Analysis of Level 9- First Draft

Analysis of Language in Level 9

The majority of the text is in past tense but it contains sections of both the conditional and future tenses. This is concordant with the development and steady incline in difficulty expected at this level. Despite the anomalous result for the previous level, the Gunning Fog Index rates this piece at 5.938, which is fairly accurate in relation to the reading level of the average child at that stage of their school education.

There are 9 words with 3 or more syllables and an average of 12.5 words per sentence. While these statistics follow the expected increase in complexity that I expected by this point, it is the language features and techniques used in this text that make it more challenging for young readers. The introduction of features such as italics to emphasise certain words within phrases changes the possible meanings of a sentence and clarifies how a child should read the word in terms or intonation and emphasis. Similarly, ellipsis is used to show a pause in the sentence. In this case, the use of the ellipsis blurs the lines between spoken and written language as the self-aware repair in the narrator’s choice of words, from ‘great’ to ‘amazing’, follows the character’s train of thought as though he were speaking directly to the reader.

This text also contains words that have difficult phonological structures, for example, ‘wheezy’. Particularly the phoneme ‘wh-‘, which is uncommon in words other than the ‘wh- inquisitives’, (ie. Where, what, when). Also, as British language tends to use a letter ‘s’ instead of ‘z’ in words like organise/organize, that is also a grapheme that British children are less familiar with. The Ginn’s New Reading 360 collection of reading books are published in England and are distributed in Britain too, meaning that they use the British spellings and rules.