NONFICTION “I was absolutely gobsmacked. In Volume 1 (A to Anno) alone, I could learn about abbeys, aerial navigation, Africa, and angling.” —Dr. Elfrieda (Freddy) Hiebert, president and CEO of TextProject
KEY FINDINGS
> > Nonfiction texts—informational because they impart facts—serve innumerable functions, come in dozens and dozens of genres and formats, and reflect a dazzling array of structural patterns and design features (Duke, 2012, 2014). > > Beers and Probst (2016) define nonfiction as “that body of work in which the author purports to tell us about the real world, a real experience, a real person, an idea, or a belief.” > > Language researcher Nell Duke (2014) maintains that the best way to help students build skills in reading and writing major informational text types— informative/explanatory persuasive, opinion procedural/how-to nonfiction narrative, and biography—is through project-based instruction. Children read and write for real purposes and real audiences on topics that matter to them. > > There may be no better, more efficient way to build world knowledge and an extensive vocabulary than processing lots and lots of informational texts. Since informational texts are written to convey key facts about the natural and social world and often contain a highly specialized vocabulary, they provide a jump start to building both a robust vocabulary and wide-ranging conceptual knowledge for even very young children (Duke and Carlisle, 2011). > > Informational texts are often discontinuous in nature; that is, unlike sentences and paragraphs inside a narrative text, they may stand alone—not part of a rich semantic network of connected sentences. And this discontinuity may well alter the ways in which comprehension unfolds—hence, the need to immerse students in informational texts and give them the opportunity to explore (Bestgen and Vonk, 1999). > > The quality of nonfiction in recent years has increased tenfold. Now our students can feast on beautifully written, full-of-voice books replete with stunning illustrations and intriguing graphics (Duke, 2014).
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CHAPTER 4: TEXT
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