Content Area Textbooks Research Articles

Teaching self-questioning using systematic prompt fading: Effects on fourth graders’ reading comprehension

Teaching students to generate questions to monitor their reading comprehension is an evidence-based practice demonstrated to be effective across grade levels for students with and without disabilities. As self-questioning is a complex skill, many students can benefit from additional instructional supports, especially when they are first learning how to self-question. One such support is systematic prompt fading, an evidence-based practice in which instructional prompts are gradually faded until the student can perform the skill independently. This study used systematic prompt fading to teach fourth graders a self-questioning strategy to improve their reading comprehension. A multiple probe across participants design demonstrated improved comprehension quiz scores for fourth graders who engaged in self-questioning while reading expository passages. In addition, all participants demonstrated at least some generalization to higher-level content area textbooks.

Content Area Textbooks as Sources for Vocabulary Learning

This study examines the potential of content area textbooks as a lexical environment for incidental vocabulary learning. The two questions proposed are how many rarely-used words content area textbooks contain within a particular number of words, and how different or similar the frequency of rarely-used words is in the linguistic studies and non-linguistic studies textbooks. This study concludes that content area textbooks contain a relatively high frequency of words within Nat3 and Nat4 levels. The high percentage of rarely-used words indicates that content area textbooks are rich sources for vocabulary learning. The findings also suggest that different kinds of textbooks in the content courses can be rich lexical environments for the study of second language vocabulary

The Power of the Read Aloud in the Age of the Common Core

The implementation of Common Core Standards for English Language Arts (2010) will require the use of more complex text and an increase in the use of informational text; however, reading research and best practices in literacy instruction confirm the value of a narrative read-aloud. Read-aloud time using narrative texts must still be included as a vital part of literacy instruction. Reading aloud to students increases vocabulary development, enhances fluency and oral language, introduces students to diverse population or cultural diversity, and develops critical thinking and problem solving skills. An effective read-aloud can enable students to learn about different types of conflicts and possible solutions as well as empathy and understanding for others. An effective twenty-minute read-aloud can expose students to the same academic words that would be found in content area textbooks and motivates students to become engaged in reading.

Enrich College English Teacher’s Knowledge of Summarizing Strategies Instruction and Expository Text Comprehension with Kintsch’s Reading Model

College English teachers’ knowledge of summarizing strategies instruction with expository text can be enhanced by their understanding of Kintsch’s Construction-Integration (CI) model. The argument is based on the exploration of how Kintsch’s CI model, being a reading model, could serve as a theoretical base to explain the comprehension process of expository text, and the functioning process of summarization. Rooted in cognitive theories, Kintsch’s reading model consists of two reading phases (i.e., a construction phase and an integration phase) that make it suitable to explain readers’ text comprehension process when they come across unfamiliar reading material, which is exactly the case when post-secondary students read to learn from content area textbooks mostly written in the genre of expository text. Moreover, the generation of three levels of text representation (i.e., surface structure, textbase and situation model) conveyed in this model reveal what reading strategies can be derived from this model and how one type of the reading strategies, namely, macrostructure strategies, is closely related to summarization. This relatedness is supported by researchers’ studies on and educators’ practice of summarization instruction to college students. Kintsch’s CI model is, thus, an appropriate reading model for college English teachers to add to their knowledge base to facilitate their teaching of summarizing strategies with expository text at the tertiary level.

English-Spanish Cognates in Picture Books: Toward a Vocabulary Curriculum for Latino ELLs

English-Spanish cognates are words that are spelled similarly or identically and possess the same or nearly the same meanings in both languages. Many cognates are academic vocabulary words and are very common in content area textbooks. The primary purpose of this investigation was to obtain an estimate of the number of different cognates in picture books. Two studies of picture books were conducted to determine their English-Spanish cognate content. Both studies found significant numbers of cognates in the picture books. Furthermore, it was found that trade books written in Spanish contained more unique cognates than those written in English. Finally, a free online database of the picture books and their cognates was presented.

Increasing Student Access to Content Area Textbooks

Teachers, particularly at the middle and high school levels, rely heavily on textbooks to deliver curricular content. Often, students are asked to dive right into the content of a textbook that may or may not contain relevant information, is difficult to navigate, or requires prior content knowledge they do not have. To combat these issues and maximize the utility of textbooks, they must be selected carefully and implemented soundly. Yet, even these steps may not enable all students, specifically those with disabilities, to access them. Fortunately, digital textbooks may be an accessible option for some students. This article provides suggestions on (a) how teachers can carefully select textbooks, (b) effective methods for implementing textbooks, and (c) accessibility ideas for digital text for students with disabilities.

