Think about the way you come to understand the world around you. What do you read to find out about the climate of a region you plan to visit? What do you consult to identify the bird that just flew past your window? In fact, what are you reading right now? The answer to all these questions is informational text.

We are surrounded by text whose primary purpose is to convey information about the natural or social world. Success in schooling, the workplace, and society depends on our ability to comprehend this material. Yet many children and adults struggle to comprehend informational text.

We should not wait to address this problem until students reach late elementary, middle, and high school, when learning from text is a cornerstone of the curriculum. Four strategies can help teachers improve K-3 students' comprehension of informational text. Teachers should:

Increase Access

Chances are that your personal bookshelves, magazine racks, and Web site bookmarks are replete with informational text. Many young students, however, have limited access to such text. One study of 20 1st grade classrooms found that on average, informational text constituted less than 10 percent of classroom libraries. And informational text represented an average of less than 3 percent of the materials displayed on these classrooms' walls and other surfaces (Duke, 2000).

Young students need to learn about the range of purposes that text can serve (Duke, 2003). By filling the classroom with books on insects, weather, firefighters, the ocean, families, trucks, reptiles, pets, and other topics that fascinate young children, teachers can demonstrate to their students that reading can help them obtain important information.

When teachers include informational text in the classroom, they also expand opportunities for home-school connections that support literacy (Duke & Purcell-Gates, 2003). Research and experience suggest that even parents who rarely read fiction for pleasure can become inspired when teachers invite them to interact with their children around nonfiction texts, newspapers, magazines, and reference books (Duke, Bennett-Armistead, & Roberts, 2002, 2003).

Increased access to informational text can also better motivate the many students who prefer this kind of text or who have strong interests in the topics addressed in such text (Caswell & Duke, 1998; Jobe & Dayton-Sakari, 2002). One student with whom I worked had shown little enthusiasm for the storybooks that his teachers had been providing, but genuinely enjoyed the informational books that we introduced, especially on his favorite topics: outer space, animals, and machines. When reading informational books, he was more willing to persist in decoding difficult words, and he applied background knowledge more readily. As he experienced success with informational books, both his overall reading ability and his self-confidence grew to the point where his narrative reading also seemed to benefit.

Increase Time

In addition to including informational text in the classroom environment, teachers also need to include such text in instructional activities. The study of 1st grade classrooms showed that students spent an average of only 3.6 minutes each day interacting with informational text—even less in low-socioeconomic-status schools (Duke, 2000).

One way to incorporate informational text in the classroom is to read it aloud to students. When teachers read aloud from informational text, young students become familiar with its characteristics and conventions (Duke & Kays, 1998). Listening to informational text can be a valuable tool for knowledge building, especially when combined with other ways of learning about the world, such as hands-on investigations (Anderson & Guthrie, 1999). Research also suggests that students are more likely to select informational text for independent reading if their teacher has read it aloud to them (Dreher & Dromsky, 2000).

Teachers can also use informational text in guided and independent reading, in writing, and in content-area instruction. For example, one teacher with whom I worked taught the sp- blend during a guided reading of an informational book about spiders. Another teacher taught students how to summarize as they wrote reviews of favorite informational books. And a science teacher used a combination of hands-on experiences and informational text reading to build students' knowledge of simple machines.

Some educators worry that informational text may be too difficult for young students, or that spending time with informational text will distract students from learning basic reading skills. Research evidence does not support this concern, however (Duke, Bennett-Armistead, & Roberts, 2002, 2003). In one study, 1st grade students whose teachers included more informational text in their classroom libraries, on classroom wall displays, and in classroom activities showed growth on standardized tests of decoding and word identification equal to those of students whose teachers focused less heavily on informational text. For classes whose students entered school with relatively low letter-sound knowledge, those exposed to more informational text actually had higher growth in this area. The study also documented other benefits, including better informational text writing and increased enthusiasm for recreational reading (Duke, Martineau, Frank, & Bennett-Armistead, 2003).

