Exploring Text Structure

It’s been a while since I felt like I’ve done anything new, but spring is kind of here, and with it comes restlessness that needs novelty. I don’t know if this counts as novelty, but I’ve been excited by the thinking I’ve seen the last couple of days in my classes.

Our latest reading unit is on text structure, which, for some reason, I just couldn’t get my head around. I understand that it is how text is organized, and that there seem to be more text structures in nonfiction than fiction, at least for fourth graders, but I don’t think I could really see why spending a lot of time with this topic made sense. In order to try and get more out of this, I reread the structure chapters in Falling in Love with Close Reading, and I decided to make a checklist for my students to use. I took an opinion piece about school uniforms that students were supposed to read, and copied that piece along with a structure checklist, and gave it to my students. Then we proceeded to read the text together.

As we went through the piece, students could see that the point of the writing was to convince the reader that school uniforms were great. Then we continued to read, finding examples of claims, counterpoints, and descriptions. Finding and naming what the writer was really doing in the piece was interesting to me; I’ve done similar things in the past, but I liked breaking down the structure even more specifically. Students color-coded the different structures, underlining each in a different color,  so that when we finished, it was clear that in this opinion piece, the writer used claims more than any other structure to get his point across.

The past couple of days, we’ve spent reading a book called Farm Workers Unite, which tells about Cesar Chavez and his work starting the United Farm Workers union. We did the same thing with the structure checklist, reading the introduction, and then a chapter about the life of migrant workers. For that chapter, I had the kids work together to “code” the text structures. I then asked them to identify the structure used the most often, and to tell why they thought they writer used that the most for that chapter. It didn’t take long for the kids to notice that it was almost all cause and effect writing. The hard part (but for me, the most interesting part) was thinking about why the author used that structure. One student pointed out that it was very different from the introduction, which led us to chat more about why that would be.  I pointed back to the title of the book, and then a number of kids got more animated. “The writer has to show how bad it was for the migrant workers, so that he can explain why they decided to unite and go on strike.”

I’m not going to read every nonfiction piece with a structure checklist nearby. But as an adult reader, it’s made me more conscious of looking at how writers organize their writing. Now my goal is to be more purposeful in helping kids see why writers choose the structures they use to best communicate their thinking, and maybe it will transfer over to student writing. It’s worth a shot!