An analysis of the words appearing in middle school textbooks

This dissertation presents three studies of middle school textbooks in math, science and social studies. Textbooks widely used in regular education middle school classrooms were the subject of the analysis. The purposes of this work are two-fold. The first is to advance our understanding of the words contained in academic text to determine which words middle school students must know in order to read for understanding in the content area classroom. The second is to develop and explicate new ways of thinking about the words making up academic text that are particularly useful to content area teachers. Chapter l, an examination of math and social studies textbooks, revealed that an average of 25% of the text consisted of words likely to challenge struggling readers. Because 90-95% of text must be known in order for comprehension to occur, this study suggests that limited vocabulary knowledge is likely to affect academic performance in the content area classroom, and by implication identifies the words on which vocabulary instruction in the middle grades should focus. Chapter 2 proposes a framework for classifying the words found in academic text based on an analysis of social studies textbooks. This framework proposes that there are two functions for words in academic text and therefore two categories for words. There are the words that represent the course 'content' material. All other words work to 'deliver' this content material to the reader. This study presents evidence that the proposed framework provides a means for making objective and data-driven decisions regarding vocabulary instruction in the social studies classroom. In Chapter 3, glossaries from math, science and social studies textbooks were analyzed to determine whether they are constructed in ways that promote new word learning. This study provided evidence that glossaries fall short in providing sufficient support for learning new words, especially to below grade-level readers, and therefore are unlikely to promote reading comprehension. Because textbook glossaries were found to be highly similar across disciplines (as well as across grade levels), the research-based recommendations provided for supplementing the use of the glossary are relevant to all content area teachers.