Kate Harris

When we think about understanding text structure, we often relate this directly to writing. But it's also really important to think about text structure when we're thinking about reading and in particular reading comprehension. In today's podcast episode, we're actually going to have a look at why it's so important to understand text structure in relation to reading comprehension. My name is Kate Harris, and today I'm once again joined by Luke Nolan, and he's become quite a regular on our podcast episodes. So welcome back again, Luke.

Luke Nolan

Thanks, Kate. It's good to be here.

Kate Harris

Do you want to start us off today by talking about well, why is it important to understand text structure?

Luke Nolan

Okay, so I'll be talking about some strategies a bit later on for supporting EAL/D reading comprehension by focusing on understanding text structure. And the aim really is to develop students text structure awareness, which is their conscious awareness of the way that information is organised in a text and the signals that provide cues to this organisation. So there are understandings and strategies I'll talk about here that are really cornerstones of good teaching practice and good EAL/D practice and have many benefits for EAL/D learners in different modes. But today I really want to focus on how we can use text structure awareness to support reading comprehension in particular. So when you look at comprehension assessments, for example, the reading questions from NAPLAN, you'll see how understanding the chunks of information in a text and how they will relate to each other is really fundamental to being able to engage with the text meaning. What's more, there are plenty of questions that specifically require skills, like recognising the purpose and overall structure of the text, identifying the main idea and supporting details or identifying reference chains. And these are skills that are all part of text structure awareness. Of course, our goals for students go far beyond simply successfully answering test questions, and we want to develop readers who engage creatively and critically with meaning. But literal comprehension is at the foundation for this. And looking at evidence from test responses can give us a good starting point.

Kate Harris

Before we get stuck into some of those specific strategies, Luke, can you break down a few of the key words here? So what is a text? What is text structure, and also why is this knowledge important for reading?

Luke Nolan

So when I talk about texts here, I'm using the functional grammar definition of a text as language that's used in context and achieves a specific social purpose. So we can group texts into genres also known as text types or types of text. And each genre has three things in common has a social purpose, for example, to inform or explain, overall structure or organisation and language features that are typical of the genre. So this definition of text is still pretty broad, but for today's discussion we'll be talking more about the types of text that students are expected to read and engage with in school. If we're asked to list some of the genres that are familiar to us from schooling, we might mention narratives, explain expositions, explanations, discussions and so on. Each of these has an expected structure, and the structure helps the text achieve its purpose. For example, an exposition where the purpose is to support a thesis typically presents and supports arguments, one at a time in stages of the text where each stage is a paragraph. So within these stages there are smaller chunks of meaning that we call phases. So for this example, the exposition would include an introduction paragraph, then a number of arguments, which are the stages and each stage of the argument, would be made up of phases including a point context, evidence, elaboration and so on. One of the tricky things about text types or genres, especially as you look at text for readers in later primary and high school, is that we often have what's called a hybrid texts, so they're made up of a number of other text types. A good example is a scientific lab report, which is written to describe and analyse an experiment that's been carried out. So in a lab report, you can find a number of stages that could otherwise be mini texts on their own. So including a procedure for the method, a recount for the results and a discussion or explanation of the results. Each of those has its own particular structure and language features, and they're all put together into this hybrid text that combines all those different structures together.

So we've talked about the text as a whole, the stages of the text and the phases within each stage, and these are some of the different levels of text structure. We can also think about common patterns that parts of the text usually the phases tend to make when they fit together logically, depending on their purpose. This is when we're talking about discourse, structures or rhetorical organisation of the text. So some common examples of these, uh, that I'm sure everyone would recognise these are all these rhetorical patterns. They include description, definition, cause and effect, classification, comparison and contrast, problem and analysis. And there are more, but they're pretty easily recognisable to us as experienced readers. Understanding these patterns and the language that signals them is really important for comprehension. So it's important to remember that, like everything else about language, all of these structures I've been talking about are really bound up with culture. Different cultures have different taken for granted ways of organising perceptions and expectations, and these are part of our background knowledge of language structures or our formal schemata. So just to give you an example of something that I've noticed, which reflects this difference across cultures and languages at a paragraph level. Marking essays from high school students I've often found that students from some language backgrounds who are in the earlier phases of learning English can tend to structure a paragraph by giving details that build up to a point, then giving the main point at the end of the paragraph. It's not the expected structure in English, but what the students are doing is structuring their writing in a way that anticipates the expectations of the reader based on the structure of that text type in their home language. So the example there is about writing, but this still gives us some insight into students text structure awareness, which is a key component of fluent reading. Text structure awareness can be understood simply as how we keep track of and make connections between ideas and details in texts. While we're reading we're always constantly referring to this. A great deal of the time this process is unconscious and automatic, and it's one of quite a few processes that fluent readers coordinate rapidly and simultaneously about every two seconds while we're reading. So we're constantly doing this in the background while we read referring to text structure, and it's interesting if a text becomes more challenging and we have to then focus more conscious attention on it we actually then start to make deliberate use of and knowledge of text structure. So we slow down and look for certain things. So we use text structure awareness when we recognise the higher level patterns of organisation in the text, the important ideas and the language that signals the text organisation.

