While we may not be fortunate enough to have a say in what textbooks we will use in our classrooms, we will certainly be able to choose the texts that supplement our lessons. These might be trade books (books that were written to be sold to the public at bookstores), magazine articles, newspaper articles, portions of other textbooks, web sites etc.

When we choose texts for our students we have to think about issues like the following:

1. Does the text assume my students have prior knowledge that they do not?
2. Does the text include a lot of new vocabulary words that my students will not be familiar with?
3. Are there pictures, charts, graphs, etc. included in the text that will help my students make sense of what they are reading?
4. Does the text look appealing? For example, is it just dense text written in the same font and font size, or is there something visually appealing about the text?
5. Is the average sentence length and the average number of syllables per word appropriate for my students?

Questions one through four above are examples of questions that we ask to determine whether a text is "reader friendly" or "considerate." This is often determined by using a checklist such as this one:  General Readability Checklist. (Here is a Readability Checklist for Informational Web Pages.)

The last question above (question five) has to do with a text's "readability." (Readability is simply defined as the relationship between the reading level of a student and the difficulty of the text.) This is often determined using a formula such as the Fry Readability Formula. Readability formulas yield estimates of textbook difficulty. They usually involve taking a measure of sentence length and word difficulty do determine a grade-level score for texts. It is important to keep in mind that just because a formula indicates that a text is written at the 8th grade level, that does not mean that it is ideal for 8th graders. (It might be. But it might not be.) Readability formulas provide you with one piece of evidence that must be used in conjunction with other evidence (e.g., the extent to which the text is reader friendly) to determine its appropriateness for your students. 

While we make a point of choosing texts that include features that support our students' efforts to read and comprehend, we have to remember that our students may not always know how to make the best use of all of those features. Research suggests that many students do not use the table of contents or index to help them find information (Dreher, 1992). Furthermore  some students are not aware of the organization of their textbook, even after they have been reading information from it for some time. For many students the problem is that they simply do not take the time to make themselves aware of the features and organization of their textbook. They never familiarize themselves with the overall content and layout of their book. They merely read the pages they're assigned and ignore the rest.  

One way to encourage your students to become familiar with the various features of your textbook as well as to get a feel for the overall layout and organization of it is to create a textbook scavenger hunt. Decide what features of your textbook you want your students to be particularly aware of. Then write questions designed to encourage your students to review those features. The scavenger hunt can be completed by students independently or in small groups. Be sure to review the answers with your students when they are done, and be sure to ask them what steps they took to find the answers to your questions. This will let you know how effectively they've used the different features of their textbook. You might even ask them to write down how they found the answers as part of answering each question. (Here is an example of a textbook scavenger hunt-- Textbook Scavenger Hunt: The Americas.) 

Dreher, M. J. (1992). Searching for information in textbooks. Journal of Reading, 35(5), pp. 364-371.