Analysis of Level 8- First draft

Analysis of Language in Level 8

While level 8 is again written primarily in the past tense, there is an instance of the conditional tense being used. The conditional tense is said in a paper by Debra Pepler of York University to be ‘rare in the speech of children younger than 6 or 7 years’ and is therefore still a new concept to children reading at this level, especially considering that children advance quicker in their speech sophistication than their reading. Because there is not a definite ‘if’ or ‘then’ statement, but a sentence that says ‘When he got into a mess, Granny helped him…’, it could be taken to mean an example of a past event rather than a routine occurrence/ situation.

There is a definite progression for the previous level in terms of the lexical choices and the complexity of the sentence and word structures. While the previous example contained no words with 3 or more syllables, this passage contains 8. A major contributor to this word count is the name ‘Joshua’ which, as well as containing three syllables, is difficult in terms of phonology, particularly in regard to the vowel sound at the end of the name. The sentences are also considerably longer than in the previous example with an average of 13.2 words per sentence. This is due to the use of complex sentences and more frequent use of conjunctions like ‘and’, as well as commas to add clauses of detail.

I again utilised the Gunning Fog Index with this extract, however I received an anomalous answer of 9.317, almost a 6 year jump from the previous result of 3.4. I believe that while a good tool for referral, there are certain features of the index that are not always accurate. For example, some words that contain 3 or more syllables, like ‘everything’, are common words that children will recognise and know. Similarly, there are words with fewer syllables that may be more abstract or have complicated sounds that this index wouldn’t notice.

At this level, the font is still sans-serif and easy to read as it contains none of the embellishments of the serif fonts. However, only a third of the page was consumed by the illustration which insinuates more of a focus on the text than the pictures.