Week 6 Blog Posts

Week 6 Blog: Choose samples of both fiction and non-fiction texts age appropriate to the students you work with. (Suggestions might be a grade level text book or leveled reader). Create a graphic organizer to illustrate salient differences in each genre. Which features will support students learning to speak English? Which features will serve to be challenging?

I looked through our Literature Connections textbook to examine some key differences between fiction and non-fiction texts. Though some elements I listed as characteristic of non-fiction did appear with fiction texts in this literature textbook (such as a glossary of terms, captions, and guiding questions in the margins), typical fiction versus non-fiction has key differences. To further illustrate, I looked at two paired short stories about magicians and escape artists.

The non-fiction piece, A Great Escape, related the story of Harry Houdini's great escape from a police station. The non-fiction piece had a photograph of Harry Houdini and within the text it had dates, facts (he escaped the handcuffs in just six minutes without damaging them at all!), bolded words that might be new and challenging vocabulary, such as perplexed. The non-fiction story was arranged in columns like a newspaper and included title, paragraph headings, and a caption for the photograph.

The fiction piece paired with it was about a pair of twin brothers, called charlatans for their hoax; they pretended to be one magician and escape artist, but really they used their identical looks to fool their audiences. This story was written in story format, included only a few illustrations, and did not have any other notable textual features such as headings, captions, or facts. This story did have story notes in the margins to help students track plot, conflict, and characterization, as well as some vocabulary footnotes (like the word charlatan).

With these two texts in particular, I thought that ESL/ELL students would struggle with vocabulary as well as the content in general. My thought was that the fiction text would actually prove more challenging because of the complexity of the story (two brothers pretending to be one), especially since students' comprehension of this idea hinged upon a single line where one brother turned to the other as saying to "his identical face, with his identical voice, 'next time, you stay in the cell.'" If students don't understand that line, they won't understand just why these brothers are charlatans. The Houdini story gave more background information and talked about the magician in a straight forward way--there weren't any tricks, he trained and was extremely dexterous.

In general, I think non-fiction tends to do better with ESL/ELL students because most non-fiction texts build in the background knowledge and vocabulary associated with the content in order to best educate the reader. Non-fiction (or certain fiction) texts that have support notes, glossaries, and non-verbal representations of information (such as timelines, charts, graphic organizers, graphs, etc.) will allow students learning or struggling with English language proficiency to glean what information they need in order to access content. Fiction texts, while more entertaining, often expect the reader to have a basic background knowledge relative to the content. Additionally, fiction texts such as this one may prove difficult for ESL/ELL students to grasp because of the content being so imaginative or magical that there is little for students to base in reality. ESL/ELL students are more likely to know reality based vocabulary than iminary concepts (horse vs. unicorn, for example). So again, in general, I believe supporting ESL/ELL students first with non-fiction texts, and then with paired fictional texts will allow them to learn background knowledge, and then build upon it with fictional structures. For this reason, paired texts, non-fiction texts, historical fiction, biographies and autobiographies are suggested genres for ESL/ELL students to start with.