#9 Fiction and Non-Fiction

Fiction 

and 

Non-Fiction

I chose the non-fiction book If You Lived with the Indians of the Northwest Coast by Anne Kamma and the fiction book Clamshell Boy  by Terri Cohlene to look at and compare. Each book is language based, gives some information about the Northwest Coastal Native Americans, challenging vocabulary, and has pictures. There are many differences between the two books.  The non-fiction book gives real facts about the Northwest Coastal people, and the fiction book is a story or a legend about the people of the Northwest. The fiction book is meant to entertain and the non-fiction is to inform. The non-fiction book has text features that are very different than a fiction book. It has a table of contents, index, glossary, captions, and loads of pictures. The fiction book has a beginning, middle, and end. You can pick up the non-fiction book and read a random page and learn something. You have to read the fiction book from cover to cover to make meaning.

Our ELL students face some difficulties and will need support with both types of texts. Clamshell Boy is a legend of how the first potlatch came to be for the Northwest Coastal Native Americans. First of all, it would be very important for our ELL students to understand that a legend is traditional story, usually of oral origin, that is handed down from generation to generation and popularly believed to have a historical basis. We need to be sure that our ELL students understand the vocabulary that they will encounter in the story, as with any fiction piece. We need to provide our students with background knowledge to understand the Northwest Coastal Native American culture in order to understand the story. They believed in spirits, and it would be important to have a discussion about this before reading. The pictures in a fiction book are a support feature to the ELL student. Often times these students rely on picture clues to help with comprehension.

We need to prepare our ELL students to understand how to work with and navigate through a non-fiction book. Non-fiction books can be very busy looking on the page, which can be overwhelming for an ELL student. There can be confusion on where to start begin reading on the page. First, we need to explicitly teach students about the text structure. Students need to learn how to use a table of contents, glossary, and index. Once that is taught then we can model how to get information from a non-fiction text by using these features. They then need to practice this skill. There are many text features in non-fiction text that will support our ELL students in their learning. Bold print is a visual cue that something is important or will be defined.  Non-fiction books have a lot of pictures and captions. The captions are short little sentences that are sometimes easier to read. ELL students will help make meaning from pictures and captions.  A glossary can be very helpful to an ELL student, this will help them to understand and define some of the unknown vocabulary. 



It is very important that we think about any difficulties that our ELL students may have with different texts. We need to try and give them all the tools and information to help them be successful readers, no matter the genre.