Analysis of Level 7- First draft

Analysis of Language in Level 7

The concept of time is foreign or at least not very familiar to children at the age synonymous with level 7 reading books. I think it is this concept that drives the authors of the stories to write in the past tense. Also, the majority of stories in general are written in the past tense, and so it is a format that children tend to be familiar with, in regards to stories. Similarly, there are no words in this extract that have more than two syllables, acknowledging the simple lexical choices necessary  for children to be able to pronounce the words and have encountered the words or separate phonemes before. The names ‘Sam’ and ‘Tess’ are easy to say and have no complicated vowel sounds or consonant clusters, as well as being fairly common and recognisable.

There are an average number of 8.5 words per sentence with a mainly simple sentence structure, however, there are some sentences like ‘She was big and brown and bouncy and she loved to go for walks.’ which are compound sentences that use conjunctions. This particular sentence also displays the rule of three by including three adjectives to describe the dog, further adding to the language features included with alliteration of the letter ‘b’. The first sentence in the story uses a transitive verb structure, which in certain contexts could be a difficult concept for children at this reading level. However, as the sentence is one that describes an action that most children are familiar with ‘taking [the dog] for a walk’ it is acceptable, in this case, to assume that the child will understand how to formulate that sentence.

When a child is first learning how to speak, they tend to begin with nouns and by the time they are around 5 or 6, they are adjectives and verbs competently. As they learn to read in the early stages, I image the content of their reading books focusses more on the nouns as this will be what they are the most familiar with. By level 7, it would seem that they are focussing more on the adjectives and verbs which is shown in this passage through the extensive use of verbs like ‘run’, ‘jump’ and ‘race’ and simple adjectives like ‘big’ and ‘brown’.

I used the Gunning Fog Index to gain an approximate age/ number of years in school that a child will require in order to understand and be able to read the story. In this case, I found that a child would require 3.4 years of school education to be at a suitable level for this, which is concordant with the age of children in the class that I visited who were reading at this level as they were at the beginning of Yr4.

The page itself is very appealing to children and formatted in a way that makes the reading experience easier for younger children. Roughly two thirds of the page is filled with the illustration which acts as a visual aid for the children to associate with the words. Also, the typography is simple, using a sans-serif and large print font.