Text-Self / Text-Text / Text-World

Connections
Description

Skilled readers and learners are constantly making connections: they recognize the interrelated
nature of knowledge and actively note themes and similarities as they emerge. Students can learn
how to make effective connections, and how to group these connections into three categories.
Text-to-self connections relate ideas learned in a text with a students own experiences or ideas.
Text-to-text connections are recurring words or ideas within a book. Finally, text-to-world
connections are links between ideas in a text and other domains of knowledge.

Benefits

Making connections helps students to deepen their learning by appreciating the ways in which
knowledge is interrelated and multifaceted. By developing broad networks of associations
around individual concepts, students increase their ability to retain and retrieve information.
Beyond the general benefits of making connections, each individual type of connection has its
own unique benefits. Text-to-self connections help students to engage emotionally with a text, to
relate to characters, and to enrich their conception of story details. Text-to-text connections help
students to identify themes and main ideas, and to notice characteristics of an authors writing
style or commonalities of writing in general across authors. Finally, text-to-world connections
help students to activate relevant background knowledge to inform their understanding of the
text, and to expand their appreciation of domains of interconnected knowledge.