Teach Comprehension Strategies

In addition to exposing young students to informational text, teachers must also teach them how to read it.

Research shows that good readers are strategic in their reading (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995) and that explicit teaching of comprehension strategies can foster comprehension development (Duke & Pearson, 2002). Although most of this research has been conducted with older students, it makes sense to begin this long-term endeavor early on (Duke & Bennett-Armistead, 2003; Pearson & Duke, 2002).

Strategies that appear to improve comprehension include monitoring students' understanding and making adjustments as needed; activating and applying relevant prior knowledge (for example, by making predictions); generating questions; thinking aloud; attending to and uncovering text structure; drawing inferences; constructing visual representations; and summarizing. With each strategy, explicit teaching should include information about what the strategy is, when it is used, how it is used, and why it is worth using.

When talking with young students, I often discuss the strategies in terms of good readers, as in “Good readers think about what might be coming next.” I also model the uses of comprehension strategies by thinking aloud as I read. For example, to model the importance of monitoring understanding, I make comments such as, “That doesn't make sense to me because . . .” or “I didn't understand that last part—I'd better go back.” Accompanying the reading with written activities—such as constructing a Venn diagram when reading a text with compare/contrast structure or writing questions about a text for classmates to answer—can also help foster students' strategy development.

Research suggests that teaching even one comprehension strategy can lead to improved comprehension and that teaching multiple strategies can have an even larger impact (National Reading Panel, 2000; Pressley, 2000). One approach to teaching multiple strategies simultaneously that has received considerable support in the research literature—and that has been used with students as early as 1st grade—is reciprocal teaching (Palincsar, Brown, & Campione, 1993). In this approach, the teacher explicitly teaches and models the use of four strategies: asking questions, summarizing, clarifying, and making predictions. In small groups, students take turns playing teacher and applying these strategies themselves, with help from the teacher and their peers as needed. Eventually, students apply these strategies on their own as they read increasingly complex and varied texts.

Another important aspect of teaching students how to read informational text is making them aware of the differences between informational text and other kinds of text, especially fictional narratives. For example, we typically read fictional narrative texts in their entirety, from beginning to end, and at a steady pace. In contrast, we typically read informational texts selectively—just the parts that might meet our needs or interest us. We might start at the index, then check a passage on page 38, then read a whole section on page 15. We may vary the pace of reading from section to section, reading some parts carefully and just scanning others. Students need to learn the differences between various kinds of text and the consequences of these differences for their reading processes (Symons, MacLatchy-Gaudet, Stone, & Reynolds, 2001).

Use Informational Text for Authentic Purposes

When you read informational text, you do so for an authentic purpose—to obtain information that you want or need to know (Purcell-Gates, Duke, Hall, & Tower, 2002). You may read a book on financial management to help you make good investments, a magazine article that deepens your knowledge of Buddhism, or a field guide to identify birds in your yard.

In contrast, students in school usually read informational text to answer questions at the back of the chapter, to complete a test prep worksheet, or simply because the teacher said to do so. Some of these activities may be unavoidable, but we need to create classrooms in which students read informational text as often as possible for more compelling purposes. In a recent study, 2nd and 3rd grade students whose teachers encouraged more authentic reading and writing of informational and how-to texts in science showed higher growth in reading comprehension as well as in writing (Purcell-Gates & Duke, 2003).

Teachers can use many strategies to create authentic purposes for reading informational text. They can set up situations in which students need information, then encourage students to read to obtain that information. Students may want to find information about the life cycles of frogs before setting up a tadpole tank or learn about the needs of growing things before planting a window box. Teachers can pique students' curiosity: putting out some earthworms for students to observe; demonstrating that water left out in a pan on Friday has “disappeared” on Monday; setting out some magnets with various materials that the magnets will or will not attract. Students will read informational books and other print materials on earthworms, evaporation, and magnetism with greater interest and purpose after such activities as these.

Reading-for-writing may also increase authenticity. Students can read about electricity to write their own class book on the subject for the school library. They can read about pond life to prepare a brochure for a local nature center. They can read about trash and recycling before embarking on a letter-writing campaign to decrease trash output in their community.

