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Complementary Reading

Page history last edited by Jen 15 years, 9 months ago

Finding "Twins" for Textbooks

 

Content area teachers, or even language arts and reading teachers, are often bound by time, inexperience and budget to assign textbook reading to students.  Textbooks, however, can be limited in possibilities for differentiation in readability, student interest, and timeliness.  Primary teachers have long solved this problem by offering students structured choices among what some researchers call "twin texts" or "paired texts" of fiction or nonfiction trade books. (For further information, see this article- 2765688.pdf -from The Reading Teacher 53(4) retrieved from EBSCO).

 

Secondary teachers are using this strategy as well, but from my vantage point, not as often as our primary peers.  I've seen Sophie's World used as a complementary text in an AP European History course and An Ordinary Man in a world studies course.   I'd love to seeIshmael on a biology syllabus. That a trade book is offered at all in a content course is good news, but contemporary researchers  are telling us that choice in texts is a crucial motivator for secondary readers.  Handing out the same book to each student may be a motivation defeating practice.

 

Surprisingly, there aren't many readily accessible online lists of titles for content areas. Here are a few useful links:

Science

More Science

Social Studies

Websites for k-8 Content Areas

Young Adult Literature booklists

Full Text Titles Online

Thematic Matrices

 

How to Use Trade Books as Complementary Reading

 

How trade books are used may be as important as which books are used. Rebecca Olness has a new book out about using literature in the content areas (its first chapter is available free from the International Reading Association).  Although her target audience includes K-5 teachers, she offers a rationale for using trade books in the content classroom as well as suggestions for how to use them--reasoning and advice that seem applicable to secondary classrooms.

 

 

Why to Use Trade Books in Content Areas

How to Use Trade Books in Content Areas

  • vocabulary learned more effectively
  • provides models for writing
  • generates interest in real world applications
  • deeper coverage of topics
  • easier for students to read
  • offered at a variety of reading levels
  • exposes students to multiple text structures
  • teaches students to exploit multiple text features
  • provides motivating choice
  • as read alouds
  • as guided reading
  • as writing models
  • to build students' topical knowledge
  • to formulate questions about related topics
  • to build literacy skills while extending content knowledge
  • in literature circles
  • as research
  • as a critical lens through which to read the textbook
  • as visual or multimodal text twins

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What If There Isn't Time for a Trade Book?

 

While secondary students may consider themselves too sophisticated for children's picturebooks, Olness encourages us not to count them out.  (I use them for scaffolding all the time.) But at the secondary level, most of us feel comfortable including websites, films (and other video text), art, music, and news articles to complement word based text.  However, I notice that these content supplements are not being treated as twin texts; rather they are illustrations of content.  To stimulate higher order thinking, they ought to be treated as meaningful texts and read using literacy strategies.  Otherwise, as mere illustrations, they may be judged redundant by students.

 

Our course text offers a variety of book lists for content area teachers.  These resources are important, but so is extending sound literacy practices to the complementary texts already in use.

 

Text Twins in My Classroom

 

I've often used text twins in poetry analysis in my language arts classroom.  I tend to choose them because the two featured poets seem to be somehow in conversation with each other, as in "Emily Dickinson's Defunct" by Marilyn Nelson and "buffalo bills defunct" by e e cummings, or "Parsley" by Rita Dove and "The Venus Hottentot" by Elizabeth Alexander.

 

Recently, I've tried to learn more about graphic novels and have paired Joseph Sacco's recent comic journalism "Complacency Kills" about the Iraq war with an article covering the same ground from Atlantic Monthly (  out.pdf-- retreived from Proquest).  These could easily be paired with a work of poetry or fiction, even film about the Iraq war.

 

In choosing complementary reading, consider curricular focus.  For me, sometimes it's theme or content, but often the texts model a writing strategy I'd like students to try.  I try to mix modes or genres across fiction and nonfiction, rarely assigning an entire book.  Instead, I make excerpts for in class discussion.  Discussion activites will depend on the focus of the pairing.

 

 

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