There's good evidence that explicit teaching of text structure that teaches students to engage with texts in a systematic way has a positive impact on reading comprehension and recall. The research also shows that text structure awareness is most effectively taught when integrating reading and writing, and the text structure awareness instruction should not be isolated or one off. So if we want to improve comprehension for students, we need to teach tech structure in a way that's ongoing, systematic and applied to every text that we read and write.

Kate Harris

You just mentioned at the end there, Luke, about the importance of teaching text structure awareness explicitly and that it shouldn't be isolated or a one off. So what could this look like when we're thinking about explicitly teaching this for our EAL/D learners?

Luke Nolan

So we know that comprehension depends on the reader's understanding of text structure, and we know that these structures are predictable, but also that they are interwoven with language and culture. So students from different language backgrounds all start with different expectations of text structure and different knowledge that they bring to the reading in English. So we need to explicitly teach knowledge of English text structures, the language that realises those text structures as well, breaking this down a bit. We need to build students’ knowledge of the different genres or types of text and how, how they're structured. Also, how to recognise the main ideas, the supporting details and those common rhetorical patterns like cause and effect, for example, how to recognise sentence level structures and connections across sentences in between them and all of this involves developing metalanguage for describing text structure. So we need to work with the students to build a shared language so that we can talk about the text structure using words like cohesion, text connectives, referring words and so on. And this metalanguage helps equip the students to notice and use all of these structural features deliberately when they're engaging with the text meaning.

Kate Harris

There's quite a few points that you highlighted there in terms of what we need to do to explicitly teach. But what strategies can teachers used to be able to implement these?

Luke Nolan

So people often think about reading strategies divided up into before reading, during reading and after reading. And I might use that structure here, so we'll talk about before reading strategies first for teaching text structure awareness. One good before reading practice is simply when you're presenting any new text, preview and identify the structure. This is where you can get the text up on the whiteboard and have a good teacher led conversation around the text and jointly annotate it to mark its structural features. So you're thinking aloud here and talking around the text, and that's what's important. Uh, it might sound something like this: So this text is a causal explanation. We've seen one of these before, haven't we? Right. There are two stages here. The first stage is the identification, and the second stage is the explanation sequence. So we can be putting labels on, um, at this point as well. And we could look at the explanations sequence and see the cause and effect highlighting the cause in red who can see where the effect is? Right. Let's highlight the effect and draw a line to connect the cause and effect. So here you're building up the students metalanguage by using an authentic text in context, which is related to the curriculum that they're engaged in. And so it's all situated in context, and you're developing this knowledge of how the structure really works to achieve that purpose. Over time, you teach this text awareness following a controlled, guided independent sequence. So at first you're giving the students all the information. But gradually you're handing over and they can recognise the text and say, for example, Oh, so this looks like a causal explanation and I can expect to find an identification stage, followed by a sequence of causes and effects, and I need to be on the lookout for verbs and collectives that show cause and effect relationships. So that's when the students are sort of internalised that, and they're able to apply that knowledge. As students gradually developed their knowledge of text structure, we can support them to practise using their knowledge before they read in order to make informed predictions about the content of the text.