Transforming Text: Finding the Poem Within

“I hate poetry. It is confusing and I despise analyzing what a poem means. I don’t have any idea how I’ll ever teach it to a group of students.” Dustin, one of our preservice teachers, expressed what many future teachers felt. When we mentioned poetry, many groaned. They had bad memories about how they learned poetry. They only recalled memorizing a list of poetic terms in elementary and middle school, analyzing poetry in high school and college, being tested on what the poet meant in English classes and on standardized tests. Often a class devoted to poetry is a discussion in which the teacher asks all the questions and eventually gives the answers. No wonder many teachers prefer teaching prose over poetry. They do not understand what Frances Kazemek and Pat Rigg advocate in Enriching Our Lives: “Poetry helps us understand ourselves and our world; it helps us see. . . in new ways. At the same time, poetry lifts our language. We find ourselves using language in new ways, in ways that are more vivid, more powerful, and more fun” (28). We change teachers’ discomfort by moving from prose to poetry through a creative process that encourages students to read closely, read well, follow their personal thoughts and associations. It is imperative to provide creative, engaging activities for pre-service teachers, so they experience the power of imagination in a way that they can take to their students. We want our pre-service, pre-K to 12 language arts teachers to begin with language that is “safe” and explore its possibilities by making the words their own. By doing so, they begin to understand the power of language that Kazemek and Rigg mention. By creating this link between prose and poetry, the process of working with a poem is demystified. Pre-service teachers find an opportunity to play with language and explore nuance. This approach incorporates what Louise Rosenblatt terms “aesthetic reading” or the “aesthetic stance,” which is a type of reading that encourages readers to read for pleasure. The reader and text act and are acted upon in a reciprocal process of meaning-making. The purpose of this strategy, then, is to encourage students to work creatively with a page of prose text by transforming it into a poem. This shift in genre from what is a narrative or expository text to a poetic one illustrates how the seeds of one discourse may, in fact, be found in another. We find that pre-service teachers need to experience playing with text to understand the transformative heart of the poetic process. They learn the value of personal creativity and are better able to nurture it in students. Paul Torrance captures the transformation process in his 1992 definition of creativity: “Creativity is digging deeper. Creativity is looking twice. Creativity is crossing out mistakes” (5). Often, pre-service teachers use this poetic approach when designing their content units and find ways for students to transform informational texts, like content area textbooks, into an aesthetic expression.

An Investigation of Teachers' Concerns About Vocabulary and the Representation of These Concerns in Content Literacy Methodology Textbooks

The purpose of this study was twofold: to (a) find out what questions currently practicing middle grade teachers have about vocabulary instruction and (b) determine what current undergraduate content area textbooks include that provide answers to these vocabulary questions. As researchers and practitioners directly responsible for teaching preservice middle grades teachers, this was a beginning step in examining whether our own teacher preparation programs are meeting the needs of new teachers as they encounter the demands of teaching vocabulary in their content areas. Teacher concerns about vocabulary instruction were determined by a survey instrument administered to 390 middle school teachers to ascertain questions they have about teaching vocabulary. A content analysis of the three leading content area textbooks was then undertaken to determine to what degree the top five concerns of middle grades teachers were addressed in these texts. Though direct information on how to teach vocabulary was provided, the researchers found that twice as much information was presented indirectly, embedded under subheadings where it was mentioned. In other words, only half the time did the texts explain how to teach the principles advocated.

Prominent Content Vocabulary Strategies and What Secondary Preservice Teachers Think About Them

This investigation focused on two research questions. The first question examined what specific instructional strategies for teaching vocabulary appear most frequently in current content area textbooks. The second question built on the first and used that information to develop a survey that was administered to secondary-level preservice teachers to examine their familiarity with the particular strategy, to rate the strategy's usability within their content area, and to rate whether they would use the strategy in their future teaching. The top-five most prominent strategies found across the textbooks were morphemic analysis, contextual analysis, semantic feature analysis grid, semantic mapping, and vocabulary self-collection. The student survey revealed the most familiarity with contextual analysis and semantic mapping. These two strategies also were favored in the usability and the intention to use in future teaching promptings. Using a chi-square statistical procedure we found that seven statements were differentially affected by the reported content area of the teacher.

