Teaching Non-fiction?
But what does this actually mean?!

by Bobbie Neate

Wherever we teach there is quite rightly a demand that we should pay more attention to the reading and writing of non-fiction. However, my concern is whether teachers are really using the term non-fiction wisely and whether they really know what the term means.

We often think of non-fiction books as those which are 'true' or 'the ones full of facts'. These descriptions are too vague to be useful in teaching and aren't even really correct.

So what does 'non-fiction' actually mean?

Non-fiction means all those wonderful books that are not a story - not a made-up story. But herein lies the problem. Non-fiction, although commonly used, is actually a very unhelpful term for children because it covers such a vast range of texts. The 'true' books (if there are such things) and the 'fact' books are part of this vast range but they are only a small part of the spectrum.

Dictionaries, cookbooks, manuals, reports, letters, gazetteers, atlases, information texts (such as project books or textbooks on history or chemistry), encyclopaedias, myths and legends all come under non-fiction. Now all these books have their own genre and hence an accompanying language and layout.

There are basically four different kinds of book and for each there is a different way to tackle them effectively. The four types of book are -

• Narrative
  
• Instructional texts
  
• Reference
  
• Information

Once children begin to recognise these four basic types , we can teach them to read different texts in different ways, helping them to get the most out of each book.

Narrative
We read all fiction in the same manner - we start at the beginning of the book, we read all the words, on all the pages, until we get to the end of the text.

This strategy is effective for the genre but is cannot be transferred to other texts - or at least if you do you will not deal with that text in the most effective manner. After all, we do not read a cookbook from beginning to end if we want to find out how to cook lasagne and we don't read all the pages of an atlas if we want to know where Sydney is.

Instructional texts
This should be a very different reading strategy to reading narrative. Look at the books I have written or edited such as Water Experiments or Round the World Cookbook. These are laid out very differently to fiction books [or even information books]. They are designed so that the child is encouraged to use the most effective way of reading instructions.

We should read instructions very differently to reading fiction - it works in four stages:

• First, we skim read to get a general idea of how the instructions are written.
  
• Next we read the list of ingredients.
  
• We move our eyes to the first instruction. We read one instructions and our eyes come off the page - because we follow the instructions and actually turn something on or make something.
  
• After that our eyes find the page again and go forward to the next instruction.

Just think how different this is narrative reading.

Reference books
What are reference books? They are those we 'refer' to. Referring is a very similar to the strategy of scanning. We use a reference book just to look up the odd fact or confirm a supposition. Look at the design of reference books - e.g. the Reference Book of Water and Weather and the Encyclopaedia of British Wild Animals. They are laid out so that the reader can very quickly access information. You do not read an encyclopaedia from cover to cover - you think what you want to know and then search for one very small area of text.

Information books
These are chapter books with heading and sub-headings. They are read intensively with a question in mind. We might read a whole chapter or we might just read a small section, depending on our purpose.

We might, for instance, flick through the pages from back to front looking at the illustrations, looking for headings and read some of them - browsing.
Then we might flip again reading more text including the captions - surveying.
Then we would look at the contents page and look to see if this book suits our purpose.
If it does, then we would read one or two paragraphs under the heading looking for answers to our questions. If it did we would either stop before we read the whole chapter or we would read/skip on until we got to what we wanted - intensive reading.

My advice is that no child is too young to learn that there are different types of books and that there are different ways of reading them. Children enjoy the challenge of identifying one kind of text and saying to themselves
"Ah, this is an encyclopaedia, it is organised like this, so I read this book in this manner." Even if they can't read the small print they can role play the 'actions' to the reading process. They are never too young to know that some books are read from beginning to end and some books are skimmed from back to front, and some are read in sections.

There is firm evidence that flexible, effective reading strategies are most likely to be adopted by children if they practise them from early in their reading life-time. My books aim to help children and teachers achieve this.

Bobbie Neate is the Series Editor of Info Trail,
the non-fiction strand of Story Street.