"Special Chat List for \"To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension\"" <[email protected]> writes: >I do think we need to teach main idea as a text structure. I know from my own >reading of my grad school text books that there is often a main idea of the >text. Perhaps it takes the forms of a central idea with examples to follow or >maybe a series of >iddeas where the reader has to infer a bigger idea from it. But I do >recognize main idea as a form of text structure often in my own reading. >It sounds to me that this is different from the strategy of determining >importance. At one of Stephanie Harvey's workshops, she spoke of an activity >were the kids read a short nonfiction article and afterwards wrote what THEY >thought was most important >Ito remember and then what did they think the AUTHOR wanted them to remember. >I think this addresses Ellin's point that we, as readers, might not always >agree with the author's "main idea" because of what we bring to the text. >In my mind, these are 2 separate issues. One is looking at the structure of >the text and the other is looking at the meaning of the text. >Dana
I agree with Dana and Elllin that we may not always agree with the author's main idea and that as critical readers, we need to develop our own thinking. I also agree that main idea and text structures are two different things. I believe you may be thinking of the structure most often refereed to as description when mentioning the Scholastic News etc. Other non fiction text structures include cause/effect, compare/contrast, sequencing, problem/solution. The reader needs to take in the information from the text and organize the facts in order to gain a better understanding. While writing, the writer needs to organize the text according to one or more of these structures. MJ _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
