Helping Students Understand Text Structure in Reading Comprehension

What the Research Says

We began our series about teaching reading comprehension by looking at text-specific knowledge, one of Hoot’s five reading comprehension focuses. We’ll now explore the next instructional focus, text structure.

Timothy Shanahan, a former founding director of the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Literacy, writes on his website: 

“Teaching kids to recognize how authors have organized a text and to use this information to guide one’s thinking about the text has proven to be a powerful tool even with younger kids. (...) It reveals the author’s purpose and allows one to focus attention better on key information – the content.” (Shanahan, 2019)

Text structure is the frame that gives shape and organization to a text. Studies show that recognizing structure patterns helps readers:

• Understand the author's purpose
• Think critically about the content
• Locate information
• Understand cause and effect
• Improve recall, predictions, and overall comprehension

Text structure provides important cues for readers, and helping students identify and recognize those cues is an integral part of skilled reading.

Why Text Structure Should Be a Part of Reading Intervention

Schools that use a structured literacy approach to instruction have incorporated the study of diverse forms of text in their curriculum. However, students who benefit from reading tutoring often have gaps in their understanding of text structure patterns. They can experience difficulty in other subject areas because informative texts and textbooks, by nature, require some knowledge of text structure to be well understood.

One-to-one instruction allows for an up-close examination of how a student navigates the features of a text to build knowledge and derive meaning. The tutor can intervene and help the student develop better habits, like taking time to read the caption accompanying an image. Tutoring also provides the opportunity to get more texts in front of children, including texts that are different from the ones they are currently engaging with in their classrooms. This is why text structure instruction and practice should occur in reading intervention, even if the student is still working on decoding.

Hoot Reading’s Approach to Text Structure Instruction

Students whose tutoring is focused on text structure are explicitly taught to critically examine and utilize different fiction and non-fiction texts in the Hoot Library, including poems, fables, traditional stories, informational texts, and graphic novels.  

Tutors use prompts and questions to identify structures and features that can occur across texts of similar genres and sub-genres. The page above is from the book “Travel to Australia” by our partners at Lerner Publishing. The tutor and student work to link the information they discover from this map to existing knowledge on previous pages, using the page's text features and overall structure.

A Hoot tutor will:

Discuss text features

In a non-fiction text like this, text features like a table of contents or glossary can guide readers on what information they’re likely to find and where it’s located. There may also be text features on a specific page worth discussing. For example, the tutor may say, “This is a map of Australia. When we look at the map, how can we tell what the symbols on the map mean? Does the map tell us anything else besides the names of important cities?”

Work with the student to build a situation model

A situation model can link information about Australia as the tutor and student read. When new information appears, the tutor uses targeted prompts and supports the student as they identify the latest information and discuss how it links to previous details, creating a mental map. For example, “On this page, what else did we learn about Australia? Does it relate to the information we learned on the previous page, or is it something new?”

Prompt reflection

After reading, the tutor prompts the student to reflect on the text structure and how it helped them understand the information better. The tutor may ask, “Did we learn what we thought we would from this book?” and, “This book is part of a series! What would you expect to learn in a book from the same publisher called ‘Travel to France?’

As the student maps related information, their knowledge of the topic and ability to recognize specific patterns across texts deepen. This will help them be a more strategic reader in the future. 

Stay tuned as we continue our series on reading comprehension skills. Next, we will explore how Hoot teaches vocabulary!

Interested in how Hoot Reading provides full-spectrum structured literacy tutoring? Contact us to find out more.