Module 3: Text Analysis

                                            

                                                 Text Number 1: Biology SEED Textbook 

                                                               Bio 2.1 Macromolecules

What makes up a healthy diet? A healthy diet includes protein, fats, and carbohydrates. Why? Because these compounds are three of the main building blocks that make up your body. You obtain these building blocks from the food that you eat, and you use these building blocks to make the organic compounds necessary for life. 69 The main chemical components of living organisms are known as organic compounds. Organic compounds are molecules built around the element carbon (C). Living things are made up of very large molecules. These large molecules are called macromolecules because “macro” means large; they are made by smaller molecules bonding together. Our body gets these smaller molecules, the "building blocks” of organic molecules from the food we eat. The four main types of macromolecules found in living organisms, shown in the table below, are: 1. Proteins. 2. Carbohydrates. 3. Lipids. 4. Nucleic Acids. 

Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are the building blocks for the macromolecules our cells need to function. Each macromolecule has a different function. Carbohydrates are sugars. Cells use carbohydrates for energy. Some carbohydrate molecules, such as glucose, are relatively small, and are called simple sugars. Glucose has the chemical formula C6H12O6 . Other carbohydrates are made of many simple sugars connected together into a long chain. These long chains often consist of hundreds or thousands of simple sugars. Plants store sugar in large molecules called starch. Animals store sugar in large molecules called glycogen. You get the carbohydrates you need for energy from eating carbohydrate-rich foods, including fruits and vegetables, as well as grains, such as bread, rice, or corn.

Buehl: Vocabulary Load

Fang: the average density of nouns, verbs, and adjectives per sentence above is 3.40. 

Science text can be difficult to comprehend due to the high volume of vocabulary in a short period of time. Getting used to the vocabulary means that students will be slower moving through the information. A high vocabulary load also means that there is  high density of nouns, verbs, and adjectives in a short space. As seen above, the average density of these words per sentence is 3.40. Below is a sample of a sentence completion activity that could be useful for students as they move through the text. 

__________, __________, __________, and __________ are the building blocks for the __________ our cells need to function. 

__________ are sugars. 

Cells use __________ for energy. 

The sentence completion activity seen above is a technique that I see teachers at the school I work at use to help guide students through notes so students can have a chance to interact with the notes. 

                                            Text Number 2: Killers of the Flower Moon

On May 24, 1921, Mollie Burkhart, a resident of the Osage settlement town of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, began to fear that something had happened to one of her three sisters, Anna Brown. Thirty-four, and less than a year older than Mollie, Anna had disappeared three days earlier. She had often gone on “sprees, ” as her family disparagingly called them: dancing and drinking with friends until dawn. But this time one night had passed, and then another, and Anna had not shown up on Mollie’s front stoop as she usually did, with her long black hair slightly frayed and her dark eyes shining like glass. When Anna came inside, she liked to slip off her shoes, and Mollie missed the comforting sound of her moving, unhurried, through the house. Instead, there was a silence as still as the plains. Mollie had already lost her sister Minnie nearly three years earlier. Her death had come with shocking speed, and though doctors had attributed it to a “peculiar wasting illness, ” Mollie harbored doubts: Minnie had been only twenty-seven and had always been in perfect health. Like their parents, Mollie and her sisters had their names inscribed on the Osage Roll, which meant that they were among the registered members of the tribe. It also meant that they possessed a fortune. In the early 1870s, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties. In the early twentieth century, each person on the tribal roll began receiving a quarterly check. 

Buehl: Literary terminology: English terminology is not as straightforward as science. English text is used to help students to make connections to terminology. In this case red is attributed to similies, blue is attributed to metaphors, and green represents foreshadowing. 

Paraphrase: The text above is from the book Killers of the Flower Moon, and English may have students paraphrase the text into their own words to help them grasp what is happening in the story. The example of how this text would be paraphrased in what is presented below. 

On May 24, 1921, Mollie Burkhart grew worried about her sister, Anna Brown, who had been missing for three days. Anna often stayed out late partying, but this time, she hadn't returned as usual, and Mollie missed the familiar sounds of her presence at home. Mollie had already lost another sister, Minnie, three years earlier to a sudden illness, but she doubted the official explanation since Minnie had always been healthy. Mollie and her sisters were part of the Osage Nation, meaning they were wealthy because of oil deposits discovered beneath their reservation land in Oklahoma. Oil companies had to pay the Osage people for drilling rights, and by the early 1900s, each registered member of the tribe received regular payments from these profits.

(1) Explain each of the characteristics you identified across the texts, (2) explain how you perceive they could impact students' comprehension, and (3) explain how it makes you think about planning to support readers in your classroom.

In the science text above, I highlighted the complicated terminology. I then counted and averaged the nouns, adjectives, and verbs to figure out dense the each sentence was. The more dense with complicated terminology, the harder the text will be for students to understand. To help students understand this text, a sentence completion activity can be used. Sentence completion activities can be a good way to assist students in synthesizing new information. This activity helps students understand how texts are put together. This makes it easier for them to read and understand what they are about. This technique I currently use when beginning to review a new unit in Biology. This helps them move through text that is given to them and allows students to work through notes. 

In the English text above, the terminology cannot be found as easily as it is in a science text. Students would be given a list of literary terms along with their definitions. Once the students have a light grasp of the definition, they would then be shown examples of what these literary terms mean. Once they have the example, they could be given a text and they can highlight the specific terminology. This can push students into the text in a more thorough manner because students will have to read through the same text multiple times to find the literary terms. Students will have to truly understand the terminology to find them within a text. . As a science teacher, this makes me re-think how I go about helping students understand some of the terminology they need to know. A science teacher could not use the same exact method an English teacher would, but a modified version. A teacher could give students vocabulary words for a unit, have the students state what the words mean, and have the students define the words based on how the words are used within the text. The next concept was paraphrasing. This is when a students will read a text such as the one above and then write about what the text was about in their own words. This pushes students to understand the text, and it makes them focus and think as they progress forward. Biology introduces students to a lot of concepts. Students will be introduced to the concepts, and the teacher can ask them to paraphrase what is happening in their own words.