Multidimensional Tools for Multidimensional Texts

Tool.  It’s a word that’s been used by author Cris Tovani and David West Brown in discussing how to teach reading and grammar, respectively.  I wasn’t shocked that each author utilized this same word – tool – in describing a device that helps to facilitate understanding of his or her respective literacy components.  I was surprised, however, when each author used the exact same tool to teach these different literacy components, and I found myself wondering if this one tool can be repurposed to teach essentially two things in tandem.

What Tovani dubs the double-entry diary, Brown has packaged as the T-graph.  “Teachers can have students collect examples of any feature (feature X) from students’ own writing, classroom reading, or other sources to fill out the left column” (Brown xxiii).  Brown’s description basically matches Tovani’s directive that “the left-hand side represents literal information from the text” (Tovani 12).  Both value the idea of highlighting text – which students will attempt to decipher in the right hand column. 

How students analyze the text on the right differs slightly.  Tovani wants students to use the double-entry diary to “hold their thinking” and asks them to share their thoughts about the text in the forms of questions and connections among other things (12).  Brown, on the other hand, wants students to use “contrastive features” to demonstrate the variation in language, and uses a T-graph that compares Shakespearean verbs to modern verbs as an example (xxiii).  Regardless of this slight variation, in both methods students use the text to extrapolate some new information.

I wonder if Tovani’s double-entry diary and Brown’s T-graph can’t be combined in the classroom to teach important aspects of both reading and grammar within the same text.  Perhaps a teacher can start off with Brown’s T-graph comparing Shakespearean verbs to modern verbs before beginning to read Hamlet.  The T-graph acts almost as a pre-read to help students with language that might seem at first to be inaccessible.  They will learn that “Alexander returneth into dust” could be read as “Alexander returns to dust” as Brown shows in his example T-graph chart (xxiii).  But instead of doing this activity and then casting aside the T-graph, the students would hold onto this T-graph as they read.  Another column could be added to the T-graph so students could react to the passage about Alexander returning to dust.  It would be a way of holding their thinking as suggested by Tovani.  In this sense, the tool that the teacher uses would become multidimensional just as they texts the students are reading.

  

 Works Cited

Tovani, Cris. Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?: Content Comprehension, Grades 6-12.  Portland: Stenhouse Publishers, 2004. Print.

Brown, David West. In other words:  lessons on grammar, code-switching, and academic writing. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2009. Print.