What are High-Interest, Low-Readability books?
- francesleggett
- Mar 28
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
High-Interest, Low-Readability Books
What happens when a child is interested in topics of a 10 year old, but can only read books that have a reading level of a 6 year old?
Not everyone’s interests align with their reading level. The type of material that a child is interested in corresponds to their “Interest Age”, whereas the actual reading level of the child corresponds to their “Reading Age”.
So… what do they do?
They have two choices.
They can try and read a book for a 10 year old. It may take them a long time to comprehend the sentences. There may be just too many big, black chunks of text that overwhelm. Ultimately, the risk is that they may just lose interest in reading entirely.
Or… they can read a book that is more accessible to them, one written for a 6 year old. The content won’t be very interesting though. The book: too babyish for them. Ultimately, they’ll finish the book feeling completely understimulated.
Neither seems like a particularly attractive choice for our young learner and both options will likely lead to no longer reading anything at all.
Research1 shows that this “lag” between reading level and age becomes more evident around fourth grade, with a difference of one to two years in reading level, and this only increases as the years go on. This is due to inadequate support and delayed detection with reading problems, or simply a drop in motivation for our “struggling” readers.
What follows is a phenomenon known as “The Matthew Effect” in reading. Those who don’t struggle with reading will read more, and will, therefore, improve their reading level, comprehension and vocabulary. Those who struggle with reading will read less, and therefore fall even further behind2.
What our child needs is a book that has content for a 10 year old, but is written for a 6-year-old Reading Age.
That means larger text, an easy-to-read font, spaces between lines so the text doesn’t appear crowded and short sentences that don’t use excess language.
The perfect recipe for our young learner to be stimulated by what they read and help them feel that reading can be for them too.
A book like this has a name: High-Interest, Low-Readability, or “High/Low” for short.
Currently, the offer of High/Low books is limited, with most of the offer concentrating on fiction books. These books are not widely available and the concept is not widely known.
Creating more of these books is key to bridging the gap between struggling and confident readers because every child deserves the right to develop a strong level of literacy in primary school.
1 Swaggerty, E. A. (2015). Selecting engaging texts for upper elementary students who avoid reading or find reading difficult. In Children’s literature in the reading program: Engaging young readers in the 21st century (Vol. 150), pp. 150–166.
2 Röthlisberger, M., Zangger, C., Juska-Bacher, B.
Matthew effect in vocabulary and reading: A comparison of good and average readers in Grade 1 to Grade 3, International Journal of Educational Research Open, Volume 5, 2023, 100278, ISSN 2666-3740, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2023.100278.
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