Concept Mapping in the German Classroom

In his article "Teaching Learners to Think, Read, and Write More Effectively in Content Subjects" (2000), Richard Sinatra shows us to incorporate text structure and concept or cognitive mapping into teaching style. The article is aimed at secondary teaching so is presented in the context of expository text structure, but it can be adapted to any type of text.

Examining the text structure is important because it tells the reader what type of text it is by the format. Text structure arranges the important information into a certain format based on the type of text. Concept mapping helps readers to think about the information and to group it into categories that makes sense to them and hopefully builds connections between prior knowledge, information learned and teacher questioning. The teaching style should be student centered and allow students to construct their own knowledge. 

To implement this strategy, modeling must be done by the teacher. The teacher should ask questions and students will probably respond with a paraphrase or quote from the text. Teacher should remember to guide students toward answers but not provide the answers. 
After the teacher models a few different types of mapping the students move to guided practice. The author says it is helpful to group students at this point in the lesson so they can help each other construct knowledge and fill in the gaps in their individual learning. After they have constructed the map, students can be asked to then write an individual response based on the map.Once students master the mapping strategies they can apply them to the texts they read on their own.

Since so many different types of texts are used in the World Language classroom as illustrated by my previous post containing a text set, it is important to provide students with a way of making sense of material regardless of the format so that they can organize the material in a way to make later use of it for their own learning and producing artifacts such as writings about the readings.