“Batting” around Ideas: A Design/Development Study of Preservice Teachers’ Knowledge of Text Difficulty and Text Complexity

Abstract This study reports the knowledge of text complexity held by preservice teachers prior to coursework. The goal of this research is to determine what strengths and what learning needs preservice teachers have related to text selection with the intention of informing programmatic redesign. In this preliminary component of a design-development study, we report findings from the Text Complexity Task, a verbal protocol task administered to 31 preservice teachers. Findings show that when evaluating text complexity, preservice teachers noted word and text-level features, but attended less to phonemic patterns, multisyllable words, and sentence-level features. Additionally, participants differed in their arguments about how some text features (e.g., unknown vocabulary, rhyming patterns) influence text difficulty. Preservice teachers also differed in their views of how a reader’s prior knowledge influences text difficulty, vocabulary knowledge, and word solving. The article concludes with recommendations for teacher educators interested in improving preservice teachers’ text selection for reading instruction.