The Many Styles of Written Language
In this last entry of our applied blog series, we’re shifting focus to how texts can vary in many different ways. For example, students may need to read from a textbook describing how volcanoes form over time. Those same students on the same day may need to also read William Shakespeare. Needless to say, the kind of language used in these two texts is going to be wildly different! Students might like one type of text, but they may heavily dislike another, which could exacerbate existing issues with reading enjoyment, described by Navkiran Dhaliwal’s article for Good E Reader: Study Finds Children’s Reading Enjoyment at Lowest Levels. Despite these differences and whether or not students enjoy one text versus another, they need to understand all these styles of language, which can prove difficult, especially for struggling readers.
From our experience, students who enjoy reading with the Cascade Format specifically comment how they enjoy that each sentence looks unique. Similarly, these students report being able to focus on the text more easily and remember what they read. As students encounter increasingly diverse texts, the Cascade Format can help them understand more about what makes each text unique.
Classroom Activity: Comparing Styles of Writing
The Cascade Format improves reading comprehension by visually cuing the structure of the text. This reduces the reliance on students’ grammatical knowledge and instead places the burden on the text presentation itself. One way for students to become more comfortable with different styles of writing is to help them understand more clearly how one style differs from the other. One activity that may help students solidify this skill is an explicit examination of how writing styles differ from author to author.
For example, the picture below shows how the writing styles between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince can be visually apparent.
- Provide students with several readings transformed into the Cascade Format using the Cascaded Explorer or Chrome Web Viewer.
- Instruct students to read for comprehension.
- After reading for comprehension, instruct students to reread while paying attention to the shapes of the sentences.
