My Blog | Sunday Cummins

When we preview a text (or source) to make predictions about its content, recognizing clues about the text’s structure can launch us into making helpful predictions – predictions that can help us activate background knowledge and aid us in setting a clear purpose for reading and determining what is important in a source.

Kid-friendly tool to use while predicting

Below is a kid-friendly list of text structures that you might share with students before they preview a text and make predictions. (If you need to introduce these structures explicitly, check out the first in a three-part series I wrote about teaching students how to identify a text’s structure(s).)

What predicting for text structure looks like

If you checked out the title of the ReadWords.com article entitled “Keeping Turtles in the Dark,” you might infer from the title that there is some sort of problem. If you continue previewing by checking out the first heading – “Funding boosts efforts to cut light pollution along Florida’s nesting beaches,” you might confirm there is a problem (“light pollution”) and that there might also be a solution (cutting the “light pollution”). Then it seems like the author will be using a problem-solution text structure. Just this simple step of using a text structure to make a prediction will help you set a clear purpose for reading (i.e., What is the problem for the turtles? What is the solution?) as you begin navigating the content of that article.

Here’s another example. If you read the title of the NEWSELA article entitled “Early human ancestors used their hands to both climb trees and make tools” and asked yourself which text structure the author is going to use, you might wonder if it’s going to be a descriptive text structure. If you continue previewing key features in the text, you’ll notice the following headings:

studying bones
prehistoric relatives
using hands and wrists

If you say to yourself, “I think this is a descriptive text structure” and ask yourself, as you read the headings, “What is the author going to describe?” you might surmise from these headings (and the first few words under each) that the author is going to describe how scientists have studied ancient bones, what they’ve learned from specific fossils they’ve studied, and what they’ve learned. This is a lot of helpful information moving forward. You can set a clear purpose for reading each section: How can I describe the work of scientists who study bones? How can I describe specific specimens of bones that have been studied? How can I describe how prehistoric peoples used their hands and wrists?

CAUTION: A text might have multiple structures 😉

CAUTION: Some texts have MICRO-TEXT STRUCTURES. As stated in a previous blog, readers continue to make and adjust predictions as they read. Encourage students to notice when a section or a special feature (e.g., diagram, map, chart) appears to have it’s own text structure. This will help them make sense of that part of the text and relate its importance to the text as a whole as well.

A BIG SUGGESTION – Integrate text structure into every preview & predict

I’ve been trying to do this and I frequently forget & fail ;). However, the more I think about it and try it out with students, the more convinced I am that this is a helpful strategy – and that I need to get my act together and just get into the routine of doing it with students!!! I’ve even revised the three-phase plan to include a reminder for when you and I are planning. (For those of you who see me teach this fall, keep me honest!!!)