Constructing Meaning from Expository Text

Introduction

  • Dr. Amy Elliman is an associate professor of elementary and special education and part of a multidisciplinary program in literacy studies.
  • She worked with researchers like Doug and Lynn Fuchs and Don Compton during her PhD at Vanderbilt.
  • Her presentation focuses on constructing meaning from expository text, including strategies for vocabulary, inference generation, and text structure.

Personal Background and Experience

  • Amy Elliman has over 20 years of experience as a teacher, reading specialist, and administrator, working with special education students from pre-K to high school.
  • She started as an educational aide in Department of Defense Schools in Germany, teaching third and fourth grade.
  • She then taught a seventh-grade resource LD class, where she realized she lacked the necessary skills to help students like Clifton, who could only spell his name.
  • She self-taught phonics but recognized the need for proper pre-service training.
  • Elliman worked at a self-contained school for children with behavior disorders, where she found that many students struggled with comprehension due to a lack of background knowledge.
  • Students struggled to understand narrative, impacting their daily experiences.
  • She pursued a Master's at Vanderbilt to study behavior disorders and reading comprehension, followed by a PhD.
  • Her work focuses on interventions for children with behavior disorders and poor comprehension.
  • She is currently working in the PhD program at Middle Tennessee State University.

John Hattie's Meta-Analysis

  • John Hattie compiles meta-analyses to determine the effectiveness of educational programs and methods.
  • A meta-analysis compiles all studies in an area into one metric to determine if something works.
  • Hattie squashes together all the meta-analyses to determine what's more and less effective.

Interpreting Effect Sizes

  • Small effect (0.25-0.30): indicates an intervention might be publishable and have some practical implication for kids (dancing in the office).
  • Moderate effect (0.5): indicates an intervention could be very meaningful for children's lives (dancing in the street).
  • Large effect (0.8 or above): indicates an intervention is highly effective and should be widely implemented (dancing on the moon).

Hattie's Findings from Meta-Analyses

  • Learning styles have a low impact, teaching to learning styles does not help.
  • Phonics has a moderate impact, primarily studied with typical kids. Still very important though.
  • Reciprocal teaching involves teaching four strategies: predicting, summarizing, questioning, and clarifying.
  • Reciprocal teaching is a multi-component program and is very effective.
  • Student expectations are extremely important, emphasizing the impact of mindset and grit.
  • Teacher expectations impact student outcomes.

Challenges in Reading Comprehension

  • Only 31% of fourth graders and 24% of eighth-grade students score below a basic level of reading comprehension.
  • Only 50% of students who take the ACT are ready for college-level reading.
  • Students require developmental for college level reading.
  • The "fourth-grade slump" is a switch from learning to read to reading to learn, which has been pushed back to third or even second grade.
  • Only 3.6% of the day is spent on informational text, and only 1.9 minutes for students from low SES backgrounds.
  • The lack of sufficient knowledge development through informational text impacts reading comprehension.

Expository Text

  • Expository text includes informational text, non-fiction, textbooks, newspapers, speeches, reports, and blogs.

Differences between Narrative and Expository Text

  • Narrative text includes plot and character development.
  • Expository text includes facts and specific vocabulary (Tier 3).
  • Inferencing occurs in both, although it may be more difficult in expository text due to knowledge demands.

Similarities between Narrative and Expository Text

  • Both require attention to vocabulary, details, and main ideas.
  • Both can be informative.

Challenges with Expository Text

  • Students struggle with vocabulary, background knowledge, and argument structure in expository texts.
  • Decoding skills are essential for understanding expository text.
  • Language dependency makes comprehension challenging.
  • Students may not have the experience to understand higher-level math concepts.
  • Difficult for students to infer background knowledge.

Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension

  • Vocabulary
  • Background knowledge
  • Decoding and sight words
  • Language (syntax, morphology, semantics)
  • Reasoning and inference skills
  • Analogical skills
  • Executive function (self-regulation, attention, working memory)
  • Motivation
  • Print exposure

Metacognition and Reading Comprehension

  • Readers have a standard of coherence that affects their engagement with the text.
  • Good readers have a low tolerance for inconsistencies and self-monitor their comprehension.
  • Poor comprehenders often want to finish reading as fast as possible and have a low standard of coherence.
  • Students need to notice their failure to comprehend and employ a strategy to fix that issue.
  • Example of a self-monitoring task: Identifying inconsistencies in a story (e.g., a cake with six candles at a tenth birthday party).

