Making Connections

What are text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections?

They are three kinds of link a reader makes while reading. A text-to-self connection links the book to something in your own life. A text-to-text connection links it to another book, film or story you know. A text-to-world connection links it to something happening outside your life — history, news, how people behave generally.

The three-way framing became widespread in primary classrooms through the comprehension-strategy work of the 1990s, particularly Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann's Mosaic of Thought (1997), which popularised teaching these strategies explicitly rather than assuming good readers pick them up.

Why does making connections help comprehension?

Because comprehension is mostly a background-knowledge problem. When a reader has something to attach a new event to, they hold onto it, predict from it and infer around it. When they have nothing, the words go past correctly decoded and completely unabsorbed. A connection is a child manufacturing the missing attachment point on purpose.

The catch is that this only works if the connection is relevant. An irrelevant connection does not just fail to help — it actively pulls attention away from the text, which is why the next section is the most important one on this page.

How do you stop children making shallow connections?

This is the reason making connections has a poor reputation, and it is entirely fixable. The shallow version sounds like: "This is about a dog. I have a dog." True, useless, and it takes the discussion straight out of the book.

Three things fix it, in order of how much they help:

1. Connect to how it felt, not to what happened. Change the question from "what does this remind you of?" to "when have you felt like that?" That single rewording removes most of the noise, because feelings connect where objects do not.
2. Make them finish the sentence. A connection is not done until they have said "… and what is the same is …" Most shallow connections cannot survive that clause, and the child works that out themselves.
3. Ask what is different too. This is the step that turns it back into reading. Naming the difference forces them to look again at what the text actually says, which is precisely where a wandering connection was taking them away from.

How do you teach making connections?

1. Read the passage first, with no task. Connections made while hunting for connections are always worse.
2. Model one of yours, including the part that does not match.
3. Fill the top box together — the moment from the book. Getting this precise is half the battle; "the bit where he is sad" is not a moment.
4. Everyone writes their own bottom box, privately, before anyone shares.
5. Talk in pairs about same and different, then take two or three to the class.

Sentence stems that actually work

• When … happened, it reminded me of the time I …
• I know how … feels here, because …
• What is the same is …, but what is different is …
• This is like … except that …
• Because I have …, I think … is going to …

The last one is worth pointing out to children explicitly: it is a connection being used to predict, which is the point of the whole strategy.

Which year groups is this for?

From Year 2, with the caveat that younger children need the moment from the book chosen for them — give them the box already filled in and let them supply only the second half. From Year 4 they can find their own moment, and from Year 5 the "what is different" step should carry as much weight as the connection itself. One sensitivity worth holding in mind across all ages: text-to-self invites children to share real life, so keep the sharing voluntary and let anyone who prefers it make a text-to-text connection instead.