Finding information in complex texts
- Students need to comprehend a diverse range of texts for academic work, including visual texts, textbooks, and Internet texts.
- Teachers can help students learn to work effectively with complex texts.
- Inquiry charts and information transfer activities can help students to find information in complex texts
Complex texts
Texts in different genres
Teachers often present a succession of texts over a series of lessons. The texts may be closely aligned in topic or theme, but they may include a range of text types: for example, one text may be a description, another may be a narrative, while another may offer an explanation. A teacher may also introduce two or more texts at the same time, for example when their students are learning to recognise and use similarities and differences in text content or structure.
Many of the materials students work with embed texts containing information or curriculum content in other text types, in order to engage their audience. You might, for example, find a description embedded in a narrative.
As an example, take a look at the Kiwi Conservation Club webpage. Essentially, the purpose of this page is to tell the reader about a class of animals – wētā – and so the basic text type is a report. However, the text in the aqua box is a recount. This recount not only tells about something that happened, it also illustrates how tough wetas are.
Nagabhand, Nation, and Franken (1993) explore the problems associated with embedded information. One of these is that the focus of the text can be obscured.
Mini-texts and embedded information
Students also meet two or more texts at the same time whenever a page or a section of a text they are reading contains thematically related mini-texts with different purposes, features, and structures. The boundaries between these mini-texts are often clearly marked by frames or boxes. Often one or more of the mini-texts may be a visual text such as a diagram, a flow chart, or a graph. When items of information are chunked separately in this way, the reader needs to know how to find the connections between them.
Texts in different media
The material on a printed page, then, may be complex, and print is not the only kind of written language that students need to work with. They also meet a wide variety of other sources of information in curriculum learning – for example, videos, DVDs, computer software, and hypertext on the Internet.
Navigation through such multiply linked texts can be quite challenging, with or without graphics. This is particularly so for EAL students, who are unlikely to have a full command of the Academic Word List and the technical words essential in particular content areas. (See the inquiry How many words should my students know? .) It’s also difficult for a reader who doesn’t know how text types are typically organised.
The inquiries Generic patterns in texts and Scaffolding students’ writing both look at aspects of the organisation of texts and how to help students develop their knowledge and skills in this area.
