Top-Level Structures
By Faye Bolton

Online Extra: Top-Level Structures - Prediction Skills

It's very helpful for your students to understand how texts are structured because they can then understand and recall more key information than readers who don't know how to use text structures. One form of text structure is called top-level structure.

There are four main organizational patterns, or top-level structures, that occur mostly in factual texts: compare/contrast, cause/effect, problem/ solution and list-like.

By utilizing top-level structures, students are able to clearly see the difference when comparing things like, for example, the characteristics of emperor and king penguins (above).

It's a signal. Authors often use signaling words to signal the four main top-level structures that they use to organize their ideas. Thoughtful readers take note of these signal words to help them understand texts.

Top-level structures operate at three levels:

1. The Whole-text level helps readers to identify the main ideas.
2. The Paragraph level helps readers see how details that support the main ideas are organized.
3. The Sentence level helps readers understand how ideas in a sentence are organized.

For example, in a text about emperor and king penguins, the author's purpose might be to compare and contrast the two penguins at the Whole-text level. However, at the Paragraph level, the author might write paragraphs listing details about the physical features or habitats of each of the penguins, using a list-like structure. At the Sentence level, the author might use the cause/effect structure to explain how the male emperor penguin uses stomach skin to cover eggs to keep them warm.

Introducing top-level structures. When introducing top-level structures to your students, help them understand that the organizational patterns of top-level structures occur daily in our real-life experiences. For example, when deciding which book to read, you compare and contrast books, or when driving on wet roads, drivers slow down to reduce the possibility of having an accident (cause/effect). Help your students recognize these structural relationships in their daily lives.

• Compare/contrast: making decisions about books to read, food to eat, etc.
• List-like: shopping lists, selecting a video from a list
• Problem/solution: situations when someone has lost something or a classmate has been unfriendly
• Cause-effect: lack of sleep causing someone to be tired, putting bread in toaster results in it being toasted

By drawing your students' attention to signaling words during the discussions about their daily life experiences, they'll then be more able to recognize these words when reading, and use them when writing. You could also write sentences about their life experiences, identify signaling words and develop a class chart of them for each top-level structure. Each list could be added to as your students identify more signaling words during discussions in Shared, Guided and Independent Reading sessions and focus on their use in Shared Writing.

Top-level text. Initially, when your students investigate top-level structures of factual texts, it's easier if you use familiar texts. Make sure your students have a lot of prior knowledge of the topic. In each case, explain how doing this helps you to understand the text better. You'll also need to demonstrate and discuss how you identify the top-level structures of texts. For example:

• Read the text, and use a process of elimination to identify the top-level structure. Look at a class chart that lists the four top-level structures and work down the list. Reread the text to see if the structures apply.
• Scan the text for words that signal top-level structures and then read the text to see if it applies.
• Show that you have a hunch what the structure might be and read the text to see if your predicted top-level structure applies.
• Try using a combination of aforementioned strategies.

Cause/effect. Good readers predict using their prior knowledge before and when reading. As well as using prior knowledge based on their life experiences, these readers use text-specific knowledge – knowledge of text structures to form predictions.

The following are some tips for when your students are using prediction and their knowledge of top-level structures with cause/effect. Be sure to select texts where the author uses signal words that help readers identify how the information is organized.

• Help your students understand that if they know one component of a top-level structure, for example cause or effect, it will help them predict the other.
• Ask them to scan a text for words that signal the cause. Encourage students to identify the cause and predict the effect. Then read to the class so that they can confirm their predicted effect.

Most importantly, make explicit to your students how they can apply what they learned about top-level structures when reading independently.

When conferring with your students during Independent Reading, ask them to explain how they use their knowledge of top-level structures to predict when reading, and how using knowledge of top-level structures helped them in comprehending texts better. I hope these methods are helpful to you and your students.

Online Extra: Top-Level Structures - Prediction Skills

Faye Bolton is the author of several books and articles on literacy. She also recently co-authored two books with Diane Snowball.

March, 2007, Vol.37, No.6