#text structure

Well... not really. I’ve used tumblr before with many different accounts. I interviewed a graphic designer for a class and now we’re friends. She told me a little niche I could do is start a side blog about correcting design. I also thought I could post some of my student work here as well to help cope with my butt getting kicked with all this design work. 

Right now I’m working on getting my contracts set up. If you’re a creative and do not have any sort of contract written up when you do jobs, I have some bad news for you. You are basically walking around in the snow without any clothes whatsoever. Contracts are the most important thing when it comes to working with your clients. The first contract you’ll need is a Scope of Work Estimate (SOW). “What’s a SOW Estimate?” you may be asking? A SOW Estimate is creating an invoice describing the deliverables of a job. There’s things you should and should not include in this type of contract. The most vague thing I can tell you is to never ever never ever NEVER EVER put anything in your Scope of Work (or any contract for that matter) that will allow your client to take advantage of you. Here’s an example of what could happen if you include a highly detailed timeline of your project:

Client: It’s Day 3. You said that on Day 3 you’d be starting the project. You: Well, it’s taking a little longer than expected to start the project. Client: I don’t care, you said you’d start, now you start.

Now you do not have enough research in for your creative brief to actually show them, and then you’ll get into trouble again when you’ve finished and they hate it. Never include super specific details when it comes to scheduling. 

For my SOW Estimate that I’m drawing up for my brand identity system (BIS), I decided to take a structured typographic approach before including colors and anything else to make it unique. Here’s two example invoices where I dissected the hierarchy and addressed the type structure: 

These two invoices show good examples of heiarchy and structure of text. They demonstrate a better understanding of these two elements I want to focus on for my contracts. 

Text Structure Strategy is a research that shows that the content consisting most texts is organized using a structure. The information presented in the content structure of a text is connected to better remembering and the information presented in the lower content structure is for a combination of two or more of the five specific text structures. The text structures are:

1. Comparison

2. Cause and effect

3. Problems and solutions

4. Sequential text

5. Descriptive text

These text structures are basically used to organize all texts irrespective of their genre, or content types which include science, social studies, current events, sports, and much more.

Expository texts like history allow the study of events that lead to cause and effect structures and sequence structures for the events.

When reading a narrative text, students often come across the question of the moral of the story or the actions of the characters. These ideas are studied as problems and solutions or cause and effect in case of events in the story. On the other hand, novels and textbook passages contain descriptive content text structures with sequences for events and cause and effect structures.

The Text Structure Strategy (TSS) was developed and refined by researchers for several years. Upon initial identification, the text structures have undergone several types of research about the what and how these help in providing students with absolute information recall. It has been found that good readers are able to take advantage of the text structures to select important ideas and create summaries for the stories or content. The summary or gist allows them to effectively remember the information after reading. 

The difference in Text Structure Strategy

The instructions for text structure strategy were always independent skills which are taught in a separate and distinct way different from main writing and summarizing or comprehension monitoring. Here are some of the easy ways to implement Text Structure Strategy in the class:

a. Activate background knowledge and discuss all interesting features in a text

b. Teach the use of vocabulary in the context by providing definition and examples for students with unfamiliar words

c. Preview the text with headings, segment reading, text understanding. The activities are done in large or small groups, silent reading, and other combinations in classrooms.

d. Focus on a skill for the week or a combination of skills that can constitute textbook content. The activity helps focus on aspects like ideas, genre, summary, comprehensive monitoring, etc. 

Instructions for Implementation

In contrast to textbook ideas and classroom practices, TSS is integrated into all textbooks for science, social studies, etc. Here are some of the ways to highlight important differences to current practices:

a. Create an efficient plan to incorporate higher-order text structures for instructions

b. Activate background learning and discuss interesting facts and ideas that include text structures like cause and effect, problem-solving, and comparison. 

c. Teach vocabulary in a context that provides definitions and examples for children with unfamiliar words. 

d. Include regular instructions about selecting ideas while reading, writing, idea development, and comprehensive monitoring. 

Types of Text Structures and Definition

1. Comparison

This form of text structure is descriptive but deals with two or more topics and highlights similarities and differences between them. The structure uses keywords including “more”, “less”, “than”, etc.

2. Cause and effect

The text explains the highlights of an event and its results. The text structure is mainly used for science and history. Keywords like “because”, “therefore”, and “why” are very common in all-cause and effect text structures.

3. Problems and solutions

These text structures contain mainly two parts. The first part talks about an issue and the second talks about how to solve or rectify it. The structure is used in subjects like mathematics, science, and social studies. Keywords like “issue”, “problems”, “trouble”, “fix”, etc.

4. Sequential text

Similar to chronological texts, the sequential text is also used as a structure to put in order of importance, alphabet, time, etc. the order is based on several structures and is used in lab reports, how-to-piece, history, etc. keywords like “first”, “next”, “how”, and “why” are very common in sequential text.

5. Descriptive text

These texts are used to describe an event or scene and are typically based on organized information by location. The text is used equally in all fiction and non-fiction stories and news. The descriptive text structure is generally used in textbooks, science, and history. Keywords like ”above”, “below”, “behind”, etc are very common with adjectives and act as hallmarks for the text structure. 

English 8 students applied their new-ish text-structure skills to write their own. Impressive stuff.

A Test and Text Structures

English 8 students finished the overview of text structures today, going over cause/effect and problem/solution today. We saw that these two structures can be very similar and in fact can lead one into another.

English I Honors students took their second Romeo and Juliet test, this time on act two.

Academic Language Teaching Ideas for ELLs

Academic Language Teaching Ideas for English Language Learners

Academic language is the language of school. Tier 2 vocabulary words that are found across different subject areas are components of academic language. For English language Learners it is particularly important to develop their academic language. For English Language Learners that are new to the country, it can take from seven to ten…

Using different texts across Lexile bands and using activities that address different skills, you can effectively implement Depth Of Knowledge (DoK) in your ELA instruction.

The Center for College & Career Readiness emphasizes this:

In essence: To master "complexity", one needs to understand, recall and apply.

The "Nutcracker" activity on Frolyc demonstrates to you how to implement DoK in ELA keeping this key idea in mind.

1. Present text along with video.

This specific text for the Nutcracker is at Lexile band 460. 

2. Pose questions addressing DoK-1 & DoK- 2

For DoK-1, pose simple questions that make students recall information from text, understand the meanings of words in text, see how the words relate to each other etc. 

In multiple choice quiz, you can address DoK-2. Here, students have to associate information that they already know to the current context. E.g. genre of the text that they just read.

3. Analyzing & organizing information - DoK 2

Analyzing and organizing information may fall in DoK level 2 based on the information presented.

Presenting information read in a different format like drawing, addresses Dok-2 as well:

4. Writing for DoK-3

Writing short passages while quoting details from text is a DoK level 3 skill.