ABSTRACT
Text used for instruction has a long history. Thousands of years ago, in the Middle East, children attempted to solve mathematical problems set on baked-clay tablets. Since then, the written word has remained a teaching aid and teacher substitute. However, in the seventeenth century, a 64-year-old ex-bishop and teacher, Jan Komensky (better known as Comenius) felt that there was more to communication than just words. Textbooks should be clear, palatable, even enjoyable, and his book, The World in Pictures (Figure 19.1), was one of the first ‘science’ books to use illustrations to achieve those ends. Nowadays, pictures are the rule rather than the exception although sometimes their provision is based more on intuition than on studies of what makes textbooks work. At the same time, these studies have often focused on the impact of convoluted sentences and difficult words (Long 1991), something that teachers can assess informally and competently without recourse to syllable counts, word counts and sentence analysis (Fatt 1991). In reality, comprehending individual words and sentences may be the least of a reader’s problems (Newton 2000). The difficulty is more likely to be in making the words and sentence say something meaningful about the topic in hand. The aim of this chapter is to point to various features of textual materials that can significantly support understanding. A page from Comenius's ‘The World in Pictures' https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203166741/98bc927b-30d2-470c-984f-ff748292fb0e/content/fig19_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
