English Language Arts and Reading.8.6.A

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The student is expected to

describe personal connections to a variety of sources, including self-selected text;

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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Response skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student responds to an increasingly challenging variety of sources that are read, heard, or viewed.

Provide students with a literary text and ask them to describe how they identify with characters, situations, and sensory details based on their own personal experiences. Using informational texts have students describe what they already know about the topic or ask questions they may have about the topic as they interact with the text.

Possible questions to ask students:

  • What does this text remind you of?
  • Can you relate to the characters in the text?
  • Does anything in this text remind you of anything in your own life?
  • What does this remind you of in another book you have read?
  • How is this text similar to other things you have read?
  • How is this text different from other things you have read?
  • What does this remind you of in the real world?
  • How are events in this text similar to things that happen in the real world?
     

Further Explanation

This assessment measures students’ ability to demonstrate how they have interpreted the explicit and implied ideas expressed in text as they describe personal connections made while reading.

When students describe personal connections they have made to something read, heard, or viewed, they should use details to demonstrate how they have interpreted the explicit and implied ideas expressed. Personal connections are formed by students' reactions to these ideas. Personal experience can, and often does, influence these reactions. Students should be encouraged to share their reactions orally or in writing.
a text that a student identifies and chooses to read for independent reading
any communication medium, such as a book, a person, or an electronic device., that supplies information

Research

1. Dallacqua, A. L. (2012). Exploring literary devices in graphic novels. Language Arts, 89(6), 365–378. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ981296

Summary: This study examines the way students engage in reading self-selected literature that uses visuals/graphics. The process includes intra mental reading. The study shows that when students openly discuss the literature mental cognitive increases and students are able to make meaning from the text. The findings also indicate that students question the text, draw multiple interpretations of the meanings, and are able to create hypothetical scenarios.
 

2. Maine, F. (2013). How children talk together to make meaning from texts: A dialogic perspective on reading comprehension strategies. Literacy, 47(3), 150–56. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12010

Summary: This study revealed that reading comprehension increases if students have the opportunity discuss the reading as a group. As students talk about the text, students use prior knowledge and experiences that connect the "gaps." Personal experiences are central to making meaning of the selected texts. Although the student participants are elementary age, the strategy is applicable to older students.