Thursday, January 21, 2010

Text Mapping


The purpose of text mapping is to help students identify important facts within the text. Before using any text book, teachers must teach students appropriate use of the text book including the use of the table of contents, glossary, maps, and any other reference material within the text. This knowledge will help students prepare to read the text, and know where to find valuable reference material such as vocabualry definitions, geographic maps, portraits, and pictures of artifacts.

While enabling students with the ability to identify important infrormation, text mapping also helps students learn to identify information that is relevant to the unit of study or lesson of the day. Additionally, students learn to identify text structure and organization. Students also develop active reading skills.

Text maps are graphic organizers. The maps are copies of the text book units, which are stapled or taped together from the first page of the unit through the last page of the unit. The unit has essentially become a scroll. This scroll is unrolled and hung on a classroom wall. Students are encouraged to move around the scroll and mark or highlight it's text. This active "scrolling" helps students develop "active" reading skills.

Books are portable but can only be viewed as a two page graphic spread. Scrolls offer students the ability to view the full text in singular. This is very important because scrolls enable the reader to make connections within the text without the distraction of turning pages (back and forth). Scrolls are a single visual entity which may be viewed at one time. In other words, the logic and structure of the information within the text is apparent to the reader on the same page in the same instance.

Along with other benefits, these scrolls (text maps) help students; improve comprehension, extract important information from the text, and learn or refine very important note taking skills.