At a Primary School (Teacher’s) Reading Level

Over the many years I have spent reading about education and reading books designed for educators, I have had several encounters with works written specifically for primary school teachers.

It is the strangest thing, but books and journal articles written for people who teach the lower grades for a living are written at a different reading level than those for high school teachers, which are also at a different reading level than those for tertiary-level educators.

Now, theoretically, it doesn’t matter what level you are teaching – you still have at least one university degree to your name.  You have a tertiary level education yourself, and should be perfectly capable of reading works written at that level…

Yet, without fail, every book I’ve ever encountered that was aimed at a primary-school-teacher audience is written in a simpler, clearer style – usually with slightly larger text and a design that wouldn’t look out of place in a middle-school level textbook.

It’s not a bad thing.  In fact, last year I was secretly pleased that one of my textbooks was written for that market.  It was a nice change from the denser texts I’d been reading – the ones designed for university students and teachers of university students.  After a while, university level texts start getting a bit wearying. 

But I’m still always taken aback by the change in tone, text density and vocabulary – by the implicit assumptions about the audience for the book.

I’m currently reading a short “guide” downloaded from an educational website, and I couldn’t figure out why reading it was making me feel, well, slightly patronised.  It is clearly intended for teachers, but whoever wrote it chose to produce it in a level of language that boarders on simplified.

Then I realised – the target audience is primary school teachers.  This is the sort of stuff people give them to read all the time.

Why is that?  Is it because they spend so much of their day working with texts at very low/young reading levels and would find it taxing to suddenly shift to significantly harder, denser texts for professional development? 

That would make sense.  I find children’s books to be a refreshing read that allows my brain to regain some of its bounce.  If I spent most of my time with the bouncy texts, I expect a dense, jargon-ridden, technical piece of writing would feel a bit leaden and unpleasant.

Or, is it because people who teach at a primary level do so because they like the information they work with to be of a simpler nature?  If you wanted to work with Shakespeare you wouldn’t be teaching kindergarten, after all.

I can’t say.  All I know is that books and journal articles written for primary school teachers definitely seem to assume they can’t or won’t deal with the same level of textual sophistication as people who teach at higher levels.

And that’s interesting.