Text Structures

What’s good in nonfiction?

Two key points that stood out to me while reading chapter two were the idea of teaching students text structures to support their reading of expository text and how one must evaluate nonfiction materials to put into their classroom. (stay tuned for the next blog on evaluating materials)

Text Structure:

From my experience, young children LOVE reading nonfiction material, and I have had amazing success from incorporating interest/inquiry reading groups into my daily reading block. While sometimes, students select fiction materials to study (i.e. fairy tales, chapter series) most wanted to read about “stuff they could learn more facts about.” I felt overall the students did a great job navigating Wikipedia (even some with some reading struggles and I feel it was related to their desire to figure it out) to some text that would be categorized as inconsiderate. But there are students who just don’t understand the writing patterns that are used in expository text. “Insensitivity to text patterns hinders not only students’ comprehension and recall but also their abilities to write well-developed content material” (Richards & Gipe, 1995, 667). With that being said, I know this upcoming school year, I want to do a better job of teaching my students how to recognize signal words and phrases that deem the text to be expository. Knowledge of text structure can improve learning from content area texts (Harvy, 1998; Allen, 2000). The authors listed the following expository text structures in writing as follows:

·         Description

·         Simple listing

·         Sequence or time order

·         Cause-effect

·         Comparison and contrast

·         Problem-solution

·         And question/answer.

In the book, they authors provide examples of lessons to support teaching each structure. They believe that by supporting students’ recognition of the writing of expository text patterns aids in students understanding and help students to recall and retain material.

 The above lists are skills teachers often are expected to teach and are often taught as isolated skills in basal programs. (at least with my experience) It will be interesting to me because common core standards, in true from, take concepts from their whole and learn smaller parts as you go. (more natural and progressive/building) I want my students to be equipped and understand cause and effect relationship, compare and contrast, etc. This all goes back to our talk on have students approach reading as the historian or scientist.  If students can learn to recognize text structures, then you could teach students how to critically read that text through the lens of historian to compare and contrast. I know when these skills are taught in isolation, many students do not grasp the true concept of how this skill can benefit them as a reader and writer. When a student understands compare and contrast, the true test of comprehension lies within their ability to take the learned skill and transfer the knowledge into other areas of future readings. As in the case of Rachel, she clearly demonstrated and appeared, on the surface, to understand the expected assignment. But when you looked more closely, she was missing the entire idea of the assignment. She was spitting out information she felt was valuable to her.  She had good intentions and wanted to compare and contrast a present war to past but was unable to do so.  Her skill set was not permanent and had not been learned in previous assignments. I believe, as teachers, we must take children to different Discourses to critically read expository text and read from the lens of the discipline’s Discourse.