Knowing how different texts are organised is very important for reading and writing.
Organisational features of texts include:
Surveying these features before reading helps students gain a general overview of the key ideas of the text, and an understanding of where key information is located. This helps activate a student’s schema and helps them form hypotheses about texts. It is particularly important at secondary school because many texts are not organised sequentially.
When students understand the hierarchical nature of organisational features of a text they may also be better able to separate main ideas from extraneous detail.
One powerful way to show students how an effective reader uses organisational features is by modelling a ‘think aloud’. For example:
“My purpose in reading this newspaper is to get an overview of some news I might be interested in. The first thing I do is scan all the headings. Usually the bigger the headline, the more important the story is. By reading the headline, the photo and the caption I can quickly tell what this story is about... I decided to stop reading it after the first paragraph because that is where the most important information in a news story is and I only wanted to get a general idea of what had happened.”
Read more about how understanding text features benefits reading comprehension
Examples of skim reading tasks:
Read an example of an Assessment Resource Bank task about identifying text features of a scientific article.
Teaching about text forms can help students understand how text is structured and why. Teachers need to be careful, however, to be flexible about the features in a text forms as authentic text forms are often mixed.
Learning about organisational features of text also provides an important interface between reading and writing. For example, students can use the organisational features of texts they read to provide a framework for making their own written summaries of the text (McDonald et al., 2008).
Research in writing by Wray and Lewis (1997) shows that when students understand the structure of texts they have to write, they are more able to generate ideas and to organise those ideas coherently and logically (Ministry of Education, 2004, p. 131).
Learn more about writing frames.
Important text forms include:
Instructional tools
Graphic organisers and structured overview are instructional tools used to help students think about and use text patterns and structures.
Published on: 08 Jan 2018
