Teaching Text Structure to Facilitate Comprehension

Name: Dularie Seunarinesingh

Title: Teaching Text Structure to Facilitate Comprehension

Date Submitted: April 30th, 2013

The pedagogical interest shown in text structure in the last few decades has been chiefly because of the focus of educational practitioners on assisting their students to succeed as writers. The belief is that a better understanding of texts and their structural attributes would inform instruction in not only writing but also reading comprehension. (Tardy & Swales, 2008). Written texts are known to follow forms of organization that structure them into recognizable patterns at the general level and influence their internal patterning at the local level. Knowledge of the different modes of rhetorical discourse and the typical ways in which writers organize text according to these modes to achieve their purpose, has been shown to influence the reading comprehension and writing production capabilities of students (Taylor & Beach, 1984; McGee & Richgels, 1985).

Students must therefore be aware of text structure if they are to be successful. However, the focus of educational practitioners in the area of reading comprehension has been focused, thus far, on teaching decoding skills and not on the explicit teaching of comprehension skills. Comprehending text requires more than the fundamental reading skills such as linguistic, syntactic and semantic knowledge, decoding skills, fluency skills and an adequate vocabulary. Many readers are able to fluently call out familiar words and quickly decode unfamiliar ones but yet experience problems with comprehending text (DeVries, 2008). In fact, according to Oakhill and Cain (2000), children experience comprehension problems even in the absence of word recognition problems and even when they possess adequate vocabularies as the skills for building an integrated representation of text is different from those required for word recognition. Yet, Dymock (2007; 2009), states that the explicit teaching of comprehension strategies is uncommon. Gaddy, Bakken and Fulk (2008), citing research conducted by several authors (Bakken, Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1997; Idol, 1987; Smith & Friend, 1986), stated that use of text structure improved students’ reading comprehension of narrative as well as expository text in elementary as well as secondary school. Attention must be focused then, on the explicit teaching of text structure as a reading comprehension strategy.

In their research on reading comprehension, Oakhill and Cain (2000), found sensitivity to text structure to be one of the critical skills which differentiated good and poor comprehenders. For example, they discovered that poor comprehenders could not readily integrate information that had been explicitly provided in the text to link separate sentences. In addition, they were unable to link situation models, that is, generalised memories, to information in the text to fill in missing details. Poor comprehenders were also unable to get the main idea and structure of a story. Williams, Hall & Lauer (2004), add that having text structure knowledge is necessary for readers since it helps them to organize content so that they are able to construct a mental representation of the text and thus get to the meaning of it. This all points to the significance of text structure knowledge to reading comprehension.