Content Area Reading
Chapter 10: Studying Text
As educators, the use of texts within our classrooms is extremely important in helping students learn our content area materials. We use text everyday in our own personal lives and it is important for us as teachers to help students use texts correctly and in a beneficial way. By creating and effectively using reading strategies in your classroom, you will be increasing the amount of information students can process and gain from your lessons.
In order for students to even begin learning these strategies, there must be an emphasis put on different text structure and how to use them. These features are important building blocks that will enable students to find important information in an understandable way. External texts structures in textbooks and novels are the features of the preface, table of contents, appendixes, and indexes. When students are aware of these book highlights, they will be able to find crucial information in a way that is less time consuming. They aids are especially helpful when searching for information in a 500 page textbook. There are also the internal text structures, which is the texts in which the author tries to explain and describe different concepts to the reader. This format is most often seen in informational texts. By being able to identify this structure, a reader will be more easily be able to pick out what information is more or less important.
A very helpful tool that should be used by students when reading a text is a type of graphic organizer. These can act as visual displays that help students grasp important information and ideas. By writing down these different ideas, students are able to interact with and further understand what is being displayed in the book. These organizers can also be helpful in creating other strategies, such as writing summaries. The students will be able to use these notes in order to portray what they felt were the main concepts that the author was trying to convey. By reiterating their original ideas, they are able to expand their thoughts in a way that might have been much more difficult before.
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