Yeah, That Reminds Me of

By Doug Buehl,
Madison East High School teacher
Member, Wisconsin State Reading Association

January 2002

This reminds me of our vacation to Nova Scotia. I can just picture the tiny isolated fishing villages and the bleak, rocky landscape, the inlets of slapping ocean waves, the taciturn townsfolk. I remember speculating how rigorous a winter must be in this tract of North America, and how self-dependent as well as inter-dependent the villagers probably are.”

I have never visited the Canadian province of Newfoundland, but I was able to draw upon travel experiences to help me visualize the terrain and empathize with the travails of the characters in E. Annie Proulx’s quirky novel, “The Shipping News.” The outlook and preoccupations of the motley menagerie of “journalists” portrayed in the story became more imaginable as I recalled the small town weekly newspaper that circulated in the farming community of my youth. As I read, I found myself continuously making connections to elements of my life that contributed to my understanding of this book.

What you bring to a text – your personal memory banks – is the bedrock of reading comprehension. It is, of course, a natural process for a reader to draw upon prior knowledge and background experiences, but proficient readers are highly conscious of eliciting these connections. They know that they will better understand if they attempt to relate what is new in a text to what they already know or have experienced. Children learning to read, or struggling readers, may move directly through a text without ever stopping to consider whether the text makes sense based on their background knowledge, or whether their knowledge can be used to help them understand confusing, unfamiliar, or challenging material.

The Strategy
This strategy emphasizes three kinds of connections that proficient readers make as they read (Harvey and Goudvis, 2000). Students develop an awareness of text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections that can guide and assist their comprehension of written materials.

Step 1: The easiest connection to teach to students is text-to-self. This category represents highly personal connections that a reader makes between a specific written text and that reader’s experiences. When a reader says, “This story reminds me of the visits we took to my grandfather’s farm,” the reader is expressing a text-to-self connection.

Model text-to-self connections initially with selections that are relatively “close to home” in terms of student experiences. Note that when we read, we often encounter parts that cause us to remember something from our own lives. A key phrase that prompts text-to-self connections is “this reminds me of . . . ”

The September Reading Room column presented strategies for coding text. When modeling text-to-self connections, have students code pertinent sections with an “R” to signal that they have recognized a personal experience that helps them understand a passage. Perhaps this text-to-self connection aids them in visualizing a scene, sympathizing with a character, or predicting possible meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary.

Step 2: Next introduce text-to-text connections. Sometimes when we read, we are reminded of other texts – other books by the same author, stories within a similar genre, poems that follow a similar theme, writing that has a comparable style, resources that presented comparable information. A text-to-text connection draws upon a reader’s specific experiences with and knowledge of print. Proficient readers gain insight during reading by thinking about how a current text relates to other written materials. When a reader says, “This character has the same problem that I read about in a story last year,” the reader is expressing a text-to-text connection.

Encourage students to consider the variety of texts they have experienced that can help them understand a new selection. In addition to those mentioned above, dramatic scripts, song lyrics, electronic texts such as Web site pages, magazine and newspaper articles, and even pieces written by fellow students can all be useful text-to-text connections.

Step 3: Finally, discuss text-to-world connections. We all have ideas about how the world works that go far beyond our own intimate personal experiences. We encounter the world vicariously, through other media such as television or movies. We are witness to others as they relate their personal experiences in the world, and we form ideas from our interactions with these people. We learn information and develop conceptual understandings through instruction in school classrooms. Text-to-world connections are these larger connections that a reader brings to a reading situation.

Often it is these text-to-world connections that teachers are trying to enhance when they teach lessons in science, social studies, literature, mathematics, and so forth.

When teachers suspect that students may lack the ability to make meaningful connections with a classroom text, classroom instruction will need to establish text-to-world connections that can bridge the gap between reader experience and author assumptions. Building necessary background knowledge prior to reading is a powerful means for providing text-to-world support and pre-empt reading failure.

Step 4: As students become comfortable recognizing the specific nature of connection with some element of a text, they can be asked to refine their text coding to reflect the three categories: TS for text-to-self, TT for text-to-text, and TW for text-to-world.

This step facilitates their verbalizing of their connections.
Harvey and Goudvis (2000) caution that merely making connections is not sufficient, however. Students may make tangential connections that can distract them from a text, and lead them to daydream or lose sight of the author’s message.

Throughout this process, students need be challenged to analyze how their connections are contributing to their understanding of a passage. Text connections should lead to text comprehension.

Posted January 14, 2002