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Text connections help students make meaning from what they’re reading by linking it to their background knowledge. But making these authentic connections doesn’t just build understanding. It also significantly increases the chances of them remembering what they read and making it a more memorable and meaningful experience.
Today, we’ll look at the types of connections students can make while reading a text. We’ll also provide tips for teaching this skill and answer some frequently asked questions about the topic.
Students can make several types of text connections to activate prior knowledge and link their experiences to new texts. Good readers often use all these types of connections to understand what they read, whether it’s in a single paragraph or a novel. These text connections include:
Text-to-self connections
Text-to-self connections let students relate their life experiences to something they’re reading through thoughts and feelings. This is often the easiest type of connection to teach. These connections provide familiar frameworks for students because they can connect events, characters, or themes in a text to their own lives.
Making text-to-self connections promotes retention and recall of that text. Information is more likely to stick when readers can anchor it to their personal experiences and memories. Some ways students can make text-to-self connections include relating to characters, recognizing emotions, sharing personal experiences, or giving their thoughts and opinions on the plot.
To teach text-to-self connections in the classroom, try:
Simple, concrete prompts: Ask questions like, “What does this story remind you of?” or “Can you relate to any of the characters in this story and why?”
Effective modeling: Show students how to make deeper connections and explain why these connections matter for understanding. For example, rather than saying “This character reminds me of myself,” model for them how to expand on that thought, like “This character reminds me of myself because she likes to make her friends laugh when they’re sad. It helps me understand why she’s a good friend.”
Relatable texts: Select books and texts with storylines that resonate with your students’ experiences. Choose ones that match their interests and cultural backgrounds when possible.
Text-to-text and text-to-media connections
Text-to-text connections happen when students relate something in a new text to something they’ve read or seen before in other media.
Some people add another category to the types of text connections you can make, called text-to-media. In this fourth category, students can connect a text to movies, television shows, songs, videos, interviews, or any other media. This connection can help students understand how themes, characters, or messages may be adapted across media formats.
To simplify the categories, we’ve chosen to incorporate text-to-media into the text-to-text bucket. We recognize that “text” can include more than just the written word. Some ways students can make text-to-text and text-to-media connections include recognizing similarities in a plot or storyline, comparing characters, noticing similar settings, or identifying common themes or messages.
To teach text-to-text and text-to-media connections in the classroom, try:
Purposeful pairings: Pick purposeful text pairs that students can read together that have similarities in characters, plot, or themes. Try the Newsela ELA Paired Text Collection to find ready-to-go activities, already paired for you!
Out-of-the-box analysis: Encourage students to go deeper than stating obvious similarities. For example, instead of saying “both stories have a girl main character,” ask them to analyze personality traits, character decisions, or what emotions both stories evoke.
Guided questions: Ask starter questions to get students thinking about text-to-text or text-to-media analysis, like “Does this text remind you of something else you’ve read?” or “How is this text different from other media you’ve encountered on the topic?”
Examining author and literary elements: Teach students about the authors of a text and have them consider how the author's perspective influences the literary elements used to create the story.
Comparing adaptations: Ask students to compare how characters, settings, and events are portrayed in different story adaptations. For example, you may have high schoolers read “Romeo and Juliet” and watch a stage production, and compare and contrast them.
Using visuals: Read picture books, graphic novels, or informational texts with charts, graphs, or pictures, and analyze how the visuals complement the written content.
Text-to-world connections
Text-to-world connections happen when students relate something in the text to something in the world around them. This is often the hardest connection for students to make. It relies less on personal experiences or feelings and more on background knowledge and observations.
When raiders can relate the text to their knowledge of the world around them, it boosts their understanding of the topic and helps them understand how the text fits into a societal or global context.
These connections encourage critical thinking about the text’s significance and increase engagement by making it more relevant. Some ways students can make text-to-world connections include analyzing current events, recognizing a historical context, and identifying cultural or social issues in a theme.
To teach text-to-world connections in the classroom, try:
Thoughtful prompts: Ask students questions like “Do the events from this text also happen in the real world, and how do you know?” or “Does this remind you of any event or issue happening in the world today?”
