Looking at this
month’s Spotlight Common Core Standard #5, you begin to see the complexity of
our new notion of reading. As mentioned before, our new conceptualization
of reading moves beyond just “what the text says” and “what the text suggests”
to “how the text is constructed” and “how the construction of the text affects
the meaning.” This requires a great deal of analysis and thought.
It first implies that students understanding the literal and inferential
meaning of a text, and now must examine it for how the author put it together.
The fifth
standard reads, “Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific
sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section,
chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.”
For the most
part, I believe this standard will belong to the realms of English and Language
Arts classes, where the close reading of texts is more of the predominant
focus. That’s not to say that it can’t be taught in other disciplines, it
just acknowledges that doing so in Math class would be a little more difficult
and perhaps a little less relevant when the predominant focus there should be
other aspects of reading: finding important details, reading for purpose
etc.
For those of you still
interested, here are some ways to address the fifth standard in your reading
activities. First, you can ask students to consider how
authors organize their texts to express their ideas.
The most common forms of organization include Chronological Order, Order
of Importance or Size, Cause / Effect, Problem / Solution, Comparison /
Contrast, and Spatial (organized by space or geography). I generally tell
students that knowing the organization gives us insight not only into how the
text is constructed, but allows us to remember and make meaning of texts a
little better.
Second, you can
ask student to think about the “author’s moves”. This is the new buzz
phrase that literacy teachers use to get readers to think about how a writer
makes choices to express ideas. These choices are “moves”. So in
other words, an author’s move might be their choice to include a vivid or
personal example to support an argument. Or perhaps, the author’s move
was to describe something in rich detail, in order to get readers to mentally
visualize something. What are the “moves” an author makes in constructing the
text?
Third, you can ask students to instead think
about the impact of certain choices. In other words, what is the impact
of including a particular detail or idea on the reader? What might a
reader think or feel because the author included this sentence, section, or concept?
Essentially, it is the same question as before, only you (the teacher)
come at it from a different angle-- that of the reader versus that of the
writer.
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