In recent years there has been a rising focus on the introduction of non-fiction text into the classroom. In particular, the English classroom. While working full-time at a school last year, a lot of the English meeting time was spent discussing what the texts should be across the different year levels. A debate occurred when it was raised whether or not we should cut down the amount of fiction we were getting the students to read.
We constantly ask the students to write to a prompt or about past experiences and they are able to do so with ease, but when it comes to writing an expository piece or factual essay students struggle and in some cases tend to give up. This was one of the arguments that was raised by one of my former colleagues and started to get people thinking. It was established that there needed to be an equal balance between the two. We could see from borrowing patterns that the students were borrowing a lot of fiction books on their own accord but required prompting to borrow factual books.
In order to broaden their horizons in both reading and writing styles, student’s exposure to the different types of text will provide them with the varying styles and voices that they were once not familiar with (Mosle, 2012). In doing so, my former school saw an increase in student engagement with different text types and it started to show in their own writing.
Reference:
Mosle, S. (2012). What Should Children Read? The New York Times. Retrieved from https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/what-should-children-read/?_r=0