Building Knowledge of Texts

When making sense of text, readers draw on not only their content knowledge and knowledge of the world, but also their knowledge of genre and text struc-ture: Is this narrative or informational text? Is it an essay or a report? Is it a mathematical formula or a chemical solution? Experienced readers also know to look for text features that highlight important ideas—in subheads, illustrations, or glossaries, for example. Through multiple experiences reading a wide variety of texts for different purposes, students are able to broaden their schema about text, building useful knowledge and strategies to bring to all their interactions with text.

Many teachers have students preview a text as a matter of course, to determine its type, purpose, and text features. Then, alert to its purpose, students can be more strategic in how to focus their reading. Rita Jensen makes sure that before her middle school ELD students read a new text, they surface schema about genre and what that means for how they will approach the particular assignment. In the following example, when she gives students a new poem to preview, she is explicit about the importance of recognizing that they have schema about poems (and newspaper articles and essays) that will help them:

I’m going to be giving you a new poem today. I want you to take a look at the title, the author, the kind of structure it is. I’m not giving you a newspaper article, I’m not giving you an essay, so you already know that. But if you didn’t know that, you would have to figure that out right off the bat, wouldn’t you?

When Cindy Ryan’s academic literacy students discussed the contents of Doris Stevens’s preface (presented earlier), they had not yet learned the structure or purpose of a preface. Only when they reached the end of it, with a little probing by their teacher, did they figure it out. Classroom Close-Up 8.6 shows how these understandings unfold, including students’ excitement in recognizing that they were reading a first-person, primary source.

For many students, informational text poses the most problems. Often, students need practice analyzing how it works. For example, when students know they can identify common informational text structures—such as compare and contrast, cause and effect, and analysis—they should also know they can organize their thinking about what they are reading accordingly and so more easily remember it.

Gina Hale’s seventh graders explicitly explore the various text structures in their history textbook over the course of the year. With their teacher’s support, students discover that different text structures suggest different reading and note-taking strategies. In Classroom Close-Up 8.7, Gina’s class begins to develop a chart that helps them visualize different text structures (and take notes strategically).

Text features (such as the subheadings that gave Gina’s students their lists of reasons for the fall of Rome) are another way for students to unpack informational text. Such headings, graphs, illustrations, photos and captions, and highlighted vocabulary may seem to be obvious meaning markers for experienced readers, but students must be apprenticed to their usefulness. Many students read right past these text markers, failing to recognize them as clues to meaning. Hani, a recent immigrant to the United States, first read past a reference to “Figure 25.16” in Chapter Twenty-Five of her high school chemistry textbook and then interpreted the phrase as a mathematics problem involving “figuring out” the relationship of the numbers 25 and 16. In Classroom Close-Up 8.8, Hani’s inexperience in reading the visuals of science is a reminder of the instruction and practice many students may need to understand these particular types of text.

As skilled readers of such texts, teachers of science may take for granted that visual models in the textbook are self-explanatory. Yet few students have been explicitly taught to made sense of such visuals. Hani’s misunderstandings are more common than teachers may think!

In the following example, ninth grader Rosa reads a textbook paragraph about the treatment of children in totalitarian states and immediately relates it to a photo and caption on the same page. She has been explicitly taught to look for the connections between text and nearby photographs and other graphics:

(Reading from her textbook) “Totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and communist China took over complete control of children’s education. Young people were often enrolled in special camps or movements such as the Hitler Youth. Children were even turned against their own parents, told to spy on them, and given an award for turning them in to the authorities.”

(Stopping to look at a photograph) The picture, I guess, has to do with that. The picture shows, it says, “Very young Soviets were taught to view Stalin as a benevolent father figure.” So I guess that ties in with the reading.

To prepare her physics students to get the most out of the embedded meaning markers in their textbook, high school teacher Nicci Nunes hands out a specific text—previewing assignment along with the textbook in her course. She asks students to investigate how different text features help to organize the text and why they might be useful to students (see Box 8.10).

Like textbooks, standardized tests are a genre with a specialized structure and conventions particular to schooling. Students benefit from explicit help to understand standardized tests as a kind of text. To build test schema, students need to explore what these tests are all about, rather than only practice and take the tests. By analyzing text passages and test items similar to those on high-stakes tests, students can take a metacognitive approach to tests as a genre with specific features and purposes that they can understand and negotiate (see Box 8.11). Some Reading Apprenticeship teachers combine an exploration of the standardized test genre with a review of students’ knowledge of Question-Answer Relationships (see the discussion of QAR in Chapter Seven).

