Understanding Texts and Readers: Responsive Comprehension with Leveled Texts

“Goals help guide my thinking about reader’s skills within each level of text complexity, and a leveling system helps my understanding of readers’ development from level to level.”

―Jennifer Serravallo

 Understanding Texts & Readers makes comprehension make sense. In it, Jennifer Serravallo narrows the distance between assessment and instruction. She maps the four fiction and four nonfiction comprehension goals she presented in The Reading Strategies Book to fourteen text levels and shares sample responses that show what to expect from readers at each.

Jen simplifies text complexity and clarifies comprehension instruction. She begins by untangling the many threads of comprehension: Levels, engagement, stamina, the relevance of texts, and much more. Then level by level she:

• calls out with precision how plot and setting, character, vocabulary and figurative language, and themes and ideas change as fiction across levels
• specifies how the complexity of main idea, key details, vocabulary, and text features increases in nonfiction texts
• points out what to expect from a reader as text characteristics change
• provides samples of student responses to texts at each level
• shares progressions across levels to support instructional planning.

Even if you haven’t read the book your reader is responding to, you’ll have the background necessary to make great teaching decisions for all your readers. “Understanding subtle shifts and increases in demands from level to level,” writes Jennifer Serravallo, “can guide what a teacher asks a student, what the teacher expects of the student, and what the teacher, therefore, teaches the student.”

Want to become a master of matching kids to books? Looking to take the difficult out of differentiation? Or do you want to dramatically increase the power and responsiveness of Jen’s Reading Strategies Book? Understanding Texts & Readers shows you how to move forward when students need to make progress.

Jennifer Serravallo is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning educator, literacy consultant, frequent speaker at state and national conferences, and former member of the Parents Magazine editorial board. In 2023, she launched her podcast To the Classroom: Conversations with Researchers and Educators. Jen is best known for creating books and resources rooted in research that help make responsive, strategic, differentiated literacy instruction possible for all teachers.
Her newest books are THE READING STRATEGIES BOOK 2.0 (2023), TEACHING WRITING IN SMALL GROUPS (March 2021), A TEACHER'S GUIDE TO READING CONFERENCES (2019), and UNDERSTANDING TEXTS AND READERS (2018). Her books and resources are used around the world: THE WRITING STRATEGIES BOOK (2017) and THE READING STRATEGIES BOOK (1st edition) (2015) have have been translated into French, Chinese, and Spanish.
Her comprehension assessment and teaching resources, COMPLETE COMPREHENSION: FICTION and COMPLETE COMPREHENSION: NONFICTION, help teachers make sense of comprehension, especially in whole chapter books and book-length nonfiction texts. They were released in Spring 2019 and are available through Heinemann (Learn more: hein.pub/cc).
Jen holds a BA from Vassar College and an MA from Teachers College, where she has also taught graduate and undergraduate classes.
Follow Jen on Twitter (@jserravallo) and Instagram (@jenniferserravallo), learn more from her website/blog: and join the Literacy Strategies Facebook Community.