Book’s Blog 7

Chapter  4        Coping with Academic Texts & Textbooks

As I pointed that chapter 3 goes into a detailed description of academic registers and cultural influences on discourse. This chapter and the next three chapters get to the practical issues of how to guide students to read academic textbooks, write for academic purposes, and learn academic vocabulary. This chapter addresses the variations in the language used in various content areas. I enjoyed reading how they examine the characteristics of content-area texts & some problems with the textbooks. They follow Fang’s identification of the expository language found in the texts. Fang (2008) categorizes 4 unique features of the language:

a)     Expository texts contain many technical terms.

b)     The language is abstract.

c)     Academic texts are dense.

d)     They are more authoritative than oral or written narrative texts.

From these features, no texts can be completely objective, and the presented information is not accurate in most cases.

It is interesting discussing about contradictories in textbook language. The Freemans states that “the style of writing varies considerably, even within one textbook” (p. 74) and this variation in style is common in school textbooks for many reasons. One of them is that readers have to adjust their reading to match the language styles.  Another reason is that these textbooks do not provide clear models of how students should write.  They list several problems with textbooks, for each content area, such as:

-        Textbooks are superficial, even though they are very long.

-        They are hard to read, they are essentially reference books.

-         They are badly designed.

-        They are authoritarian.

Within these problems, they talk about the dryness of these textbooks, no stories, many facts, no updates, errors, the process of choosing them, the cost … etc depending on Daniels & Zemelan (2004).   

To cope with textbooks, the author suggest to introduce informational texts in the lower grades.  Furthermore, secondary teachers should supplement textbooks with informational texts that students can read, and they should teach them strategies for reading expository & academic texts. They need to scaffold instruction that supports them in reading texts in different subject areas as Dr. Pence suggested to do in the history content. There are 5 causes for including more informational reading:

1-     Informational text is the key to success in schools.

2-     Most reading done outside school is informational.

3-     Many students prefer nonfiction.

4-     These texts often relate to students’ interests.  

5-     They help students to build important background they need for different contents.

The Freemans argue that engagement in reading is a key to academic success. They offer the “Engagement Model of Instruction” by Guthrie & Davis (2003) who identify 6 practices that build motivation and promote reading engagement:

1. Knowledge goals.
2. Real-world interactions.
3. Many interesting texts.
4. Support for student choice.
5. Direct strategy instruction (includes 10 strategies).
6. Collaborative activities.

There are several challenges involved in finding ways to engagement learners in reading content-area materials. The Freemans offer 2 strategies for helping ELLs & SELs, who struggle with reading, to engage with texts that represent different academic genres:

A)   Read & retell.

http://www.myread.org/monitoring_read.htm

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+power+of+read+and+retell.-a0228435388

B)    Text analysis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_analytics

Both are tools for understanding academic genres. Both scaffold academic language & enable students to build academic language proficiency.      

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Fang’s paper @

Guthrie & Davis’ article @