Using informational texts: Analyzing informational and nonfiction texts can help students make text-to-world connections because they include real people, places, and events.
Acknowledging the challenge: Remind students (and yourself!) that making text-to-world connections can be tricky. If they don’t get it right away, use more modeling, prompts, scaffolds, and practice opportunities to help them get more comfortable making these kinds of connections.
[What makes a “good” text connection?](id-good)
The best text connections enhance students’ understanding of the text and help them draw meaning from it. When students start connecting with texts, they may make surface-level connections.
For example, when reading an article called “Is gaming good for kids?”, students might make the surface-level connection, “I play Fortnite, just like the person in the article.” These connections are fine when students start learning the skill.
But once they understand the concept, you should encourage them to dig deeper. Using the same article, you might prompt students to tell you how they feel about playing a video game.
Additional questions could lead students to make deeper connections. They might say, “It’s really exciting to try to beat a hard level in a video game. When I do it, I feel proud of myself and like I want to do it again. I understand why other people also like to play video games if they feel that way.”
When students think about experiences, feelings, and different perspectives, they’re creating meaningful connections to the text.
When assessing if students are making “good” connections, you can use a few factors for analysis, such as:
How relevant is the connection to the text?
Do the students show depth in their insight?
Does the connection use evidence from the text?
Does this connection affect student understanding?
Does this connection clarify why it matters in context?
You can also ask students to self-evaluate if they’re making good text connections. Prompting them to ask questions like “Does this help me understand the text better?” or “Is this just about me, or does it reveal something about the text?” can help them consider the depth of their analysis.
[Why do students need to learn how to connect ideas in a text?](id-why)
Working memory, a part of the brain that processes new information, has a limited capacity. It functions better when it can rely on “familiar, organized information from long-term memory.” Students struggle to process information when the cognitive load is too high. This leads to poor information retention, decreased understanding, and a lack of focus.
When students connect a text to prior knowledge, they use those long-term memory schemas to lower the cognitive load. Doing so makes it easier to understand and retain new information and skills in the classroom.
When students make text connections, they can better understand the author’s intended message and purpose. With fiction, making connections helps students understand a character’s personality, motivations, or the events in the plot. With nonfiction, connections help students learn the author’s purpose and how the text is relevant or timely.
[How can you adapt teaching text connections for different grade levels and learners?](id-differentiation)
Your students enter the classroom with different home lives, cultural backgrounds, and learning abilities. To help them learn ELA skills, like making text connections, you can account for these differences and differentiate your instruction and practice opportunities to meet their needs.
Making text connections by grade band
Students can start making text-to-self connections as early as preschool. If they have some verbal communication skills or experience with a topic, they have the tools to make those types of connections.
Their earliest connections are often surface-level. As students build more background knowledge and learn other literacy skills, they can work their way up to making deeper connections with texts. Here are some ways you can help students at each grade level grow their text connection skills:
Early elementary (K-2): Focus on simple emotional and personal text-to-self connections. Support with illustrated organizers, sentence stems, and discussions.
Upper elementary (3-5): Students start making comparisons between texts and explore basic text-to-world examples. Support with Venn diagrams, sticky notes, and shared writing activities.
Middle school (6-8): Students begin to analyze deeper messages, patterns, and the author’s intent. Use discussion prompts, written responses, and paired texts to support.
High school (9-12): Emphasize synthesis, critique, and literary analysis. Encourage students to write comparative essays, make research-based connections, or engage with Socratic seminars.
Make text connections across subjects
Text connections aren’t just for ELA. They seamlessly integrate into other subjects, making learning more relevant and connected to students’ lives. You can teach these skills across subjects. Try it with these lesson ideas:
Science: Have students read an article about extreme weather. Then, ask students if they’ve ever experienced an extreme weather event or seen one on the news. Finally, link their observations to data collection or modeling of weather events.
Social studies: Ask students to read a first-person historical account or primary source. Then, ask them, “Does this remind you of any event or issue happening in the world today?” Encourage comparison of motivations, outcomes, and perspectives.
Math: When working with real-world problems, ask students, “When have you used math like this outside of school?” Students can then reflect on activities like shopping, measuring, or estimating time.
