What Is Text To Self

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Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World

Utilise this strategy to improve students' reading skills and help them connect ideas in a text to their own lives, current events, and history.

Published: May 12, 2020

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English & Language Arts
History
Social Studies

Overview

About This Teaching Strategy

Reading comes live when nosotros recognize how the ideas in a text connect to our experiences and beliefs, events happening in the larger world, our understanding of history, and our knowledge of other texts. The Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World strategy helps students develop the habit of making these connections as they read. When students are given a purpose for their reading, they are able to ameliorate encompass and brand significant of the ideas in the text. Y'all can use this strategy with whatsoever blazon of text, historical or literary, and with other media, such as film. It tin can exist used at the beginning, heart, or terminate of the reading process to get students engaged with a text, to help students sympathize the text more securely, or to evaluate students' understanding of the text.

Lesson Plans

This strategy works all-time with a text that raises universal themes that might resonate with students' own experiences and with cloth they have studied previously. Teachers often give students their own copy of the text and then that they tin mark it up, although this is not required.

The accompanying handout to this strategy provides you with sample questions that you tin give students to guide them through this activeness. The questions in the directions are full general, merely you tin make them specific to the fabric your class is studying. For example, you might inquire students to connect what they read to specific texts or to events you lot have studied before in the school year.

Students gain a deeper understanding of the text, of their classmates, and of the earth around them when they have the opportunity to discuss their responses with peers. Students tin share their responses with a partner (see the Recall-Pair-Share education strategy), in pocket-sized groups (see the Assigning Roles teaching strategy), or equally part of a larger discussion (see the Fishbowl education strategy).

If you have limited time, you lot tin can give students the option of writing nearly ane connection they have constitute between the text and another text, their lives, or the larger world.

Social maps are a visual style of showing relationships betwixt people, merely they can also exist used to evidence relationships betwixt ideas and events. An extension of this activity would be to accept students draw the connections they notice between a text and other ideas, events, or experiences. Students tin can piece of work on these maps in groups, noting the relationships among their responses.

Materials and Downloads

Download the files below.

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