Text Forms
What you think, you can say. What you say, you can write. What you write, you can read.
Why Text Forms?
Over the last decades, reading comprehension has changed its emphasis from rote and automatized learning of strategies to a focus on developing active readers who can flexibly and adaptively apply varied skills and strategies, as well as knowledge of texts, to making meaning of a wide variety of texts (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991).
In recent decades there has been an influx of research and practice with respect to developing students' knowledge of text structures and key characteristics as a means to facilitate their comprehension of texts. "Readers of all ages must be aware of text structures if they are to be most successful" (Meyer, 2003). The structure or organization of the text is the arrangement of ideas and the relationships among the ideas (Armbruster, 2004). Readers who are unaware of the text structures are at a disadvantage because they do not approach reading with any type of reading plan or background knowledge of features that may be helpful as they make meaning of the ideas and information in texts (Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980). Whereas readers who are familiar with text structures and their key features are better tooled to navigate the ideas and information, already having a sense of what to expect and pay attention to.
And so in addition to developing their ability to recognize patterns at the level of words and sentences, students need to learn to notice recognizable patterns in whole texts. These include text features, elements of style, text structures, as well as techniques and conventions when interacting with texts.
Learning to draw consciously on their understanding of text features, text forms, their purposes, features and patterns helps students not only to create different types of oral and written texts, but also to make meaning from texts in a range of media, including print and electronic texts.
Indeed, building students’ knowledge about text forms by analyzing and discussing different forms will help them to understand the purpose, organization (framework and features), and structure of texts, and will assist them to more easily access information in texts.
Resources for grades 1 to 8
Explanatory (expository) forms of texts:
To access various resources to suppport the learning and instruction of procedural types of texts,
click HERE for grades 4 to 8
Opinion and Persuasive types of texts
To access various resources to suppport the learning and instruction:
Click HERE .for grades 1 to 4 Opinion-focused texts (in support of the grades 1-4 OCDSB Long Range Plans)
Click HERE. for grades 5 to 8 Persuasive-focused texts (in support of the grades 5-8 OCDSB Long Range Plans)