In an insightful post on meeting the text complexity standard for the Common Core, Teaching Channel coach Ryan McCarthy writes:

I know from my own time in the classroom that many students struggle with grade level complex texts. Teachers ask me every day about how to help such readers. “I give them complex texts like the standards say, and they can’t do it!” is a common refrain. I always begin by asking them about their approach to planning, because thoughtful planning holds the key to student success with complex texts.

McCarthy goes on to outline several planning strategies when assigning complex texts. All seek to avoid doing "too much of the pre-reading work for students, telling students what a text means before they have a chance to read it." Teachers, McCarthy says, "can and should scaffold reading, without shortchanging student thinking," with an eye to protecting students' "joy of discovery" and "opportunities for authentic interpretation and analysis."

McCarthy goes on to present strategies for scaffolding through close reading. We'd like to present some strategies for scaffolding through pre-leaning of key vocabulary, keeping the goal of not "shortchanging student thinking" in mind. Glossaries have a very limited ability to help kids truly understand complicated texts. Is there a way to pull out words and teach them to students that gives them an authentic sense of the word, and helps them make sense of the text they're about to read?  

In a post on Readability, the Common Core, and Vocabulary, Vocabulary.com director of curriculum development Georgia Scurletis describes ways to use a deeper understanding of vocabulary learning to make complex texts easier to understand.

First, it's good to remember that text complexity is a spectrum, she writes. In elementary school classrooms, teachers spend a great deal of time and energy matching student readers to texts that have an appropriate level of readability for them. But:

If you flash forward to the middle school classroom where students are no longer confined to reading from assigned bins, there doesn't seem to be the same emphasis on matching reader to text — despite the fact that "two thirds of eighth graders do not read at the 'proficient' level." (NAEP Reading_2009) Most likely this shift has occurred because middle school students are usually taught by content area teachers who are expected to introduce texts such as the Bill of Rights or complicated explanations of genetics, and even if their students struggle with reading these texts, teachers are still responsible for teaching the concepts conveyed in them. Furthermore, due to time constraints and a lack of training in the teaching of reading skills, teachers are forced to convey the content through summaries or illustrations instead of expecting students to be able to independently comprehend that content.

The free resources on Vocabulary.com can help, Scurletis suggests. For instance, when you're preparing vocabulary lists (which our tool allows you to pull from text you've cut and pasted into our list building tool) sort the words by difficulty. We assign words difficulty ratings not by syllable-counting, but by taking into consideration factors like how likely students are to have seen that word before. 

Students often think of "big words" as being harder words, but word difficulty also boils down to exposure. Although unstoppable has four syllables and din has one, more students have been frequently exposed to the base word of unstoppable: stop (once every 52 pages), whereas din only shows up once every 829 pages. So which word is harder?

Next, once words to learn have been selected, Scurletis's post demonstrates how to truly learn those words. Model using the Vocabulary.com Dictionary to take students "behind the scenes" with words, through fun and friendly word blurbs that describe how, when, and why you'd use that word; hundreds of context examples drawn from real world sources; and a word family tree that includes information about how typical or unusual that word may be.

Guided annotation exercises can help students to become more interactive and observant readers of complex texts. And, once students begin to view a text as a collection of sentences and words, some much harder than others, they can more easily apply their decoding and inference skills to those especially challenging passages. The reward will come when students realize that they are actively making meaning from a text, instead of passively receiving someone else's interpretation.

And remember: once a student understands how to use the resources in our dictionary, our fast-paced, addictive game is only a click away.