Doorlopende leerlijnen: implicaties voor leveling van leer- en examenteksten voor het middelbaar onderwijs

Abstract

Throughout their school career, students should be able to read increasingly more difficult texts. In this paper we discuss the importance of leveling (adapting the difficulty of texts to students’ reading proficiency), and we investigate which guidelines are available for educational publishers who would like to vary the complexity of their texts. Because of the need for evidence-based pieces of writing advice and the lack of empirical evidence for many of the guidelines that are available, we look at the usefulness of the notion of distance for varying text complexity. We apply a first operationalization of this notion (address your reader directly, add characters, avoid passives) to a corpus of exam texts for secondary education, in order to track whether exam makers systematically vary the complexity of the language used in final exams for pre-vocational (Dutch vmbo) and preuniversity (Dutch vwo) education. The notion distance proves to be useful, but is not used in a systematic way for differentiating between these school levels.