Karen Carabello's Post

Guiding Students through Expository Text with Text Feature Walks
By Michelle J. Kelley and Nicki Clausen-Grace
Resource Recommendation: Text feature walk is a learning strategy. This article will show teachers how
to use this strategy that is not farfetched and difficult to use in the classroom. This strategy will assess
prior knowledge, make connections, and set a purpose for reading expository text. (Clay,1991; Fountas
& Pinnell, 1996). Making predictions can be made easier to do when text features are used along with
bold type. Informational text are harder to understand and comprehend because the texts are very
wordy and have many multi-syllable or unfamiliar words that can be difficult to pronounce for third and
even up to middle school students. Text features are readily there in nonfiction text, but sometimes
they are not used by students as stated by the authors of this article. (Kelley &Clausen-Grace, 2008;
Spencer, 2003)
A kind of scientific study was done to come to the realization of this strategy to be effective in helping
students become thinkers, and experts in the various disciplines. The students learn to arrange the
information in a meaningful way, use a strategy, use deep discuss to learn. A student can go from front
cover to glossary learning how to use the text in learning the content and applying learning to the
mechanical workings of this text and to generally any text. What’s more this strategy can work for any
discipline.
The text must be well written and the text feature must be well thought out and planned in order to
give the reader the best possible experience so as not to confuse and make the text incomprehensible
for the student. This is where the teacher’s expertise in selecting the right kind of text for this kind of
learning.
Scaffolding is used when meaningful talk is done in the classroom between teachers and students. The
students will develop thoughts about what they will be learning, work in small groups, read and study
each feature in the order that it appears and relates each feature to the idea of the whole text. Then at
this time the student will be able to see how the author has arranged the features and the whole text
and can recall the background knowledge that he has. (Honig, Diamond, & Gutljohn,2000). Students will
be able to remember new information such as vocabulary because of the features and the mental
models brought to bear due to the discussions.(Recht &Leslie, 1988). Students will be prepared to read
on with anticipation says (Lubliner 2001).
“Ruddell (2009) recommended that reading strategies do three things: (1) provide students with
the opportunity "to interact and transact with the text" (p. 220), (2) purposefully guide the
student as they read in the content area, and (3) help students to integrate their reading with
content learning. The text feature walk accomplishes all three of these goals."
The student is taught how to use this strategy and it takes time. The authors say teach and show
students that there is a main part of the text and then there are the text features. The text
should be selected for the grade level, easy for the student to relate to which the student can
make connections with easily. The teacher should not cover to vast a part of the text, help
students read the vocabulary words by introducing the necessary vocabulary before the group or
class and hold the discussion of the text. Identify text features and talk while showing the features.
Ask open-ended questions about the features. The author suggests having an interactive conversation
about the text not just taking turns talking about the text. “Ask the question why does the author use
text features?”, says the authors of the article.