simplifying a text: less words or more words?

There is an interesting article about this:

O'Donnell, Mary 2009, Finding Middle Ground in Second Language Reading: Pedagogic Modifications That Increase Comprehensibility and Vocabulary Acquisition While Preserving Authentic Text Features, Modern Language Journal, vol. 93, no. 4. 512-533.

The standard approach to making academic text easier to read and understand is through simplification. This has usually meant shorter sentences, shorter words, and cutting out excess verbiage, and better layout.

These have been embodied in the Plain English movement.

However in 2000 I was simplifying a Public Health article so that Indigenous Health Workers with little schooling could both understand it and use it to learn academic language. I noticed that in 'breaking down' the article into simpler language 2-3 times, my first move was to actually make the text longer than the original. What I was doing was unpacking the grammatical metaphors carrying the causal and intertextual relationships into explicit signals. In short I was both pulling out hidden and making explicit implicit rhetorical and textual aspects of the text. This meant adding metadiscourse to the text.

It was only after this first break-down, that I could then begin to focus on simplifying the lexis or wording of the content.

This article argues that the first strategy - what I had found myself instinctively doing in 2000 - is the most effective way to simplify texts and make them more accessible to students. It is called 'textual elaboration' which involves the offsetting of unfamiliar linguistic terms by the use of synonyms, restatements, explanations, and rhetorical signaling.