The Text Analysis Process

The following extract is taken from award-winning PETAA Book Teaching with Intent 2: Literature-based literacy teaching and learning, written by Bronwyn Parkin and Helen Harper, published 2019. 

Introduction

Before we start using a text in class, we need to do some work to become well acquainted with it. We need to know how we're going to approach the text with our students and what we're going to say about it. Most importantly, we need a very clear idea of what language resources it offers us. As well as thinking about the broad elements, such as genre, themes, characters, settings and plot), we also need to think carefully about how the author has put the words together.

Text analysis is a planning exercise. We share elements of what we find as teachers with our students, but this exercise is not for the students. It is to help us, the teachers, clearly understand how the text works so that we can then confidently apply it to the teaching sequence in the classroom.

The 'So what?' factor

Good narrative writers work hard to draw us into other people's worlds and motivations. When they succeed, their stories can make us laugh, or they might make us feel sad; can make us identify with characters, or thoroughly dislike them; can make us feel suspense, or surprise. At the end of the story we might feel like we've been on an emotional roller-coaster ride.

To get students to appreciate how writers do this, it's not enough to be able to name the grammatical parts of a text, to highlight the nouns or verbs or adjectives. On its own, grammatical analysis won't show us how the text works, although it's an important first step. Once we have identified the grammatical and structural features of a text, we need to think about how we will talk about the job that these verbs or adjectives or extended noun groups are doing: to figure out how authors have used their words to achieve these effects. We need to see the grammar, and then ask ourselves, 'So what?'.

The key to talking successfully about a text is being able to draw children's attention simultaneously to the actual wording of the text and to how the author's word choices impact on us as readers.

Overview of the text analysis process

We propose a three-step process for analysing the text of a whole picture book, or selected focus passage from a short story or novel.

• Step 1: work at text level (story, passage).
• Step 2: work at passage level (paragraphs, sentences, words).
• Step 3: set our teaching and learning goals.

At Step 1, we begin the process at text level, thinking about the text as a whole. To use an analogy, this is a bit like looking at the landscape from the air. We notice the broad layout: the roads, the infrastructure, perhaps sections of fields, trees, or a vineyard. Looking at a text and seeing the broad layout helps us to think about its structure, and about meaning-making and what that has to offer readers.

At Step 2, we're working at passage level, thinking about where it fits in the overall text and about its internal structure. Continuing our analogy, we have zoomed in from the bird's-eye view to observe more closely just one discrete section of the landscape, such as the vineyard. Looking at the passage, we think about each paragraph and sentence, and why the author might have included them. What meaning do they make? What meaning would be missing if they were left out?

Then we zoom in further, to examine the vines in each row, looking closely at the performance of each plant, admiring the quality of the grapes. Within each sentence, we think about word choice, and why the author has selected these particular words and this grammar. 

At Step 3, we decide our teaching and learning goals, based on our text-level and passage-level analysis.

In summary

Text analysis is key to the success of our teaching sequence. Spending time doing a thorough analysis at the beginning means we have thought through what literate resources are available at all levels (from text structure to the careful choice of words), and we have thought about the 'So what?' (the effect that these choices have on the reader). Text analysis provides learning goals from reading right through to writing.