Instructions for Text Analysis

Here is a set of steps to help you analyse a passage as an important part of your preparation for teaching a series of AL lessons.

Notes before you begin

1.  The text analysis is an important part of your teaching preparation: much of the success of your teaching sequence will stem from the quality of your initial analysis, and your subsequent ability to frame your teaching goals in relation to what the text says and how it says it. With this in mind, try to take the time to do the analysis as carefully as you can.

2.  Having stressed the importance of depth in your analysis, however, it is important also to stress the importance of ‘lightness of touch’: do not go overboard in your analysis. Do not over-interpret the text, and do not worry about complex grammatical details: you need to be able to talk to your students about the things you have found in your analysis.

3.  The template that we propose here is intended as a tool that encourages you towards brevity. It is not an end in itself. It is designed to allow you to identify and catagorise the word choices and grammatical choices in your text more easily so that you can:

  1. frame your discussion about the text, and
  2. talk about the exact words and grammatical patterns that create the meanings that you want the students to understand.

At this stage, we are not worrying about how to choose passages; we are assuming that this job has been done for you because you are working from teaching notes or working with an experienced colleague.

At the end of this explanation there is an exemplar text analysis from “George’s Marvellous Medicine” by Roald Dahl.


Step 1: Think about what the story or passage is doing

First read the story or passage carefully, and think about what the text is doing. At this stage of your thinking, don’t get tangled up in thinking about the technicalities of the writing; just think about the text as a story, or as a section of a story, if you are using a longer text. The purpose of this exercise is to get you to focus on the intent of the text, and how a reader is likely to react to the text. That is, you are using this exercise to orient your thinking to the fundamental meanings of the text.

If there are illustrations in the text, you should also think about how the visuals are supporting or complementing the words and perhaps filling in meanings that are not made explicit in the words. For example, in Rosie’s walk, the words tell us nothing at all about the fox that is stalking Rosie, but the illustrations of the fox’s misadventures are what make the story interesting.

The following questions can help you think about the passage:

1.  (a) For a picture book text, where your passage represents a full story: What kind of story is it? For example, is it an adventure tale, a story about overcoming a challenge, a story about friendship, a fable about good/strong/ nasty /characters? Is there a purpose or special message in the text? (there might be none, but a fable, for example, will have an underlying message: the message in The Lion and the Mouse, for example, is that ‘even the weak can help the strong and mighty’.)

(b) For a passage from a longer story: What is the function of this passage within the longer text? (eg orientation, introduces a new character, part of the complication etc). What is the purpose of the passage? What do you think the author was trying to achieve through this passage?

2.  What effect does the passage have on you as the reader? (For example, how does the passage make you feel? What do you think the writer is trying to get the reader to think about through this passage?)

Briefly note down your answers to these questions. You can also make a note of any language that stands out as being interesting, and that you think you might focus on in your teaching. The purpose of filling in the template is to work out why it is interesting, and how you might frame your focus on this language.


Step 2: Think about the words the writer has used to achieve this purpose and effect

Use the template to help you think this through what the words in the text are doing (you can copy the table onto a landscape page to give you more room to write). See the explanation below for ideas about what to write in each column. See the example text below to see how it can work in practice.

Column 1 / Column 2 / Column 3 / Column 4 / Column 5
Structure of the passage / Text section, showing clauses, verbs and theme / What the clause structure tells us / Notes about lexical choices (words and their meanings), idioms, literary techniques / What do these words do to the reader? Notes on inferences the reader makes, the effect or impact of the words on the reader, how the reader feels
LABEL THE FIRST PART OF THE STRUCTURE / FIRST PART OF THE TEXT IN CLAUSES
LABEL THE SECOND PART OF THE STRUCTURE / TEXT IN CLAUSES
LABEL THE THIRD PART OF THE STRUCTURE ETC / TEXT IN CLAUSES

In Columns 1 and 2

Type the passage

Begin by typing the passage in clauses in the second column, identifying the verbs and underlining them. If you are unsure about how to identify a clause, find the verbs first. A clause needs to have a verb in it. There are some references about grammar to help you in the Learning Materials section of Learnline.

Identify the internal structure of the text or passage (Text organisation) and make brief notes in the left-hand column (Column 1)

If you are working with the entire text of a picture book, identify the stages of the text (eg orientation, complication, resolution – bearing in mind that not all stories follow this structure religiously). You might also identify sub-sections within the stages of a text. For example, within the orientation, there might be a passage that is a description of a character or a setting.

If you are working with a passage from a longer text (a novel or short story), identify the internal structure of the passage. For example, if the passage is a description of a character, you might find that you can find sections within the description for different aspects of the character’s description: his appearance, his habits, his character etc. In other passages, you might be able to section them into a series of actions, or an action followed by a reaction.

Try to make your notes here as brief as you can, as you should be able to use these notes to identify the structure of the text with your students. The structure may also later serve as a writing plan for your students if you get them to write their own text modeled on the passage you are studying.

