More to Know: Language Is Functional Today’s rigorous standards focus our attention on the functions of language, as there is renewed interest and emphasis in the classroom on using language to accomplish specific goals. These standards divide texts into two primary types: fiction and informational/ nonfiction. When students are working with fictional texts (Fuhler and Walther, 2007), they are following and remembering multiple events in a story, summarizing texts, noticing and remembering details of the setting, discussing the impact of the setting on characters, and noting the perspective of the various characters as well as the narrator. Examples of fictional genre include: • Fables, folktales, and myths
• Realistic fiction • Historical fiction • Science fiction
• Poetry • Drama • Fantasy • Fairy tales
When students are engaged with informational texts, on the other hand, they learn to search for and use key information, to summarize a text, to draw inferences from a text, and to use these inferences to explain the relationships between events and ideas. Examples of informational texts include: • Current events • Biography, autobiography, memoirs • Science • History • Functional texts Of course, within these broad categories, there are many text types, or genres, each with their own unique structure, vocabulary, and format. Which genre we choose to use typically depends on both our purpose and our audience (Duke, 2014; Fountas and Pinnell, 2012). To consider how purpose and audience influence genre and text type, consider literacy researchers Armistead-Bennett, Duke, and Moses’ observation: “A text written for the purpose of advertising a new car, for example, is fundamentally different from a text written for the purpose of explaining how that car works, which is in turn fundamentally different from a text that chronicles someone’s adventures driving that car across the country” (2005).
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CHAPTER 4: TEXT
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