Differences Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Knowing the differences between reading genres can help students understand the text better. Teachers should explicitly teach different text features for fiction text and non-fiction text so that students can use these tools to aid in comprehension. Here is a graphic organizer that shows differences in each genre:

Fiction versus Nonfiction Graphic Organizer

These text features can aid in comprehension. One text feature in particular that helps students, especially English Language Learners, is pictures. Pictures in fiction books illustrate the main events while pictures in non-fiction books provide a non-linguistic representation for a topic. In non-fiction texts, maps can show a location, labeled diagrams can give a better understanding of vocabulary, and photographs capture a moment that may have never been seen before. The pictures in books aid in comprehension, and so do headings or chapter titles. Both headings and titles provide the main idea of the next section before reading it, and this can help students activate prior knowledge and understand each section better. These are some text features that can help a student better understand the concept or story.

While many text features help comprehension, there are a few that may be confusing for English Language Learners. One feature of both fiction and non-fiction texts that is hard to grasp when learning a new language is the choice of vocabulary words. Some non-fiction texts do provide the reader with a glossary, but even these definitions can be hard to understand without teacher support. In fiction texts, there is not a glossary, so if a student does not know a word, they can use context clues to figure out the meaning. However, children who are learning a second language may not have the vocabulary to fully understand the rest of the sentence and come up with a synonym or definition for the unknown word on their own. This text feature may be hard to understand for English Language Learners.