As you go, think about whether this structure reveals anything to you about what the writer might have been trying to do with the text (see notes on Column 5 below).

Tip: Create new rows on your table and move the text into these rows to correspond to the structure that you decide on (see example of George’s Marvellous Medicine below).


In Column 3, make notes on the internal structure of the clauses and sentences.

Include notes on

-  the kinds of verbs

-  what comes before the verb (theme)

-  who does what to whom (transitivity)

-  how the ideas are connected (cohesion, the use of conjunctions if it’s interesting, the use of pronouns if it’s interesting)

Make notes about any grammatical information that you might share with your students. At the same time, think about why the author might have chosen to construct the sentences in the passage in this way.

It is useful to look at the kinds of verbs in the passage – do they represent material processes, relational processes, mental or verbal processes? You can think of verbs as the ‘powerhouse’ or the ‘engine’ of a sentence or clause – it’s as if they are the force that drives the sentence (without verbs there are no sentences). So looking at the verbs can tell you a lot about the kinds of sentences you are working with. The verbs might tell you, for example, that the passage is about the characters’ perceptions (saw, heard), or that the passage is a series of actions or a description.

It’s also useful to look at what comes before and what comes after the verb. Writers manipulate sentence structure to draw readers’ attention to the ideas and feelings that they want their readers most to engage with. The first part of a sentence (the theme) tells us what the sentence is about and represents the ideas that the writer wanted to foreground, so it’s good to make a note of this and to think about why this information has been foregrounded. Often the first part of the sentence is also the subject of the sentence (‘The boy knocked on the front door’), but sometimes writers put other information first, such as information about time or place (At six o’clock sharp, the boy knocked on the front door).

You may also make a note of words and phrases that come after the verb and that tell us information about where, when, how or why something happened.

It’s also useful to think about who is doing what to whom (transitivity). For example, you might note any instances of the ‘passive’ construction, as this foregrounds the person or thing that is having something done to them, not the person or thing that is actually doing it.

You can also look at the cohesion of the text - how ideas are joined together (eg reference items, conjunctions).

Look also at the general structure of the sentences: are they simple or compound/complex sentences? For example, Roald Dahl is a master of short sharp sentences consisting of a single clause. He will often write a series of such sentences, and then complete the paragraph with a slightly longer sentence that seems to summarise the information that has come before. This makes for a very satisfying rhythm when you read the text out loud.

In Column 4, make notes about lexical choices (words and their meanings), idioms and literary techniques

Think about the kinds of words the writer has chosen, and note any words that you will discuss with your students. These can be words that have interesting meanings or forms, or words from which you can draw a rich inference.

Look also for patterns in the kinds of words in the passage. For example, do the particular word choices work together to help build a particular image? Do the word choices work together to build a particular kind of atmosphere or feeling? Is there a series of action verbs (which could help create a fast paced action passage)? Are there nominal groups with particular kinds of describing words?

Look also for idioms, and for literary techniques such as metaphor or simile.

In Column 5, consider the notes you have already made in the other columns. Make notes about what you think the writer was trying to achieve with these word choices.

Consider the overall effect or impact of the word choices. Make notes on how the reader is made to feel by these words, and how the reader is made to think (the inferences that the reader will draw from the passage).

This column is in some ways the most important, as you will use it to frame the way you talk about the text with your students.

A note of caution though: Be careful not to over-interpret, or to make interpretations of the text that you cannot back up by showing the students the precise words that led you to this interpretation. Be brief.

Step 3: Read through your completed template and write a brief summary

By the time you have filled in your template (Step 2), you will feel that you know your text very well, and that you have been thinking about the text in a fairly microscopic way. Now it is time to go back to the big picture.

Your summary may be quite similar to the kinds of things you wrote in Step 1, when you made some very general notes about what stood out in the text. But it is still important to do this summary, as this will frame your teaching.

A good way to do this is to copy everything you wrote in Column 5 onto a new page. Then edit it until you have a set of things you can say about the text which will give your students a clear idea of how a literate person feels and thinks when they read this text.

Step 4: Devise some teaching goals and some focus for the study of this text

A basic teaching goal is to get your students to be able to read your focus text at 90+% accuracy. You should have comprehension, spelling and writing goals as well.

For your comprehension goals, think about how you want your students to be able to think about this text. Your students need to know more than just how to understand the meanings of the individual words. They need to know about the inferences that a literate reader will make from this writing. They also need to be able to recognise what kind of text it is – for example, is it a character description, an action sequence, does it represent the problem or complication in a story?

For spelling goals, think about which words are suitable for your students. Are there any common spelling patterns, or patterns repeated within the text? Are there any patterns that you can relate to previously studied words?

Writing goals will vary greatly according to the age and literacy levels of your student group. For younger students, your goals may relate mostly to handwriting and to reproducing the text in Joint Reconstructed Writing. With all students, you may choose to get the students to write their own text modeled on all or part of the passage you have studied. You may choose to focus on specific techniques such as writing metaphors or similes.