Models of Comprehension

  • Simple View of Reading: Decoding x Linguistic Comprehension = Reading Comprehension. Simple is hard.
  • Scarborough's Reading Rope: Many strands that are required for language comprehension.
  • Strategies that a good reader must employ.

Kintsch's Construction Integration Model

  • Surface Code: Getting words off the page.
  • Text Base: Getting the literal meaning of the text.
  • Situation Model: Putting together a mental representation intended by the author, including background knowledge. This is where students have trouble.
  • Background knowledge is crucial for comprehension.
  • Example: Understanding a comic strip requires integrating information and background knowledge to understand the joke.

RAND Model

  • Reading comprehension is an interaction between the text, the reader, and the activity or purpose.
  • All of those pieces take place in a sociocultural context.
  • Interaction between: the reader, the text, and the task or activity.
  • Lower-level reading ability, motivation, and low reading volume can affect comprehension.
  • Text complexity can be too low or too high for readers.
  • Task or activity relates to what is expected of the student.
  • Reading a passage and answering questions is testing, not instruction.
  • Need to teach students how to think differently about text; through that instruction comes strategy development.

Practice and Engagement

  • Practice is important, engaging deeply in text is important.
  • Books: Why Students Don't Like School by Daniel Willingham, and Peak by Anders Ericsson.
  • Need lots of practice at these skills. Students need to engage deeply, but make sure they have quality opportunities.
  • Deliberate practice. Need to be thinking very deeply about text to get better at thinking about text.

Deliberate Practice

  • Have goals beyond your current level. Working at the current level is not effective, you have to push them.
  • Given models of what you're doing. Being a model is best.
  • Understanding the gradual release of responsibility is important. Teachers need to model those skills.

Choosing Text

  • Important to consider text complexity, which involves more than just readability.

Features of Text Complexity

  • Qualitative features: Levels of meaning, structure, language, and knowledge demands.
  • Reader and task considerations: Motivation, knowledge, experiences, purpose, and task complexity.

Ranking Texts by Difficulty

  • Ranking should be done by: easier to hardest.
  • Ranking text example: From The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Grapes of Wrath.
  • Short sentences without rare vocabulary is important for understanding.
  • Figurative language is intense in The Book Thief.

Text Complexity Measures:

  • Should not only rely on readability.
  • Typically, text complexity measures two things sentences, length and vocabulary.
  • Flesch Kincaid looks at word length and sentence length.
  • Dale Chall looks at word frequency and sentence length.
  • Lexiles looks at word frequency and sentence length.
  • ATOS, which is the AR program, used word difficulty, word length, sentence length and text length.
  • Cometrix looks at narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential cohesion and deep cohesion.
  • Quantitative measures are objective and computer-generated but do not consider content and knowledge.
  • Complex ideas may be present without complex syntax or vocabulary.
  • May limit student choice. Teacher expertise is required when using text complexity measures.
  • Combine narrative with expository to develop vocabulary and knowledge.

Vocabulary

  • Vocabulary development is crucial for comprehension.

Vocabulary Development

  • Students add 10 to 15 new words a day to their mental lexicons.
  • Explicitly teaching kids we get about 400, we're talking about 3,000 words that kids are adding on their own.
  • Exposure is important for vocabulary development.
  • Students with reading disabilities require more repetitions of seeing a word in supportive context to add new words to their lexicons.

