Building Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to Resources

What is it? How does it work?

Background:
Strategies for helping students identify important concepts and conceptual relationships in text.

Overview:
Text maps depict important concepts in a selection of text and show how they connect structurally. Text mapping can develop comprehension before, during, and/or after reading. As a teaching strategy, students use a map developed by the teacher. As a learning strategy, students develop their own maps. In text mapping, the major concepts of a passage attach to major branches in a diagram to which minor branches are added for details. Branches can be labeled to represent the rhetorical structure. It also has been called Graphic Organizers/ Structured Overview (Barron, 1969) and Idea Mapping (Armbruster & Anderson, 1982) for expository and Story Maps (Beck & McKeown, 1981) for narrative text.

As a teaching strategy, text mapping has 3 stages:
I. Preparation: This first stage is considered the most important by the developers.
Step 1: Select the important concepts from a text .
Step 2: Arrange the concept words into a map that shows how the words are connected.
Step 3: Add to the map words students have previously learned.
Step 4: Evaluate the map by sharing it with a novice teacher to see if the relationships make sense.
II. Presentation: The teacher uses the map for 5-10 minutes as a preteaching tool to introduce the concepts and their interrelationships. Students are encouraged to add concepts and question the relationships. Intermittently, the teacher poses questions to check for understanding.
III. Follow-Up: As students read, they are encouraged to see how new information fits into the map.

As a student strategy, text mapping has 2 stages:
Stage 1 Before reading: For the strategy to be effective, students must be taught to generate their own map of concepts from a text.
Stage 2 During and After Reading: Students confirm and add to the map, creating a spatial representation of the concepts in the text. They label the branches to show the relationships between concepts (i.e., concept and example, concept and definition, concept and properties, temporal, cause and effect, conditional, and comparison). Students can be taught to review the map prior to a test.

Computer mapping programs aid the use of this strategy.