The Surprisingly Easy Way to Make Academic Texts Accessible? Welcome to Text Engineering

The debate about oversimplifying a text for multilingual learners has been a spirited one. One side argues that giving students a text that is significantly above a their current abilities leads to a demoralizing experience and no comprehension. The other side suggests that with simplification, the content doesn’t present students with real-world skills. We actually say yes to both sides. If a text is many grade levels above where students are, multilingual learners will not only struggle to read the text but will glean nothing from reading it. However, if the academic complexity of the text is completely diminished, multilingual learners will lack practice reading challenging texts for when they encounter them in other classes, in daily life, on state exams, or in their careers.

However, what if the debate shifted to how can we make a complex text accessible to multilingual learners without simplifying it? We suggest engineering the text by directly embedding scaffolds within the body of the text. This way, the text remains at grade-level while still providing the needed linguistic scaffolds.

Engineering a text can include:

1. Adding Headings

A long text can be divided into sections, making different ideas clearly visible to students. Each section has its distinct heading to help students see information segmentation. Common headings might include causes, effects, perspectives, and key events in nonfiction texts. However, in fiction, it is mainly events that transpire, because fiction is based on a narrative. In particular, when a chapter just has a number, we can add a subheading to the chapter to clue students into the main idea of that chapter. For example, instead of just “Chapter 5,” we could also add Mama’s Relationship With Grandma.

2. Writing Guiding Questions

Headings can also take the form of guided questions. Because each segment has its own content to communicate, a guided question helps students think about the upcoming segment. In particular, they have to read for specific content, which makes reading more active. Example questions might be:

• • Why did [character’s name] not want to return home?
  • What did [character’s name] do after receiving the news about her grandmother?
  • Why was the Louisiana Purchase so important to American history?
  • How do people use waves in modern society?

An additional practice would be to have students pause before reading another section to provide a short answer to the guided question with an annotation. By pausing to annotate, multilingual learners actively process the content section by section.

3. Inserting Images

When working with multilingual learners of English, an image is worth a thousand scaffolds. For each section, we can add an image to make that concept more concrete. For example, we could add a photo of a historical battle or a picture of an Arctic food web when the text is about these topics. Additionally, we can add a short caption below the text or image to compress the information in that section into a single sentence. It might look like:

• • The attack on the U.S. Pearl Harbor by the Japanese left many battleships destroyed. [Note: Remember that images of battles or violence may be triggering for some students. Be sure to know your learners!]
  • The Arctic food web shows producers and consumers.

4. Incorporating Synonyms

When a text is oversimplified, the more transferable academic vocabulary is removed and replaced by more accessible words. However, by replacing the academic vocabulary words, multilingual learners of English miss a valuable opportunity to learn them. Instead, we suggest keeping these transferable academic vocabulary words and simply adding a more accessible synonym in brackets after the more rigorous words. Doing this maintains the complexity of the text yet still scaffolds the language. Here is how this might look:

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 significantly affected [changed] the United States by doubling its size and opening vast new lands for settlement. As a consequence [result] of this historic acquisition, the U.S. gained control of territory spanning approximately [about] 828,000 square miles, which helped to secure [fix] its future as a continental power. This agreement with France removed [took away] foreign claims to the Mississippi River and enhanced economic and political stability.
(Text generated by ChatGPT, December 2024)

5. Translanguaging

Last but not least, we can tap into the linguistic assets of multilingual learners of English when they read a text. If we are reading a text in English and our students are Spanish speaking, we can teach them to read for cognates, words that are the same or similar in both languages (e.g., replicate / replicar; electricity / electricidad). When we teach multilingual learners of English to translanguage while reading, they intentionally use their preferred language to make the English text more accessible.

Conclusion

We hope that through this engineering of the text, teachers can both provide exposure to complex academic texts while still scaffolding the reading experience for multilingual learners of English. Through engineering texts, we fulfill the promise that multilingual learners will be career, college, and community-ready while also upholding our commitment to providing instruction that is equitable and affirming.