Mastering Textual Analysis and Concept Mapping Techniques

Posted on Nov 1, 2025 in Primary Education

Essential Skills for Effective Communication

Developing strong communication skills involves several key textual competencies:

  • Adequacy: Knowing how to choose the appropriate variety (dialect/standard) and register (general/specific, formal/familiar, objective/subjective) for each situation.
  • Consistency: Knowing how to select relevant information and structure knowledge effectively.
  • Cohesion: Learning to connect the different phrases that form a text (using pronominal forms, punctuation, conjunctions, prepositions, etc.).
  • Grammar and Spelling: Knowing the phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical rules of the language to construct clear and precise sentences. This includes knowledge of sound/spelling correspondence.
  • Arrangement in Space: Learning how to format a document or letter (conventions, margins, headers, etc.).

Constructing a Concept Map

Procedure for Developing a Concept Map

Here are the steps of the general procedure to construct a concept map:

  1. Read a text and identify words that express the main ideas or key concepts. Focus on the most relevant or important information, not excessive detail.
  2. Underline the identified words, ensuring they are the most important and that nothing is missing or superfluous. These words are usually nouns, common nouns, or scientific/technical terms.
  3. Identify the general topic or theme and write it at the top of the conceptual map, enclosed in an oval or rectangle.
  4. Identify the subtopics: What does the text say about the main topic or subject matter? Write them on the second level, also enclosed in ovals.
  5. Draw the corresponding connections between the theme and subthemes.
  6. Select and write the descriptor (linking phrase) for each of the connections that have just been drawn.
  7. At the third level, post the specifics of each idea or item, enclosed in ovals.
  8. Trace the connections between the subtopics and their specific aspects.
  9. Write the descriptors for this third level.
  10. If directionality is needed, draw arrowheads on the corresponding connectors.

Elements of Narrative Writing

Narrative presents human events outside the private experience of the writer, though the writer might appear within the text.

Effective narration requires including characters with experiences that move us to a world unfamiliar to us. Character information must detail not only physical attributes but also personality, allowing us to imagine clearly how those characters are.

Using Summary Tables

The summary table is a tool for understanding information derived from a text. It is a form of visual representation used to explain or suggest a theme.

Textual Relationships Between Concepts

We identify three types of relationships between the ideas of a text:

  • Superordinate Relations
  • Coordinated Relations
  • Subordinate Relations

Superordinate Relations

Superordinate relations are established between an idea that is more general or dominating another. For example, the concept mammal is more general and dominates the concept of a lion, because the lion belongs to a much more general or comprehensive group: mammals. If the mammal concept includes the lion concept, then mammal has a superordinate relationship with respect to lion.

Coordinated Relations

Coordinated relations are established between concepts that are equal because they share a category or common characteristics. For example, lion and tiger share the characteristic of eating their prey using their claws and teeth; the category that identifies these animals is that they are cats. Thus, lion and tiger maintain a coordinated relationship.

Subordinate Relations

Subordinate relations arise between concepts where one fits within the other. Returning to the example of the mammal and the lion: since the animal fits into the concept mammal, the lion has a subordinate relationship with the concept of mammal. Subordination is the inverse case of superordination.

  • In subordination, the particular case fits into the overall concept.
  • In superordination, the general case includes the particular case.