Fiction vs Non-Fiction

As a teacher that works primarily with non-fiction within my content area, I found that making a graphic organizer that helps distinguish between the text features and structures within that genre very easy to put together. I used the textbook I use in class and identified different features that would help a student gain comprehension from the text. I broke down the reading into the three parts: before, during and after to help a student practice metacognitive strategies. I also scaffolded the writing portions with sentence stems and questions to think about while reading. A feature that will help a student learning to speak English would be the text features such as titles, pictures, maps, charts, glossaries to help find the meaning of unknown words. A feature that I think will serve challenging to a student learning English would be the structures of a non-fiction text such as cause and effect, compare and contrast, etc. I tried to support that challenge by using images to help explain the text structure. 

Fiction was much more difficult for me, because it is not something that I am familiar with implementing in my classroom on a daily basis. I relied on the expertise of the Language Arts teachers that I worked with and additional research on the subject. I brought up lots of old memories from elementary and middle school recalling all the features and structures of a fictional text. The graphic organizer that I included for fictional text is much more basic and just highlights identifying the beginning, middle and end of a story, the characters, conflict of the story, resolution of the story , point of view and theme. All of this features could be identified during reading, as a comprehension tool I included a story map to help students put all of these features together in a cohesive way. Features of the text that I believe will support students learning English would again be illustrations because it will make the characters, setting, and theme become more concrete for students. Furthermore, I think that they will be able to identify the conflict easily. Features that will serve challenging would be if students do not have illustrations as a support that will prove difficult to students, furthermore, I believe resolution and point of view will be difficult for students to navigate as well because these concepts are much more abstract for students. 

By completing these together or comparing them side by side, I think the students will visually see the differences between the two types of texts. I think it would be a useful activity to do in a classroom for English Language Learners or those in an intervention classroom, or as a reminder for all students of what the different features and structures are of the two texts. 

Sources:

Google Images

This Reading Mama - a developmental approach to literacy. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2015, from http://thisreadingmama.com/

(n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2015, from http://www.abss.k12.nc.us/cms/lib02/NC01001905/Centricity/Domain/2723/Common Core Question Stems.docx.