Talk about a detailed chapter – Tompkins’s chapter 9 goes into intricate depth about text factors (narrative genres, story elements, and narrative devices), informational book text factors (nonfiction genres, expository text structures, and nonfiction features), and poetic text factors (book formats, poetic forms, and poetic devices). What particularly interested me, however, was the thought that as teachers teach students about the text factors, the students’ comprehension of the text as a whole increases (p. 311). After considering the thought longer, however, it makes sense that spending time on these factors leads to a better understanding of literacy because these steps are showing children the many different ways to look at their books. It’s as if they give them a new set of eyes to look through when reading a piece of literature – sharper eyes.
In my own experience in the classroom, it seems as if the students merely read to read and fail to truly grasp the meaning behind their literature. We give them a social studies assignment, consisting of reading a 3-page chapter and answering questions at the end of it, and they cannot focus long enough to truly understand and respond. To take Tompkins’s advice, I think it would be a great idea to use think-alouds to “help students internalize the information and apply it when they’re reading and writing.” (p.312)