4th Grade Reading Assignment – Grade Level Appropriate ?

9 comments

1. If they are receiving immersive English instruction they may be able to handle it, but this material is not focused on the life environment of a ten year old, it’s the type of topic discussed in high schools. If you are talking about elementary school level, I’d imagine it would be difficult for them to understand these concepts even in their native language.

   I’d put this around Eiken level 2 reading skill based on grammar complexity, but a bit higher based on vocabulary. That’s not elementary school level. Eiken level 5 is simple greetings and daily life at Elementary school level. Eiken 3 is JHS 1st/2nd year, Eiken 2.5 is JHS 3rd year students/average level 1st year HS students. This would be too difficult for them.

   I teach at a top ten percent public high school in my prefecture. If I wanted to use this with my high school students, I’d consider it challenging for first year students based on vocabulary, but I would expect second year students to be able to handle it.

2. It is difficult to say. We don’t know the level/ability of your students; they may be rockstars in English or being punished by reading this.

   I would also put this in the Eiken pre-2ish/2ish range. Maybe more in the level-2 range.

3. Interesting. So, so far, the consensus is that this material content would be difficult for the students to comprehend (and/or boring as watching paint dry) even in their Native tongue.

   And I don’t know if I would term them as “rockstars”. They are above-average within their peer group. I can’t really say if any of them are savants. But it should be stressed that none of them are native English speakers (you all probably got that already), and that the school is NOT immersion. Not even close. An international course, yes, but Immersion? Hell no.

4. This is not particularly appropriate for 4th grade in Japan or even an English speaking country due to style and topic. This actually looks like something lifted from a 2nd or 3rd year high school text like ProVision.

   How about hunting for authentic and/or reading class materials for native speakers, grade 4-5?

   For reading class materials, try, [https://www.readworks.org/](https://www.readworks.org/)

5. Level aside I would recommend a topic more relevant to their age. Even though it is an academic topic it should still have some kind of familiarity that the kids can scaffold on before they move in to the reading itself.

6. I’d be shocked if more than one kid in any of my 4th grade classes could read the word CAT.

7. That would be way too dry for native speaking 10-year olds. Whoever wrote or chose that for this class got a bit lazy methinks.

8. This doesn’t look the least bit appropriate for an elementary school lesson even for Grade 4 students in an English-medium program.

   It’s not just that it’s dry.

   I pushed the first paragraph through VocabKitchen which pins it at CEFR C2. Compleat Lexical Tutor says about 10% are 2000 word level and 3 words are off list. Some of the reading level profilers I checked say the reading level is high.

   It’s also an unillustrated text typical of drill books published in Japan. They’re meant for yakudoku and a few comprehension questions at the high school level. They’re boring even for high school students.

   I could imagine building this text into a 2-3 hour unit workbook with accompanying presentations (audio, video, interactives, etc) in a CLIL framework.

9. After reading all these comments, I feel so vindicated right now.