In my experience, young students working to comprehend informational text for such purposes look noticeably different from those reading it simply because the teacher assigned it. The first set of students reads more strategically and pays more attention to components of the text, such as headings, vocabulary, and summary statements. Indeed, instruction that emphasizes reading to learn and sharing information with others has proven effective in increasing students' engagement, application of strategies, and comprehension (Guthrie, 2003).

Increasing Reading Achievement

The four strategies discussed in this article provide a good start for our efforts to improve young students' ability to read informational text. In the years to come, I hope that teachers and researchers will work together to develop and test techniques, observe and experiment, and gain new insights about how to help students with this important goal. Incorporating informational text in the curriculum in the early years of school has the potential to increase student motivation, build important comprehension skills, and lay the groundwork for students to grow into confident, purposeful readers.

What Struggling Older Readers Need

Certainly, some students in the upper elementary grades through the high school grades still struggle to actually read the words they encounter. It makes sense for these students to receive thoughtful, age-appropriate instruction in word recognition and spelling.

But working with words alone will not build the competence and dispositions that students need to read the increasingly complex texts in their academic subjects, nor will it motivate students to read voluntarily outside school. In a critique of the National Reading Panel report, Cunningham (2001) asserts that the report's focus on single reading interventions, such as intensive phonics programs, ignores the multidimensional and interactive nature of literacy development and of productive reading experiences. Teaching reading is not like targeting and curing specific medical illnesses, Cunningham suggests. It is more like

fostering healthy human development, building a successful business, maintaining an effective military, and providing good parenting than it is like administering medical or psychological interventions. (p. 331)

Teaching reading to older struggling students means paying attention to the full range of evidence on what these students need to grow as readers and writers.

Put the Right Books in Students' Hands

More than anything, struggling readers need plenty of opportunities to read text that makes sense to them. Requiring students to spend most of their school time reading books that are too difficult makes it impossible for them to learn and to develop as readers (Allington, 2002).

Students should spend most of their school reading time with texts that they can read and want to read. Students tell us that when we give them interesting materials that they can read without too much difficulty, they will read (Ivey & Broaddus, 2001). Providing books that span the content areas, match students' reading levels, and encompass a variety of formats and genres is nonnegotiable if we want struggling readers to improve.

In the past, some middle schools and high schools have been reluctant to consider providing easy reading materials out of concern that such materials were embarrassing to struggling readers or too light on content. But today, such companies as Scholastic (http://scholastic.com) and Wright Group (www.wrightgroup.com) have produced a plethora of nonfiction materials that are easy enough for beginning readers but interesting enough to engage even high school students. Teachers can also find annotated lists of high-quality trade books that span a range of difficulty levels. These lists have been compiled by professional teaching organizations from across the disciplines. The National Council for the Social Studies's Notable Social Studies Books for Young People (www.socialstudies.org) and the National Science Teachers Association's Outstanding Science Trade Books for Children (www.nsta.org) are two good examples. Content-area teachers will find many readable, interesting trade books that include important content to match curriculum standards.

Help Students Make Sense of Text

Struggling readers—and even those who have no difficulty reading—need ongoing explanations and discussions about the process of reading and how to make sense of what they read. But rather than assign fill-in-the-blank exercises or test-like passages followed by comprehension questions, teachers should describe the mental activities involved in making sense of text and encourage students to share the specific processes that they use to build their personal understandings of what they read.

For instance, while reading to her students about the digestion processes of owls from the book Exploding Ants: Amazing Facts About How Animals Adapt (Settel, 1999), one 7th grade teacher stopped to explain how she figured out the main points of the text:

I pay attention to words and phrases that the author repeats. In this passage, I noticed “spits up” and “regurgitating,” which mean the same thing, at the beginning and end of the paragraph. I think the author wants us to remember that owls digest the soft parts of their prey and spit up the hair and bones.

