Comprehensive Notes on Literary and Informational Text Comprehension
Types and Nature of Literary Texts
Literary texts, which include stories and other narrative forms, express connected, event-based experiences. These narratives may be the original invention of an author or a retelling of tales from oral tradition. Examples of literary texts encompass adventures, fables, fairy tales, fantasies, folktales, legends, myths, novels, realistic fiction, science fiction, short stories, and tall tales. Other major categories of literary work include drama and poetry.
Children typically develop a sensitivity to narrative story structure early in life, often using it to comprehend simple stories before entering school. This connection is rooted in the similarity between story elements and life events, which both involve key players, specific times and places, conflicts, resolutions, and lessons learned. Most narratives are organized around a set of elements known as story grammar. These elements include setting, characters, plot, and theme.
Core Elements of Literary Text
Identifying and representing the components of story structure is essential for improving narrative comprehension, memory, and recall.
Setting
The setting of a story specifies when and where the events occur. It may be a specific, named location or an indefinite one, such as the future or an unnamed country. The setting can fluctuate within a story through techniques such as flashbacks or flash-forwards before returning to the primary time frame.
Characters
Characters are the people, animals, or creatures that populate a story. The protagonist is the main character who drives the action forward, often in opposition to the antagonist, a villain or rival. To understand characters, readers utilize characterization techniques: analyzing what the author states directly; what the character says, thinks, and does; and how other characters react. The motivation of the main character, whether explicit or implied, is the primary driver of the plot.
Plot
The plot represents the sum of a series of events and provides the story with a beginning, middle, and end. The components of a narrative plot include the conflict or problem the character faces, the sequence of events as the character attempts to solve that problem, and the final outcome or resolution.
Theme
The theme is the overarching "big idea" or message the author intends for the reader to take away. It expresses a relationship among story elements and comments on that relationship. Themes are often generalized as lessons or observations that extend beyond the specifics of the story's plot.
Narrative Comprehension Strategies
Effective strategy use is predicated on recognizing the elements of story structure. Good readers employ several strategies to monitor and construct meaning:
Monitoring Comprehension: This involves checking if the story makes sense. Readers can ask themselves if they have identified the characters, the setting, and the problem, and whether they understand the resolution and theme.
Think-Alouds: Students or teachers verbalize their thinking process during reading. This helps identify parts of a story that are confusing and allows readers to describe the fix-up strategies they use to repair understanding.
Connecting to World Knowledge: Readers integrate information from the story with their own life experiences or other stories they have read.
Predicting: Making informed guesses about upcoming events based on world knowledge and the story's structure. Previewing features like artwork or titles helps focus attention.
Constructing Mental Images: This is the process of "making pictures in the mind." Readers adapt these images as new information is encountered in the text.
Summarizing and Retelling: Summarizing focuses on identifying the main elements of the story grammar. Retelling is a restatement of the events and can be used to assess comprehension.
Literacy Instruction Models and Techniques
Dialogic Reading: The Picture Book Read-Aloud Method
Developed by Grover Whitehurst, dialogic reading is an interactive approach where the student becomes the "teller" of the story while the teacher acts as the listener and questioner. This method is common in Pre-Kindergarten but suitable for older students. It involves two primary frameworks: CROWD and PEER.
CROWD Prompts:
C (Completion): Fill-in-the-blank prompts for rhyming or predictable texts to build prediction skills.
R (Recall): Questions about specific details to build sequencing and retelling abilities.
O (Open-ended): Questions that encourage students to describe illustrations in their own words.
W (Wh-): Questions starting with who, what, where, when, or why to direct attention to story elements.
D (Distancing): Questions that bridge the story and the real world by relating text to outside experiences.
PEER Sequence:
P (Prompt): The teacher uses a CROWD prompt to get the student to respond.
E (Evaluate): The teacher affirms the student's response.
E (Expand): The teacher adds information to the student's response.
R (Repeat): The teacher asks the student to repeat the expanded response.
Transactional Strategies Instruction (TSI)
Developed by Michael Pressley and colleagues, TSI emphasizes collaborative discussion and the coordinated use of comprehension strategies. It is based on the idea that meaning is constructed through transactions between the reader and the text, and among readers within a group. It focuses on metacognition, motivation, and reader response.
Reader Response Framework
Reader response involves personal interpretations influenced by interaction with the story. The Book Club program identifies three categories of response:
Personal: Draws on emotion; includes sharing personal stories or journal entries.
Creative: Draws on imagination; includes activities like writing a poem inspired by a theme or creating a Readers Theatre script.
Critical: Draws on evaluation; includes analyzing the author's craft, purpose, and literary techniques like dialogue or point of view.
Nature and Structure of Informational Text
Informational or expository text communicates facts about the natural or social world. It is generally more complex and abstract than literary text, requiring readers to recognize causality, synthesize data, and evaluate solutions. Types of informational texts include biographies, recipes, technical manuals, textbooks, and websites.
