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- Students with reading disabilities typically don't develop the knowledge of text structures on their own and have to be taught explicitly how to identify and how to use them.
- Understanding the structure of the reading material assists you with comprehension because the schema or structure of the reading makes certain predictions possible about what is to come; that knowledge, in turn, assists you with making connections among ideas.
- Two important features of text structure are the organization itself and the structural or visual cues present to clearly mark the organizational pattern.
- Differences in the type of structure used to organize textual information significantly affect the amount of information learned and remembered; certain types of structures facilitate recall more than others.
- Well-presented text uses a variety of structural or visual cues to make the organization clear.
- There is strong empirical evidence that readers' awareness of text structure is highly related to reading comprehension.
- Students with learning disabilities need to be taught explicitly how to analyze text and use this analysis strategically to assist with reading comprehension.
- Although in early grades the focus is on narrative texts, the demand for understanding expository text increases as students get older and teachers rely on textbooks to convey subject matter.
- Variations in text style across genres can result in difficulties in recognition of the text organization and misinterpretation of the text content.
- For all students expository texts are more difficult to process and monitor than narratives.
- Research has found that units separated from each other by four spaces rather than one resulted in significantly higher reading comprehension scores for low ability readers.
- In teaching organization patterns of text it is important to teach students to identify the macrostructure, as well as the signaling devices and cohesive devices present in the text.
- Macrostructure involves the more global aspects of structure, reflecting the shape of the story or chapter.
- For both narrative and expository text, teachers need to teach the macrostructure or text grammars explicitly.
- Several different kinds of visual cues, such as introductory paragraphs and topic sentences, may be used in well-presented text as signaling devices.
- Students with learning disabilities have greater difficulty with unmarked or implicit relationships that don't use signal words.
- The task for teachers is to help students make use of the structural cues available in well presented text and help them to figure out the patterns of poorly written text that do not have visual cues to assist.
- Text cohesion is built both within and between sentences; cohesive ties can be chained in a sequence of immediate ties, or they can be remote, separated by one or more sentences.
- Understanding the relations between sentences that have cohesive devices are among the higher level linguistic and problem solving skills required for text comprehension.
- In order to use text structure strategically to aid comprehension students have to activate their metacognitive resources and ask themselves some key questions about text structure.
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