Reading Strategies in the High School Curriculum: Module 1

Module One: Informational vs. Narrative Text

Throughout our elementary learning we are taught to read for fluency, comprehension, and understanding. Too often, students are not taught how to differentiate between informational text and narrative text. Furthermore, students are not taught how to extract neccessary information from both types of text. It is imparative that students not only come in contact with both types of text in any academic discipline, but that they understand how to gain information from each type of text.

Before you continue with this unit, please answer the following questions:

What are some examples of narrative text?
What are some examples of informational text?
What type of text is most commonly used in your academic discipline?
What problems could arrise when students are not able to differentiate between narrative and informational text?

Module Objectives:

Students will be able to distinguish between informational text and narrative text.
- Students will be able to extract relavent material from both informational and narrative text.
  - Students will develop a list of reasons for student difficulty in extracting valuable information from both types of text.

What is narrative text?

Narrative text is text that tells a story or experience. Narrative text, as it sounds, contains a narrative or story. Narrative text is most notably utalized in the humanities (i.e. English, History). Narrative text, generally, contains a lesson and holds the reader's attention through explicit detail. The text relays an experience to the reader, and bases it's emphasis on making the experience vivid as opposed to giving directions or direct information.

What is informational text?

Informational text is text that gives direction or direct information. Informational text seeks to relay knowledge from writer to recipient in the most direct way possible. This form of text does not concern with relaying an experience, but seeks to teach the lesson in a simple, less personal manner. Informational text is, most generally, utalized in the science and mathematics classes, but may be used, to some degree, in the humanities as well.

Before you continue, please answer the following questions on the discussion page:

Have you had experiences with both informational and narrative text? If so, what were they?
Have you incorporated both informational and narrative text in your curriculum? When, how?

Lost in Translation:

Often times, students beleive they have comprehended a text by simply reading it. If, however, at the end of the reading, the student is not able to relay thier information in ther own words, or form a conclusion based on the information given, they have lost meaning in translation. Please read the following text and develop a conclusion:

1. Suppose that on an average day, you spend 1/5 of your homework time on math and 1/2 of your homework time on literature. The time for these subjects totals 1 3/4 hours. How much time do you spend on your homework?

Please post your conclusion in the discussion area now.

The first thing you most likely considered is whether the information was telling you a story, or if it was giving you information in order to solve with an equation. After concluding that the textual type was informational, you most likely began to translate the information from its written textual form to a numerical equation. From there, depending on your mathamatical skills, you attempted to solve the problem. You may have noticed, however, that you had difficulties translating the information from written text to a situation where you could solve the problem. This alludes to the fact that you may not have fully understood the problem, or situation. The next two units will introduce you to reading strategies, and allow you to develop a lesson plan to encourage your students to use active reading strategies to aid in decoding and understanding text.

Please answer the following questions in the discussion area. Please feel free to comment upon the thoughts of others:

Did you have difficulties solving the word problem? Why/Why not?
Why do you believe that so many people have difficulties with word problems?
Do you recall having trouble understanding text in school? If so, how did you learn to work through this difficulty?

Once you have posted your answers, you may procede to Module Two: Module_2

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