What is textmapping all about????

Here is an overview of text mapping from the Text Mapping Project Site:

1. Textmapping is a graphic organizer technique that can be used to teach reading comprehension and writing skills, study skills, and course content. It is practiced on scrolls, which are an alternative environment to books. Textmapping and scrolls can be used strategically, but they are not strategies. They are enabling technologies - simple, basic tools which can be used for reading and classroom instruction. The same strategies that can be taught in books can be taught more clearly and explicitly by using scrolls and mapping.
   
   • Textmapping involves long paper scrolls, colored markers, and a spatially-descriptive form of marking called mapping.
   • It has seven key instructional benefits.
   • It is easy to learn and easy to implement in the classroom.
   • Implementation costs are very low.
   • It has been used with mainstream, ESL, and special needs classes at all levels, from elementary through college.
   
   
2. Textmapping enables teachers to clearly and explicitly model reading comprehension, writing and study skills in the course of regular classroom instruction.
   
   
3. Textmapping shines a light on the pre-reading process. It focuses more attention on, and spends more time with, the text itself - lingering on the page, delaying abstraction, forcing readers to engage in a more careful in-context comprehension of both the big picture and the details, and enabling teachers to explicitly and systematically model comprehension processes.
   
   
4. It is low-tech, easy to learn, easy to teach, requires no special equipment, and can be adapted easily and inexpensively for use in the classroom. All you need is access to a copier, tape or glue-stick, and colored pencils, markers, or crayons.
   
   
5. People commonly confuse Textmapping with Semantic Mapping, Concept Mapping, Story Mapping, and other so-called mapping techniques - all of which are actually diagramming techniques. For more on this, see a comparison of Textmapping to other graphic organizers.
   
   
6. Perhaps the best way to understand Textmapping is to make a scroll and map it yourself.
   
   
7. The Textmapping Project seeks to contribute to the improvement of reading comprehension skills instruction.
   

Note: Text mapping can be developed in conjunction with the Wheels for Literature Advanced Organizer which can be found at http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/teaching_techniques/wheelsli.html

Here is an excerpt from their site:

Wheels for Literature create an advance organizer that will support memory, attention and processing when reading short stories, novels, essays, plays and long poems. The wheels always have main ideas inside the wheel and specific information spiked around the outside of the appropriate wheel. Establishing the demands of the task in advance helps focus attention, support working memory and produce a review system. While reading, the basic information is recorded on the appropriate wheel as soon as encountered. The basic demands such as characters,setting and plot are always tracked but any other requirements such as examples of man versus nature can also be tracked by adding additional wheels.

The Wheels for Literature strategy is an adapted use of the wheel to meet the needs for literature assignments. The wheels provide a concise summary of the details and main ideas to remember. The wheel set-up depends on the type of literature that is being read.