Understanding text structure gives a good framework to teach skimming and scanning, so students are skimming and scanning strategically, making use of their knowledge of how the text works when they look for key information. I know that I've certainly found this to be something that's really useful to teach as part of a package of examination response skills for senior students in high school, where they have to very quickly look at an unseen text, connect that with their background knowledge of how similar texts they've encountered have been structured. And then that will help them to know where to look for certain information, especially if they're under time pressure. Now, when we teach text structure, one useful strategy before reading can be to use a skeleton text. So this is an overall outline of the text showing the stages and some signalling words or discourse markers but with key information missing, with most of the information missing except for the skeleton or the overall structure of the text. So this can help students to work on predicting the texts content, and so they're noticing the text structure. But they're also learning to deliberately use their knowledge of the text structure to anticipate what's going to be in the text. You might have heard of a similar pre reading strategy called a structured overview, and this is where you present a graphic organiser with keywords and concepts for the topic. So if your structured overview shows how the text is organised into parts and how those parts relate to each other, then engaging with this can be a good way of developing text structure awareness. And there are a whole lot of graphic organiser options for visualising those different discourse patterns like cause and effect that I mentioned before.

So I've talked about some before reading activities, thinking about during reading or after reading, often when you're re reading a text. One of my favourite activities, which is a bit of a go to, is called semantic mapping. So the aim of semantic mapping is for students to see the connections between concepts in the text by highlighting groups of words and drawing lines between them. It's pretty simple, but it can be pretty effective for the students and I found also for teachers- it can help them to see what the actual demands of a text are in terms of making connections between these different ideas. So here's how you do semantic mapping: after you've read the text the first time for understanding, you reread and identify so highlight or underline the participants in the text. So that means the noun groups that tell us who or what the text is about. It can be useful to use different colours to keep track of the participants, and you could use this as an opportunity to identify different types of participant as well. So you could say, Look for the non-living, uh, and living participants, the concrete and abstract participants, every day or technical and so on. This is a good time to build or consolidate knowledge of noun groups and how they build up the field of the text. So the next step, once you've highlighted those groups of participants, is you circle the pronouns and referring words, and you draw lines between those circle pronouns and the noun groups that they refer to. The next step is you circle the pronouns and you draw lines between the circle pronouns and the noun groups that they refer to, so the text will become covered in lines, joining the noun groups and the pronouns. And this is a good way of making these connections visible and helping students to visualise and understand how word groups and ideas are connected within the text. So I like semantic mapping because it's pretty simple and easy to get started with. But once you start, you'll notice how complex these referring relationships are in the text. And semantic mapping can give students and teachers a good insight into how readers use these connections to construct meaning. Now there are plenty of other after reading activities you can use for text structure awareness. For example, you could revisit a graphic organiser that you used before reading. Uh, you could use this to organise summary notes and reflect on how the writer has used text structure. To organise the care information, you could use matching activities where you match topic sentences with paragraphs or main ideas for supporting details. You could use text marking activities, for example, where you highlight and label keywords that signal the text structure. You could use close activities where you might ask students to fill in, for example, text connectives and you could also use a good one is sequencing activities where you ask students to reorder a jumble to paragraph or text and then justify the decisions with reference to text structure. So all of these activities really shine when you organise them. So students can work in groups and have plenty of structured talk around the text where they're using metalanguage and noticing not just the parts of the text, but how they fit together and how they work together to achieve the purpose. This goes back to quality teaching and good EAL/D pedagogy in general, really, and remembering that our roles as teachers are to apprentice students into these literacy practises by teaching explicitly, modelling and planning plenty of structured practise so that students gradually become independent in using their knowledge of text structures to read, to learn and communicate effectively. Just to sum up some of the main points that I've covered today, the text structure awareness is really a key component in effective reading. It's something that we're doing all the time, as experienced readers automatically. But when we come across more challenging texts, we tend to slow down and use our text structure awareness deliberately as part of our repertoire of reading strategies. So also, we need to remember that EAL/D learners bring with them different understandings of text structure based on their literacy experiences from their home language. And so we need to teach text structure awareness in a way that is explicit, ongoing and integrated with the curriculum so that students eventually develop independent mastery and they can apply their knowledge of text structure awareness to learn and communicate.

Kate Harris

As always, Luke, you've given us lots of interesting things to think about. And you really highlighted why it is so important to think about text structure, not just when we're thinking about writing, but also to explicitly teach it when we're looking at reading. So thank you for joining us here again today.

Luke Nolan

No, thank you. And this is something that I believe is really important and valuable for teachers and our students. And I hope that everyone takes something away from this.

Kate Harris

I'm sure they will. And thank you everyone for joining us for this episode of the EAL/D conversations podcast.

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