Whether we are teaching students to spell, building their reading fluency, improving reading comprehension, or consolidating their writing skills at the sentence, paragraph or whole text level, structural awareness is crucial. It is the silver thread that is woven through each and every one of these crucial literacy skills, and which inextricably links them together. By focusing on structural awareness, we enable learners to see and understand the underlying patterns and frameworks upon which information is organised, enabling them to break complex ideas at any level into manageable chunks. This builds the metacognitive skills required for monitoring their own learning and enables students to more easily and effectively transfer their learning to new contexts.
When we look below the surface, we can see the inherent structure of each and every level within the system. We can think of it this way: The word sum is to word structure, as the BubbleMap is to sentence structure, as the graphic organiser is to text structure.
Structural awareness is the cornerstone of skilled literacy development, but it is often overlooked. We believe this to be so important that we have decided to gift a chapter from The Sentence Studio, entitled "Structural Awareness Across the System" in the hope that it will spark discussion regarding the impact of structural awareness on student's literacy development. Click here to download the chapter, and please feel free to contact us with your thoughts and observations.
