Nicholas Bielby has qualified praise for a book on working with non-fiction texts

Two-and-a-half cheers for this book. It does something really useful, providing support in an area where many teachers may fear they lack expertise. Its linguistic sophistication (which is carried lightly) is matched by its practical classroom understanding.

It explains just enough and provides the right amount of support for the unsure teacher to feel confident, and the confident teacher to feel secure in developing his or her own activities. Technical terms are explained, and chapters three to eight illustrate the six relevant categories of non-fiction: recount, report, explanation, instruction, discussion and persuasion, by annotating a shared text at the text, sentence and word levels, and providing useful teacher’s notes, further text examples for extension work, photocopiable worksheets and imaginative follow-up writing activities. This will be a valuable book in any staffroom armoury.

So why the half-cheer reser-vation? The terms “cohesive devices” and “emotive language” are used without explanation, and “modal verbs” does not appear in the initial list of terms. The term “adverbial clause” is used to describe adverbial (prepositional) phrases.

I don’t like “a scientific phenomena”. I am troubled when children are invited, in the chapter on “Explanation”, to write about classroom routines to help a supply teacher. Surely such writing will tend to be a report, not an explanation? And I don’t like the slovenly writing in some of the shared texts. For example, the passage on the water cycle concludes: “The fallen water is evaporated, condenses into clouds and precipitates again and again, making a water cycle.” Surely “water evaporates” would be clearer? And if it does it all “again and again”, this is more than one water cycle. The abstract notion of a “cycle” is never explained.

Okay, so I’m nit-picking. But I would have liked this book to be worth three cheers.