What Does Text Complexity Mean for English Learners and Language Minority Students?

This paper addresses the implications, for ELLs, of the Common Core State Standards' requirement that students be able to read and understand complex, informationally dense texts.  The authors discuss the types of supports that learners need in order to work with complex texts. They also provide a sample of what academic discourse involves, using an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. They demonstrate how English learners can be provided with strategies for accessing complex texts, such as closely examining one sentence at a time. The authors argue that instruction must go beyond vocabulary and should begin with an examination of our beliefs about language, literacy and learning.