Informational Reading

1. Informational Reading Megan Miller

2. What? • Informational, or expository, text communicates facts about the natural or social world (Duke 2006) • Informational texts tend to be more complex, diverse and challenging than narrative texts and understanding them requires more abstract thinking (Sadler 2001; Alvermann and Eakle 2003; Fisher and Frey 2004) • It is important to integrate comprehension instruction into content-area teaching, particularly for adolescents

3. What? • Torgeson et al. (2007) make the following recommendations for improving adolescent literacy instruction in content areas • Provide explicit comprehension strategies instruction throughout the day • Include plenty of open, sustained discussion of reading content • Hold high standards for text, conversation, questions, and vocabulary • Build motivation and engagement with reading • Teach essential content knowledge

4. What? • Informational Text Structure • Information texts use a limited number of organizational structures, including description, compare-contrast, cause-effect, problem/solution, and time order • See Information Text Structures and Signal Words chart on page 683

5. What? • Graphic Organizers – see pgs 684 & 685 • Because they are concrete representations, graphic organizers provide a means for students to • Record information about underlying text structures • See how concepts fit within text structures • Focus on the most important ideas in the text • Examine relationships among text concepts • Recall key text information • Write well-organized summaries • (Armbruster et al. 2001; Trabasso and Bouchard 2002)

6. What? • Considerate Texts • Facilitate comprehension and learning • Three overlapping features characterize and help define considerate text (Armbruster 1996) • Structural cues: aspects of text that suggest, indicate or emphasize its structure • Coherence: main ideas are explicitly stated, information limited to that which supports the development of a main idea, a logical ordering of events and ideas, the use of signal words to clarify relationships between events and ideas, and smooth transitions between topics • Audience appropriateness: the extent to which the text matches world knowledge that readers are likely to have

7. What? • Strategy Application • When comprehension instruction is tied to content are learning, it is important to read with a purpose in mind (Neufeld 2005) • Informational reading instruction be done in meaningful contexts and for authentic purposes • When comprehension strategies are closely linked with knowledge in a content are, students are more likely to learn the strategies fully, perceive strategies as valuable tools and use them in new learning situations

8. What? • Connecting to World Knowledge • Students learn new information from text by linking it with knowledge that stems from their pervious experiences • When reader’s world knowledge matches what is present in the text, they assimilate the new information, connecting it readily into their existing schema for the topic • When their world knowledge conflicts with information presented in the text, either readers accommodate by modifying their schema to fit the new information or they reject the information and maintain their pervious understanding (Prado 2004)

9. What? • Connecting World Knowledge Strategies • KWL charts • Pre-reading and predicting • Asking questions • Answering questions • Constructing mental images • Summarizing

10. What? • Multiple-Strategy Instruction Program: CSR • Encourages students to self-monitor their comprehension by using a set of four comprehension strategies • Preview • Click and clunk • Get the gist • Wrap up

11. What? • Reader Response • Enhance reader interactions with informational texts • Discussion oriented instruction: Questioning the Author teaches students to question what they read, to think, to probe, to associate, and to critique • Writing for content-area learning: important for students to make reading/writing connections with informational text by studying the authors’ writing styles, writing reviews of texts, making improvements to existing texts and producing their own informational texts (Duke 2006)

12. What? • Motivation and Engagement with Reading • Engaged readers are knowledge driven, socially interactive, and strategic • Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI): primary aim is to increase students’ reading engagement • Relevance • Choice • Collaboration • Success • Conceptual theme

13. What? • Web-Based Text • When a student lacks world knowledge it is easier for them to use web-based text as long as options for navigation and browsing are limited • Can be more engaging than traditional text • WebQuest: poses open-ended problems that students solve using internet resources • Organizes the learning task and prevents endless searching for information See strategy applications in web-based text chart on page 697

14. Why? • Builds content knowledge and vocabulary • Capitalizes on students’ interests, curiosities, and experiences • Presents opportunities for students to develop areas of expertise • Prepares students for the types of texts they will read most frequently as adults • Supports students in both answering and raising questions • Serves as a tool for both solving and posing problems • Duke 2004, 2006

15. When? • Primary grade students need increased instructional time with informational text • Use age appropriate texts that appeal to students’ natural curiosity • After grade 3 it is important to help students expand their knowledge in content areas such as science and math • No single test captures the complexity of comprehension, the best idea is to use a variety of methods • See the Comprehension Assessment: Response Formats chart on page 701

16. How - QAR • Questions-Answer Relationships (QAR) • Research based method and language framework to enhance student’s ability to talk about answer comprehension questions • Analyze differences between questions with answers in the text and those with answers in student’s background knowledge or experiences • Four categories: • Right there • Think and search • On my own • Author and me

17. How-Summarizing • Summarizing • Paragraph shrinking • Identify who or what a paragraph is mostly about • Identify the most important information about the who or what • Shrink all the information into one main-idea statement of 10 words or less

18. HoW-CSR • Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) • Before Reading: Preview, scan, brainstorm what you want to know, predict what you will learn • During Reading: click and clunk, get the gist • After Reading: Wrap up, ask and answer questions, review what you learned • Click and clunk: words or concepts whose meanings are understood “click”, words or concepts they don’t understand “clunk” • Get the gist: Identify the most important ideas in the reading

19. How-QtA • Questioning the Author (QtA) • 3 goals for QtA lesson planning • Identify the major understandings and potential obstacles in the text • To segment the text or determine where to stop reading and initiate discussion • Develop initiating queries and potential follow up queries See QtA queries and discussion moves charts on pages 734 and 735 as well as lesson scrip on 736-738

20. How-CORI • Concept Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) • Activating background knowledge • Questioning • Organizing graphically • Structuring story • Summarizing • Goal is to increase engagement and motivation to read through interest, ownership, social interaction, confidence, and content mastery • See charts for goals and motivational practices on pages 740 and 741

21. Conclusion • Students’ success or failure in school is closely tied to their ability to comprehend informational text • Students need to develop skills to read, interpret and understand informational text that is often associated with content area learning in relation to their currently held background knowledge • “Middle and high-school students spend most of their time in content-area classes and must learn to read expository, informational, content-area texts with greater proficiency” (Torgensen et al. , 2007)