Support text connection practice for English Language Learners and special education students
You can support multilingual learners and students with individualized education plans (IEPs) as they learn how to make text connections. Try these techniques and scaffolds to get started:
Leverage home languages: Allow students to make text-to-self connections in their home language before translating their ideas into English.
Provide visual and cultural support: Use visual prompts, labeled sentence grams, and pair shared texts with culturally relevant examples from students’ backgrounds.
Use support resources: Offer word banks, sentence frames, discussion stems, and bilingual texts or media during reading and assessments.
Offer flexibility: Provide visual supports, allow for verbal or pictorial responses, and include support resources that fit your students’ individual needs.
Use inclusive texts: Choose texts that reflect diverse cultures, backgrounds, and voices. Pair them with discussion prompts that invite personal, community, or cultural reflection.
[13 tips to help students connect ideas while reading](id-tips)
Use these tips to help your students learn how to make connections in texts they read:
1. Assess students’ level of background knowledge
If students don’t know anything about a subject or topic, it’ll be harder for them to make connections. You can do pre-reading activities before students start a text to understand what they know about the topic.
You may ask questions like, “What do we know about [TOPIC]?” Or you could ask students if they know what key vocabulary words from a text mean. If you find gaps in their background knowledge, you can fill them in before you ask students to make connections to a text.
2. Model your connections
Modeling helps teach almost every literacy skill. Teaching students how to make text connections is no exception. Start by displaying the text you’re reading if possible, or make sure students have an individual copy to follow along.
Use think-alouds to show them what you do before, during, and after reading to make connections. Emphasize connections that truly add to understanding the text and explain why some connections are more helpful than others. Model how to revise vague connections into more meaningful ones.
For example, if you’re reading “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum in class, you might model your connections like this:
Text-to-self: “When Dorothy says she wants to go home, I know what she means. Sometimes, even on a fun vacation, I feel homesick.”
Text-to-text: “Reading this book reminds me of the time I went to see ‘Wicked’ onstage. It’s the prequel to this story and tells us more about the characters’ backstory.”
Text-to-world: “When Dorothy gets swept away in the tornado, I think about our weather. Kansas gets many tornadoes, but we don’t.”
3. Ask guiding questions
You can help students think more deeply about the content of a text by asking guiding questions. You can ask them out loud or share them on the board during whole-class discussions.
Other options include adding them to worksheets, small-group discussion instructions, or other independent work materials. Some questions you may ask to guide students when making connections include:
Text-to-self questions:
Does this story remind you of any experiences you’ve had?
Can you relate to any of the characters in the story? Why?
Have you ever had to solve a problem like the one in the story? How did you do it?
Text-to-text
Does this text remind you of another book you’ve read? Why?
How is this text different than other books or articles you’ve read?
Does this text remind you of any other media, like a song, movie, or television show? Why?
Text-to-world
Do events that happened in the text also happen in the real world? How do you know?
Can you think of a historical event related to what happened in the text? How do they connect?
How are the events in the text similar to or different from events that happen in the real world?
4. Schedule pause points for whole-class reading
When you preview your mentor texts, mark significant points where you can pause and emphasize connections. While students can make connections at any point in a text, identifying natural breaks helps streamline the lesson. It also gives you the best opportunities to model connecting ideas in the text.
5. Make a mind-body connection
Many tips and tricks exist to help students memorize information and facts, like mnemonic devices. While those same techniques don’t work for finding connections, you can incorporate gestures or physical body movements.
The mind-body connection helps students recognize and remember when they find certain connections in a text. This technique works best for young readers. You can use the following signals to have students identify connections while they read:
Text-to-self: Point to your chest
Text-to-text: Mome opening and closing a book
Text-to-world: Point away from your body
6. Use anchor charts to promote understanding.
Create anchor charts with your students to help them better understand how to make text connections. Keep them simple with a definition, sentence frame, and illustration for each. Try it with one of your mentor texts, and then hang the chart in your classroom for reference throughout the year.
