Going Beyond the Fab Five: Helping Students Cope With the Unique Linguistic Challenges of Expository Reading in Intermediate Grades

Abstract

As students transition from primary to intermediate grades, the kind of materials that they are expected to read and write become more heavily dominated by expository texts. Expository texts contain grammatical patterns that are distinct from those used in primary‐grade storybooks. These linguistic features pose new comprehension challenges for students.This article identifies some of the special linguistic features of expository texts and describes several classroom‐based strategies for helping students develop insights on the language through which expository texts are constructed. It argues that reading instruction for intermediate grades needs to go beyond the “Fab Five” (i.e., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension strategies) endorsed by the National Reading Panel in the United States to include tasks that specifically address the unique linguistic challenges of expository reading.