Meta-Analysis of Vocabulary Instruction

  • On standardized measures, doesn't impact much effectiveness.
  • Custom measures increase impact to comprehension. Effect of .50.
  • If you have a reading difficulty and you get vocabulary instruction, a huge jump occurs.
  • Vocabulary instruction effects comprehension, especially for students with reading difficulties.
  • Must impact comprehension as well.
Stahl and Nagy Classroom Vocabulary Development Levels:
  • Increase breadth and depth through rich conversation with kids
  • Teach independent word learning strategies
  • Roots and affixes
  • Using context clues to figure out a word.
Tier Examples:
  • Vocabulary needs to match type of text (tier two for narrative, tier three for expository).
  • Semantic gradients enhance vocabulary learning.
  • Extended discussion increases word effect better.
Frayer model:
  • Synonyms, anonyms, and context can effect word use.
Semantic Feature Analysis:
  • Powerful strategy because this had the most effectiveness out of any strategies.
  • Use this chart to have students look at what dogs want so they can know what type of dog that is.
  • Also use the semantic chart for people from The Book Thief.
Memnonics:
  • Hasn't been shown to work on comprehension because no one has looked at it.
  • Works because it gives a shallow meaning of the word.
  • Works great for short term to learn what words mean.
Becca McHowan's Word Wizard Chart:
  • Generalizations chart.
  • Words they were interested in.
  • Words of the class put on star.
  • If they have used a word in one in their class and they used the word somewhere else.
  • Want students to generalize and be excited by word usage.

Knowledge

  • New knowledge depends on integrating prior knowledge.
  • Well-connected memory stores allow quicker retrieval of information.
  • Readers who possess more knowledge in a domain are better able to make inferences than readers who have higher IQ or better reading ability.

Implications for Knowledge

  • If we can teach enough deep knowledge to kids, we now have a mechanism for them to understand text that isn't dependent on their reading ability or their IQ.
  • Multiple studies has shown this.
How knowledge impacts comprehension:
  • Background knowledge effects comprehension through vocabulary, inferences, and increasing working memory.
  • Daniel Willingham's YouTube video for more knowledge of this.
Time spent on knowledge:
  • Grades K through 3: Language arts is 50 % of the time. Science is 11 % and social studies is 9 %.
  • Grades 4 through 6: Language arts is 44 %. Science is 13 % and social studies is 11 %.
What classes would you get your knowledge from:
  • Science and social studies.
  • Have to select text in language arts because they also need to develop knowledge as well.

Inference Generation

  • Teaching students to use Inference is very important!
  • Is the heart of the construction interrogation model.
  • Higher the pronoun usage in the text is. It becomes the important to use Inference.
  • Inferencing is a key part of comprehension.
Inference Ability shown through:
  • Working memory capacity.
  • Actively engaging text.
  • Rich vocabulary
Struggling Readers Infer:
  • Require less informational coherence.
  • Make fewer inferences.

Meta Analysis:

  • 0.58 of general learning for comprehension.
  • Good skill readers (0.5) for inferential skills.
  • Poor, less skilled readers(0.8), better to teach to low skilled.
  • Teach, engage students.
  • Small group instruction, creating Inferential answers. Practice creating can make a effective learning.
  • Character perspective is very important!
  • Text clue introduction increases effective learning.

Designing Successful Comprehension Lessons

  • Select strategies.
  • Local cohesion.
  • Global cohesion.

POEMS: Framework to Develop Lessons

  • Prepatory
  • Organization
  • Elaborative
  • Metacognition
  • Summarizing

Helps those kids who have working memory issues. Organizational is important, keep track of each part of the characters. And remember the main point for the day.
Elabortive is important, teach deep the Inference strategies!
Summarization is needed for people with executive function and self regulation

Sentence Micro Cohesion and Macro Cohesion:
  • The sentence level.
  • What level should you start with the sentence to paragraph level with children?
  • If at the paragraph level start at the sentence level.
  • Is so start over at the propose sentence level.
Teach Small:
  • Signal words to what that mean!
  • For sentence combining which it can use it when is good.
  • Having create groups and put them back together.
Informational Text Structure:
  • Taxonomical structures, you often find these in science. How are things related!
  • Cause and effect is important to analyze during and after!
  • Comparative contrast is important to evaluate things!
  • Argument with supporting sentences.
Structured Note Taking!
  • Graphic organizer is important to understand plot.
  • Structured note organization: vocab. Take with graphic organizers.
  • Asking about the central ideal will improve comprehension.
General Point:
  • Give the right text is important in this process.
  • You can always create questions, and test the children after!
  • Get them to create something with what they created it is important.
  • Vocabulary creation is used to make short easy passages.
Teaching vocabulary:
  • There are some different items of measures, 4 specific types help children.
  • Litheral memorization.
  • Summarization points!
  • Inference questions.
  • Vocabulary questions.
    Can help your children to be successful in the comprehension section of the text.
How to put all the piece again:
  • Tips for using expositiory text were coverd there.