As Fillmore and Snow (this volume, p. 13) point out, the Common Core State Standards “shift the emphasis in literacy instruction radically—away from words toward text, from accuracy toward interpretation, evaluation, and synthesis, and from summarization toward argumentation.” While they see this as a positive move, they point out that teaching students to succeed at these challenging tasks requires knowledge about language and how it works. Teachers need to know that texts are shaped by the language choices of their authors as they craft texts for different purposes and that exploring the ways that texts unfold can help students read with greater comprehension. In teacher education courses, participants often learn about text organization patterns such as sequence, description, cause and effect, comparison/contrast, or problem/solution, but these patterns seldom show up neatly in the authentic texts that students read. The advice given to recognize text structure seldom goes beyond a focus on very explicit connecting phrases (first, finally as markers of sequence) or conjunctions (because, if as signals of cause or condition) that are not always present in the texts that students read. This chapter introduces knowledge about language that can help teachers explore text structure with their students by analyzing how the words and phrases that begin a sentence shape and direct the unfolding of texts of different genres.

Texts are not arbitrary collections of sentences. Instead, each sentence in a text builds from what has come before and moves toward what will come next. Linguists who take a functional perspective on language have shown how sentence beginnings shape texts in ways that teachers can talk about with students to help them understand meaning and recognize how different genres are structured. Drawing on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL), they have used its functional grammar to engage students in meaningful talk about language in school texts (Derewianka, 2011; Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008).