from the
University of Virginia in 2015. Before going back to graduate school, Laura worked as a
reading teacher and reading curriculum developer. Her first teaching job was with the JET
program in Hokkaido, Japan. Lauras research interests include text complexity, reading
fluency, alphabet knowledge, and early writing.

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