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In this lesson, you will learn comprehension strategies for analyzing and summarizing informative texts, including how to identify expository text structures, evaluate the author’s point of view, and recognize faulty reasoning.
So far, we’ve reviewed quite a few topics: roots and affixes and their origins; comprehension strategies; and different types of figurative language. We also covered some specialized words, including synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and homonyms.
Informational texts are part of our daily lives. From newspapers and magazines, to blogs and biographies, to road signs and receipts, we rely on informational texts to convey facts and ideas about the world in which we live.
So how do we provide students with the tools they need to effectively evaluate this world of information?
Step one is access. Early exposure to a wide variety of texts not only hones vocabulary and language skills but also gives students an opportunity to choose their own material and develop personal preferences.
Step two is instruction. Informational texts have unique organizational structures and features that students must learn to identify in order to analyze and gather information. Comprehension strategies build an understanding of the conventions of informational texts and develop active readers who are able to investigate and assimilate the world around them.
Simply put, exposition means information. So it follows that expository text is writing in which an author explains a thought or idea. Whether it’s a book, article, catalog, brochure, recipe, or treatise investigating the flight patterns of the Anas platyrhynchos (Mallard ducks), expository texts have a common goal—to provide information.
Likewise, readers of expository texts have a common purpose—to receive information. Why do birds fly south for the winter? Who won the game last night? Where is Uruguay?
Reading comprehension strategies enable a reader to build on initial inquiries and make meaning from a wide variety of texts to find appropriate answers and create informed responses.
The key is to keep students asking who, what, why, where and how.
Before reading: Asking questions before reading ignites a reader’s imagination and connects their prior knowledge to the task at hand. It also encourages a student to set a purpose for reading and make choices about what might be appropriate texts to consult.
Eliciting prior knowledge engages the mind and enables a student to make connections with new topics and material.
Expository texts have purposes as varied as the authors who write them. They can be instructional, informational, persuasive, satirical, humorous, highly opinionated, and just downright false. Having students set a purpose for reading will help them identify new ideas and develop critical thinking skills that will enable them to identify the purpose of different types of writing.
When readers make predictions about texts before they begin reading, they are actively engaged and more likely to revise predictions as they discover new facts and information.
Encourage students to make connections across content areas and identify resources that might be useful for a given subject. Familiarize them with a wide variety of print and electronic resources to support comprehensive research.
Effective and efficient readers use a variety of strategies for different purposes. In addition to critical reading, a student might use techniques known as skimming and scanning to review a wide variety of information quickly.
During Reading: Asking probing questions during reading enables students to compare and generalize the information presented, identify main ideas and supporting details in text, revise predictions, and continually clarify meaning as they read.
| Question | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Who? | Encourages readers to analyze important details about the author and intention of text. | Who is speaking?
Who is the intended audience? Who are they writing about? |
| What? | Provides information about the author’s purpose (to persuade, to entertain, to inform) and helps students identify the main idea and supporting details, as well as vocabulary, idiomatic phrases, and figurative language that might be unfamiliar. | What is the author’s purpose?
What is the subject or main idea? What does this word or phrase mean? |
| Why? | Enables students to continually evaluate details and identify point of view to differentiate between fact and opinion. | Why is it significant?
Why did they say that? Why was this written? |
| Where? | Provides insight about the author’s historical, cultural, or geographical origins, and how the information might affect the point of view. | Where is the author from?
Where was this information published? |
| When? | Knowing whether a text is current or not can greatly affect interpretation. By asking “when” questions, readers can be sure to evaluate text in its proper context. | When was it written: past or present?
What important events were happening at this time? |
| How? | Informational texts have unique organizational structures that students must learn to identify in order to access and understand information. | How is it organized? |
After Reading: By asking questions after reading, students assimilate new information and incorporate it into their lives. Ask students to summarize new ideas in their own words and analyze their interpretations by pointing to specific details in texts.
Keeping the above questions in mind, let’s take a look at a sample passage to see how this information might be presented in a few test questions.
Read the passage and answer the question below.
“I was born in a log cabin. I came to my pioneer mother in one of Wisconsin’s bitterest winters. Twenty-one years later I was sailing for England, the wife of a diplomat who was one of Boston’s wealthy and aristocratic sons.”
What do we know about the person telling the story?
The correct answer is C. Though the story might very well be true in the sense that the author is telling us the story of her life—the truth as she knows it—we don’t yet have enough information to determine that this is factual information. The author is anonymous, so we can’t even safely assume that the text is not fictional. For the purposes of comprehension, however, we can choose C because these are the only details that are supported by the text. We might assume she has a single parent because she only mentions her mother, but at this point, we lack any information in the text to support that assumption.
Let’s see what a few more details might tell us:
“The first thing I remember is being grateful for windows. I was three years old. My mother had set me to play on a mattress carefully placed in the one ray of sunlight streaming through the one glass window of our log cabin. Baby as I was, I had ached in the agonizing cold of a pioneer winter. Lying there, warmed by that blessed sunshine, I was suddenly aware of wonder and joy and gratitude. It was gratitude for glass, which could keep out the biting cold and let in the warm sun.”
Why is the author telling us this story?
The correct answer is A. Though an autobiography can be entertaining, we can infer this author is attempting to share an experience that from all accounts was very harsh at times. In addition, she begins her story by telling us that she grew up in a log cabin, then proceeds with information about how that environment shaped her earliest memories. With more information, we might find out that her purpose for telling the story is not exactly as it appears here, but at this point—other than the fact that the piece is anonymous—we don’t have reason to believe she has any other motive than to tell us about her formative years.