Good instruction in reading comprehension does not happen in a short unit of study or within an intensive reading program (Duffy, 2003; Fisher & Frey, 2004; Tovani & Keene, 2000). Rather, teaching about thoughtful reading should happen in every class and throughout the school year. Most important, it requires the expertise of the best reader in the classroom: the teacher.

Explore Words Within Real Reading and Writing

Some struggling readers need to think more about the structure of words. An interactive and connected approach, such as word study, enables students to manipulate key words from their reading and begin extending generalizations to unfamiliar words, thereby strengthening not only reading skills but also writing and spelling skills (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2003.) Instruction to facilitate word knowledge begins with high-interest, easy reading and pulls high-utility words directly from the pages of students' current texts.

For instance, middle school or high school students still struggling to spell predictable long vowel patterns in one-syllable words can read popular fiction picture books, such as Chip Wants a Dog (Wegman, 2003) and Willy the Dreamer (Browne, 1998), or visual nonfiction texts, such as Fish Faces (Wu, 1993). Students work briefly with a teacher to investigate words with long vowel patterns found in these books. After grouping and recording the words according to their patterns, students examine the letter combinations that produce the long vowel sound in these words and also consider word meaning. Students then reread selected text, searching for additional words that fit the newfound patterns. Continued practice in using and writing the selected words, a process reinforced by students' reading selections, strengthens and builds on this new understanding of long vowel patterns.

Ensure Teacher Time and Expertise

Solid evidence shows that teachers who succeed with lower-achieving readers spend most of their time working with individuals or small groups rather than in front of the class (Allington & Johnston, 2002; Taylor, Pearson, Clark, & Walpole, 2000). During these one-to-one times, teachers can observe and respond to students' confusions about reading and also determine what works for individual students.

The most important and sophisticated kind of teaching requires knowledge of how to support students in the midst of reading to facilitate their perseverance and understanding. Struggling readers need this kind of teaching more than other students do. Unfortunately, struggling readers are the students most likely to experience reading and writing instruction through a workbook, on a computer program, or from the least trained teachers in the school.

Teachers in the upper elementary through secondary grades may wonder how they can find enough time to work with individual students. The times when the whole class is engaged in purposeful reading and writing provide a good opportunity for the teacher to devote time to students who struggle to get started.

For example, during free reading time in a 7th grade ESL language arts class, one teacher we observed sat next to a boy who had selected My Little Sister Ate One Hare (Grossman, 1998), a high-interest picture book that the teacher had recently read aloud to the class. As the student mumbled and skimmed through the pages, the teacher perceived that the text was too difficult for him to read independently. But he clearly found this book interesting, and he wanted to read it. Reacting immediately but thoughtfully, the teacher suggested that the student echo read with her—that is, the teacher read a line of text and the student repeated it. By the middle of the book, the student was reading in unison with the teacher. The next day he selected the same text and read it again enthusiastically—this time independently.

In a school that had adopted a phonics-based or phonemic awareness program, this student would be considered a prime candidate. But participating in something so far removed from real reading would never take him to the point where this knowledgeable teacher was able to take him. We cannot imagine a more direct or influential resource in helping struggling readers than a good teacher.

Asking the Right Questions

If you find yourself in the position of having to consider whether or not to adopt a reading program for your low-achieving older readers that emphasizes systematic phonics instruction, ask yourself these important questions: When I think about developing word knowledge in my older students, am I sure of what kinds of instruction really count and which students really need it? Do I know what it means to teach thoughtful reading of texts, and do I have enough trust in myself and in the teachers in my school to do it? Do my students get enough opportunities to read interesting materials that they can easily manage? Do students find any relevance in the reading and writing curriculum in my school?

We would love to believe that an intensive, six-week dose of phonics or phonemic awareness training could solve persistent reading problems. But our experience does not show that such specific interventions can help us grow competent, strategic, purposeful readers. We cannot afford to waste time, resources, and, most of all, teacher expertise on anything that distracts us from the meaningful support that will make a real difference for older struggling readers.

References

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