Organizational Structures and Signal Words
Informational texts utilize five primary structures:
Description: Explains or illustrates a concept. Signal words: for example, such as, main parts.
Compare-Contrast: Presents similarities and differences. Signal words: like, unlike, however, on the other hand.
Cause-Effect: Explains reasons for events and their results. Signal words: because, since, as a result, consequently.
Problem/Solution: Poses a problem and suggests answers. Signal words: the trouble, the question, in response.
Time Order (Sequence): Groups ideas by time or order. Signal words: first, next, then, stages, steps.
Strategies for Informational Text Comprehension
Considerate Texts
Considerate texts facilitate learning through three features:
Structural Cues: Introductions, glossaries, headings, sidebars, and bulleted lists that act as a map of main ideas.
Coherence: Logical ordering and clear explanations using precise terms and signal words.
Audience Appropriateness: Matching the existing world knowledge of the reader. Conceptual density—the number of new concepts per unit of text—affects difficulty.
Question-Answer Relationships (QAR)
Taffy Raphael’s QAR framework helps students identify where to find answers to comprehension questions. It is split into two main sections:
In the Text:
Right There: The answer is in one sentence; wording in the question and text are the same.
Think and Search: The answer is found by searching across the text and combining information; wordings are different.
In My Head:
On My Own: The answer comes entirely from the student's prior world knowledge.
Author and Me: The answer requires combining information from the text with the student's world knowledge.
Elaborative Interrogation
This simple strategy helps students remember facts by asking "why does this fact make sense?" This interrogation helps students expand on and personalize information, making it easier to recall, especially in math and science.
K-W-L Procedure
This technique for tapping world knowledge involves three steps:
K: What I Know (accessing prior knowledge).
W: What I Want to find out (identifying learning goals).
L: What I Learned (reflecting on new information).
Advanced Summarization Techniques
Paragraph Shrinking
Developed by Fuchs et al., this technique generates a main-idea statement for a single paragraph through three steps:
Identify the main "who" or "what" (person, animal, place, or thing).
Identify the most important information about that "who" or "what."
Shrink the information into a statement of words or less.
Rule-Based Summary Strategy
Developed by Brown, Campione, and Day, this method uses four specific rules to produce a summary:
Substitute a more general term for a list of specific terms (e.g., "motor vehicles" for "cars, SUVs, and trucks").
Delete redundant information.
Delete information that is not central to the overall meaning.
Select or create a topic sentence.
Comprehensive Strategic Reading Programs
Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR)
CSR combines comprehension strategies with cooperative learning. It follows a four-step process:
Preview (Before Reading): Scanning for graphic features, brainstorming known information, and predicting what will be learned.
Click and Clunk (During Reading): Monitoring for "clicks" (understanding) and "clunks" (confusion). "The Vocabulary Strategy" is used as a fix-up for clunks.
Get the Gist (During Reading): Identifying the main idea of each paragraph and shrinking it to words or less.
Wrap Up (After Reading): Generating and answering questions (using QAR) and reviewing important learned information.
Questioning the Author (QtA)
Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown's approach uses "Queries" to spark discussion and uncover an author's intent.
Initiating Queries: Open-ended questions to start a discussion (e.g., "What is the author trying to say here?").
Follow-Up Queries: Detailed questions to move a discussion along (e.g., "Does the author explain this clearly?").
Discussion Moves: Tools for the teacher to manage ideas, including Marking (drawing attention to an idea), Turning-Back (turning responsibility to students or the text), Revoicing (interpreting student responses), Recapping (reviewing major points), Modeling (making thinking processes public), and Annotating (filling in gaps in the text).
Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI)
CORI integrates literacy instruction with inquiry science. Its primary goal is reading engagement. It utilizes five motivational practices:
Relevance: Providing real-world, hands-on purposes for reading.
Choice: Sharing control of learning with students (e.g., choosing texts or partners).
Collaboration: Providing opportunities for social interaction.
Success: Matching texts to independent levels ( accuracy rate or higher) and providing positive feedback.
Conceptual Theme: Using overarching themes to connect reading to science concepts.
Strategy Application in Web-Based Text
Web-based literacy is essential for modern success. Electronic text can be more engaging but presents unique challenges, such as navigating hyperlinks, managing lack of linearity, and dealing with potentially distracting but irrelevant information. Strategically, web readers must:
Adapt monitoring to determine the relevance of layers of information.
Draw from experiences navigating search engines and websites.
Adapt predictions to choose the most relevant links.
Condense questions into keywords for effective searching.
Synthesize information gathered from multiple sites rather than a single text.
One method for managing the web is the WebQuest, which poses an open-ended problem for students to solve using a selection of provided internet links, preventing aimless searching.