7. Start a connections journal
You can have students start a journal to keep track of the connections they make while they read. This is an enjoyable and helpful activity for students who do more independent or silent reading. Encourage students to include the following items in each journal entry:
Name of the text
Fiction or nonfiction
Type of connection(s)
Textual evidence from the story or article
Description of why students made the connection
These journals can include illustrations, stickers, pasted-in notes, or other artistic additions to strengthen the connections they make. You can also use connection journals for small-group and whole-class reading. Encourage students to record the connections they make as a class in addition to the ones they find on their own.
8. Try connection sentence frames
Students may understand the concept of making connections but struggle to articulate them. You can use connection sentence frames with blanks that they can fill in to express their ideas. This exercise can help scaffold students to start expressing connections on their own. Try sentence frames like:
“This reminds me of…”
“A similar situation happened when…”
“This connects to the world because…”
“This helps me understand…”
“Because of this, I realized…”
You can also move beyond surface-level connections by asking things like “How does this help you understand the character or theme?” or “Why is this connection important to understanding the text?”
9. Add music and other media
When making text-to-text/text-to-media connections, you can encourage students to connect a text to songs. This activity works well for fictional stories. It helps students connect the storyline in a song to the plot or characters.
For example, students might connect a fairy tale to Taylor Swift’s song “Love Story.” They may connect the line “You’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess” to the characters. You may also ask students to compare texts and movies, TV shows, or online discussions about the topic.
10. Use graphic organizers
Graphic organizers give students a visual way to categorize information and build a strong foundation for making text connections. Look for organizers with prompts and sentence frames to help students distinguish between connection types.
Using bookmarks and sticky notes is an excellent way to reinforce text connections, especially when students can't write in or mark up the physical text. Try bookmarking pages or paragraphs that all fit one connection type. You can also use color-coded sticky notes that correspond to specific text connections.
With Newsela ELA, you can also use our annotation or guided highlighting features to have students mark evidence for text connections using different colors for text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world.
12. Teach one type of connection at a time
When teaching literacy skills, the advice is usually to show students how they all work together. When teaching text connections, though, you can focus on teaching just one type at a time. It doesn't matter which of the three you're teaching. It's still the same skill, just different parts of it.
Start with text-to-self, which is usually easiest for students to grasp. Then work up to text-to-world connections, which are the hardest to master. Eventually, as students understand the concept, you can ask them to provide examples for all three types simultaneously.
13. Stress how different people make different connections
Different people can draw unique connections to the same text. There aren’t “right” and “wrong” answers when making connections. Be sure to stress to your students that all their connections can be valid, even if they’re different from one another.
Consider an after-reading partner discussion that encourages students to share their connections. This allows them to provide diverse perspectives on the same texts.
Making text connections with Newsela
With Newsela ELA, it’s easy to help students make connections with a variety of relevant, real-world content. With over 15,000 literary and informational texts, there's something for every lesson.
We have collections that are perfect for teaching students how to make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections:
Our ELA in the Real World collection helps students draw connections between the world and the topics and skills they learn in ELA class.
Our Life Skills Through Literature collection helps students make text-to-self connections by using fictional texts to explore their feelings and real-life situations they may encounter as they grow up.
Our Debate and Discussion collection encourages students to make text-to-text connections with content on the same topics to form an argument and support it with textual evidence.
In addition to these great collections and more, you also get access to helpful resources and scaffolds, many of them powered by your AI-assistant, Luna, like:
Checks for understanding embedded within texts. They allow students to slow down and make sure they understand what they’ve read before moving forward in a text.
A text leveler that allows you to supplement your Newsela lesson plans with other content to support your students' learning, at the appropriate difficulty level for your grade band.
Text translations that let you provide paragraph-by-paragraph support by putting content into over 40 languages.
Customizable graphic organizers to help you activate background knowledge and make connections more easily.
Search filters that let you find content by reading skill, maturity, topic, standard, and more.
Reporting features that help you identify classroom trends and patterns and look in on students’ skills progress with ease.
Not a Newsela customer yet? You can sign up for Newsela Lite for free and get access to helpful scaffolds to teach students how to make text connections.
Everything you need to accelerate learning across ELA, social studies, and science
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