The book matters! Choosing complex narrative texts to support literary discussion (original) (raw)

Overview The Common Core state standards call for a consistent emphasis on increasingly complex texts for all students throughout the grades. Instruction with complex text is important for fostering robust reading skills, acquiring academic vocabulary, building content knowledge, and eventually, preparing students for college and career (Shanahan, 2002. Hiebert, 2012. Gomez, 2008. Liben, 2010, et al.). Furthermore, a growing body of research suggests that instruction with increasingly complex texts within the study of a single topic can lead to greater gains in reading rate, vocabulary acquisition, and comprehension (Adams, 2009. Morgan, 2009. O'Connor, 2010. Williams, 2009.). Essentially, as students learn more about a topic they can read more difficult texts on that topic, and if given support, improve their foundational reading and comprehension skills as well. Key strategies for teaching students to navigate complex texts successfully (such as close reading, rereading, and defining words from context) are embedded in nearly every lesson in the modules. Still, all students—particularly those who have difficulty reading—can benefit from additional work with complex texts. Ideally, this additional work should focus on the same texts that students are currently working with during the module lessons, providing extra practice and support. The purpose of this resource is to offer general suggestions to consider for planning both guided small group work and differentiated center work that helps students deepen their understanding of the complex texts within the 60-minute module lessons. The activities in this resource are organized to give students practice in navigating four key aspects of text complexity: meaning, structure, knowledge, and language. • Suggestions in the Meaning section focus on skills such as understanding layers of meaning, identifying the overall purpose of the writing, locating main ideas and supporting details, and summarizing. • Suggestions in the Structure activities can help students to explore text features, organization, sentence structure, or genre in order to better understand a text. • Suggestions in the Knowledge section help students to build a knowledge base using research and other texts. • Suggestions in the Language section include vocabulary and sentence structure activities. When focused on a specific complex text, activities in any or all of these four areas can help students to better understand that text and to develop strategies for approaching complexity in new texts as well. The activities in this resource likely are familiar to many teachers. They are not intended to introduce new pedagogy; rather, they are meant to spark ideas about how teachers can apply what we already know about teaching reading of complex texts. This resource includes guidelines for creating and organizing text-specific activities, ideas for tailoring tasks to meet students' needs, and a sample five-day schedule. The ideas included in this resource can be used to plan center activities for an additional literacy block that occurs alongside the module lessons and also provides guidance for planning whole group instruction in areas where it is determined that the whole class needs additional support. Teachers who already have such an additional literacy block can use these suggestions to focus and refine instruction that takes place during that time.