<p>This study presents the development, description, application, and discussion of a practical analytical framework to design, select and examine challenging scientific texts for middle school gifted students. Although arranging appropriate levels of challenging texts is required to satisfy the academic needs of gifted students and nurture their higher-order thinking skills, there is a paucity of research on how to design these challenging texts. Hence, depending on the theory of systemic functional linguistics, literature findings, and empirical data corpus of teachers’ generated scientific texts, a practical analytical framework is developed to describe and categorize features of these texts and how to manipulate these patterns to guide teachers and researchers. The application of this framework will be exemplified by two teachers’ generated scientific texts in the topics of photosynthesis and the albedo effect. Finally, the affordances of the analytical framework are discussed.</p>