Whenever Gina Hale’s diverse seventh graders start a new chapter in their history textbook, they first spend some time previewing the text and predicting what it will be about. Gina’s goal is that students will become familiar not only with the helpfulness of text features such as the headings and captions that serve to highlight big ideas, but also with the markers and patterns within text that signal how information is organized.

It is the first week of school, and “The Fall of Rome” is the first chapter in the textbook. Students previewed it the previous day, and today Gina intends to introduce the idea of text structure. She begins with a question to the class:

“So, what is this chapter about?”

“The Fall of Rome!” students respond in a chorus.

“So, is it a story about how Rome fell, or an explanation, or . . . How is it organized?” Despite students’ previewing work the previous day, they are clearly stumped. Gina reminds students that they had noticed an oddly formatted introductory paragraph the day before. “Does the introduction offer any clues about the way the chapter is organized? Read it with your partner and see what you find out.”

Partners begin reading and Gina moves around the room, listening. Stopping with one pair, she points to a line in the book and asks Murad to read it again. “There were many reasons for the fall of Rome. The empire was plagued by internal and external problems, including . . .” Murad’s partner Wen is excited, “So, this is about all the reasons!”

Murad agrees and notices that there were two kinds of reasons: internal and external.

In a class discussion, Murad and Wen share their discovery. Gina asks, “So if I wanted to take notes, make a list of the reasons, how could I start?”

“You gotta have two lists,” Murad offers.

“Okay, so how should I set this up?” Gina begins writing across the top of a blank transparency: “Many reasons for the fall of Rome.”

“You know, one for internal and one for external.”

Gina adds columns labeled “Internal Problems” and “External Problems.”

As students call out different problems, she begins to record their ideas.

“That looks like a T-chart!” Doris observes.

Gina draws in the missing lines for a T-chart. “Let’s all do that,” she says, “make a T-chart so we can begin organizing two lists of information as we read. Any predictions about where to find information for each list?”

“Under the subheadings!” several students suggest.

“Let’s see if that works,” Gina nods.

Later, students use their T-chart notes as they write their first essay: “Reasons for the Fall of Rome.” With each new chapter, students preview the text they are about to read and make predictions about the content and how the content is organized. On a class poster, they assign note-taking graphics to the different text structures and add the specific language, or signal words, that clue them into the text structure. Next to the T-chart, for example, Gina has recorded Murad and Wen’s clue from the text: “There were many reasons.”

For a new chapter that is structured chronologically, students organize notes around timelines and explore time-related signal words. Another chapter is organized around defi nitions and examples, and the class generates tree-charts and finds signal words and punctuation that signal embedded definitions or examples. For a chapter that compares two feudal empires, the class tries out Venn diagrams and identifies signal words such as similarly, in comparison, and by contrast.

Over time, students’ previewing and predicting becomes more purposeful and reliable. They take more useful notes, knowing they will need them for tests and writing assignments and projects.

Figure 25.16 in Hani’s chemistry textbook is a technical drawing that shows a cross-section of a typical geological formation in which natural gas and oil deposits are found. Descending strata of sandstone, shale, limestone, gas, oil, and water are pictured. In the drawing, two oil derricks are also pictured, sitting on the sandstone surface. The well pipe of one derrick reaches down into the gas deposit; the pipe of the other derrick reaches even deeper, into oil.

Hani remarked first of all that as she read her chemistry textbook, the reference to Figure 25.16 was unclear: “I thought it said figure something, of all these different numbers [25.16]. Now I’m not sure what it is.”

When prompted to find and look at the figure, which she had ignored, Hani responded, “They’re describing what they all are. Each step, like they’re saying, maybe this is sandstone, or something like that.”

In science, figures can display a conceptual model rather than represent a real entity, and the making of models is a key literacy skill in the discipline. Hani described the model of an oil derrick on various strata of earth in Figure 25.16 as a place she could visit: “Let’s say if I got there, if I was there, in real life, whatever, I would know what it is, what the machine is, how it works, how the oil and gas, where they’re at.”

From Reading for Understanding, pp 254-258