Analyzing Text	Introduction	-
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As a reader you encounter many different materials that you either want to, or have to, read. You may look forward to reading your morning newspaper or to each new issue of your favorite magazine. You may eagerly check the New York Times Best Seller List for leads on good books to read, or run out to get Oprah's latest book selection. On the "have to " side you may read articles in professional journals in areas you are studying or you may read an apartment lease before signing it. From your own experience you know that written materials are not alike in content, structure, or purpose and that you have to be able to understand a wide variety of texts. You may not realize it, but your ability to comprehend different text types is in part related to your knowledge of text structure, that is, how the author constructed and organized the material. Your students also have to be able to understand a variety of texts with the most common being stories, especially in the lower grades, and subject matter textbooks that become increasingly difficult and important to their success in higher grades. Students who struggle to understand what they read often do not have sufficient awareness of the way written materials are organized or the cues to look for to figure out patterns in text. These problems complicate their reading comprehension efforts. Therefore, it is important that instruction in reading comprehension for students with reading disabilities includes explicit instruction in text structure. This module, Analyzing Texts to Enable Comprehension, will address this aspect of teaching reading comprehension and provide the information you need to assist students with text analysis as a tool to facilitate their constructing meaning from print. It will teach you about the structures present in different types of texts in two broad categories, narrative and expository, and will suggest ways of teaching struggling readers how to perform text analysis with the ultimate goal of students' using text analysis strategically. In the first lesson of this module we will provide you with information that cuts across all text types. In the subsequent lessons we will focus on narrative and expository texts, respectively. In all three lessons we will remind you of the importance of integrating work in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, which we have described in earlier lessons as maintaining language connections. Also germane to all three lessons is research-validated methodology in teaching strategies. Since the goal is to have students use text analysis independently when they read, you will need to apply what you have learned in previous lessons about strategic instruction, especially in Lesson 2 of Module III which is specifically on that topic. If, for some reason, you haven't yet studied Module III, it would be a good idea to do that before beginning this module. Lesson 1, Understanding Text Structures, will explain the relationship of text structure to reading comprehension by describing three important aspects of text structure that affect reading comprehension: (1) the organizational pattern of the material itself and the clarity of its presentation, (2) students' awareness of that organization, and (3) students strategic use of text organization. It will describe text characteristics, including genre, content, and organizational patterns, along with specific recommendations for teaching these features to students with reading disabilities. We will remind you about common elements of strategic instruction that need to be incorporated in your teaching in order to help students use text analysis independently. However, this information won't substitute for the more comprehensive approach taken in Lesson 2 of Module III. Lesson 2, Narrative Structure, as you might suspect, focuses on narratives. We will provide you with a more detailed description of narrative texts with a special emphasis on what specific characteristics require of readers. You will learn the problems struggling readers have with narratives and techniques to help them. Specifically, we'll explain how to use the organizational pattern, called story grammar, as a tool for narrative text analysis and offer suggestions to teach this kind of analysis. We will also give you specific information on strategic instruction in this context. This lesson builds on information you already learned in the first lesson of this module and on prior knowledge of strategic instruction. Lesson 3, Expository Structure, is similar to Lesson 2 in purpose, but different in content because of the differences between narrative and expository text. So, in it you will learn how to help students with reading disabilities use expository structures strategically to comprehend these text types. We will present a detailed description of expository texts, which are more varied than narratives. Whereas in Lesson 1 we present story grammar to help you understand the organizational pattern of narratives, in this lesson we will give you several text grammars that capture the varied patterns typically used in expository texts. You will also learn that well-presented, or "considerate," expository text uses a variety of structural, or visual, cues to make the organization clear. We will explain the specific problems encountered by students with reading disabilities when they try to understand expository text and suggest how to approach the teaching of strategic use of expository structure to facilitate students' reading comprehension, once again building on what you know about strategic instruction. Because of the way this module has been constructed, you really need to study Lesson 1 first. It will be a springboard for the other two lessons. If you chose to do Lesson 3 before Lesson 2 that would not pose a problem for you. However, we don't recommend studying either one of those lessons before Lesson 1.