Tier Two Vocabulary

Regular practice with complex text and its academic language

The third shift concerns what students are reading. In the research that informed the development of these standards it was found that students were required to read texts significantly more complex in both college and career training programs than the texts they had read in high school. This is one of the reasons why students face such challenge in those post-secondary programs. 21 In addition to the skills of literacy, these standards also include a "staircase of complexity" throughout so that students complete high school ready for the challenging texts they will need to read and understand. Text complexity refers to the themes and concepts of the text as well as the vocabulary and syntax of the text.

The language referred to in the shift as "academic language" includes vocabulary and sentence structure that supports students in reading complex text across the content areas. The specific vocabulary here is not the typical content-specific vocabulary, but rather, words such as dedicate, ignite, consequence.

Text-Dependent Analysis in Action: Examples From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"