Reading Comprehension Strategies in Secondary Content-Area Classrooms

AS STUDENTS move up through the grades, the academic demands on them increase, and a great many of those increases come in the form of reading. While basic literacy is certainly a problem for some students, they are in the minority. Most of our middle and high school students can read--if by that we understand the ability to decode text. But the academic tasks students encounter in the upper elementary grades, and even more so in secondary school, involve a great deal of in support of learning new and complicated content. As Michael Kamil has reported, the ability to comprehend the expository texts in content-area textbooks is critical to students' academic success.(1) Yet as the academic demands on our secondary students become more complicated, explicit instruction diminishes.(2) The academic importance of instruction in comprehension is clear. Students who are taught such comprehension strategies as predicting, questioning, and summarizing improve their comprehension scores on both experimenter-constructed tests and standardized tests.(3) So it seems clear that secondary teachers can help students become proficient readers of academic texts if they arm them with a variety of comprehension strategies. Of course, for many decades literacy researchers have called on content-area teachers to provide explicit instruction in secondary classrooms. Cries of every teacher a teacher of reading are anything but new. However, the message sometimes seems to have fallen on deaf ears, and there is much room for improvement with regard to literacy integration in math, science, social studies, and the fine arts. Over the course of the 2005-06 academic year, I set out to examine the extent to which content-area secondary teachers included explicit comprehension strategies in regular classroom instruction. I examined the instructional practices of four content-area teachers in middle school and four content-area teachers in high school and sought answers to two broad questions: * To what degree do the teachers incorporate comprehension strategies in their science and social studies classrooms? (That is, what percentage of instructional time do they spend on integrating literacy strategies in their classrooms?) * Which comprehension strategies are most frequently used in middle and high school science and social studies classrooms? I collected data from 2,400 minutes of direct classroom observations in eight middle and high school science and social studies classrooms. Acting as a nonparticipant observer, I coded the instruction I observed according to whether it was judged to be comprehension instruction or non-comprehension instruction. While I began my study under no illusions that literacy integration would be extensive in these classrooms, I was surprised by how little instruction in comprehension I actually saw. In a total of 40 hours of classroom observations, these secondary content-area teachers allotted an average of just 82 minutes to teaching, explaining, modeling, scaffolding, and assisting students in using effective comprehension strategies. That's just over 3% of instructional time devoted to helping these adolescent readers make meaning of text by asking and answering questions, summarizing, applying fix-up strategies when comprehension broke down, examining text structures, using graphic organizers, predicting, and clarifying. Furthermore, the comprehension instruction I did observe was limited in scope: the most heavily used strategies to support comprehension were asking literal questions and having students write summaries of text. What might these findings mean? First, because middle school and high school curricula emphasize breadth over depth, teachers are likely to see their major instructional responsibility as covering their particular content in preparation for state tests. …

Playful Textbook Previews: Letting Go of Familiar Mustache Monologues

Elementary teachers lead students on prereading picture walks, engage them in prediction activities, and model previewing processes, secondary teachers often fail to do much more than distribute the textbook. To help middle and high school students learn to use their content area textbooks more effectively, teachers can engage them in previewing activities designed for expository text. Students are taught to find and use the special features and learning aids in their textbooks. They become engaged in content overviews to activate their background knowledge and get them thinking about course topics from the very first day of class. This article presents eight textbook preview ideas that can be easily adapted for any textbook in any content area.

Reading English for academic purposes – What situational factors may motivate learners to read?

This study, situated in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context where non-English major college learners are usually required to read content-area textbooks in English, tried to determine what motivates students to engage in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) reading activities. Three student informants were invited to reflect on their own EAP reading experiences and discuss pedagogical situations in which they were more willing to read. Then a questionnaire containing 18 statements describing various situations was constructed based on interviews with the student informants and data were collected from 212 college business majors. Descriptive statistics showed that learners were most willing to read under three circumstances: when (1) teachers were available to answer questions, (2) key points were highlighted clearly in textbooks, and (3) reading skills were taught. Factor analysis results presented three distinct clusters of variables, namely EFL teacher facilitation, reading requirements, and text facilitation. The three clusters of factors explained a total of 59% variance. Through learners’ indications of why they preferred specific content areas in EAP reading, background schema was also found to be an important factor influencing situational EAP reading motivation.

THE INTERACTION OF READING SKILLS AND SCIENCE CONTENT KNOWLEDGE WHEN TEACHING STRUGGLING SECONDARY STUDENTS

Science content area texts are difficult for most middle school students, particularly whose reading skills are below grade level. This article describes an innovative approach to integrating the teaching of middle school science content and reading skills to increase levels of student success with content area textbooks. For reading instruction, this approach features carefully selected vocabulary, word reading instruction, oral (including partner reading) and silent reading with reading fluency practice as needed, and explicit instruction on comprehension strategies, such as retelling, concept mapping, and summarization. The teaching of the science content incorporates instructional design principles that have been documented to improve comprehension of science content, process skills, and higher order thinking. Six aspects of instructional design that are discussed are the identification and teaching of big ideas, the systematic instruction of vocabulary (including science affixes), a review and integration of core concepts, visual displays of how core concepts are integrated, mnemonics for core concepts, and structured hands-on activities.

ELECTRONIC STUDYING: USING COMPUTER‐BASED OUTLINING PROGRAMS AS STUDY TOOLS

We provide a rationale for and describe the use of computer‐based outlining programs as tools for studying material in content area textbooks. Following an overview of a three‐step procedure using computer‐based outlining programs as study tools, we present information that validates the efficacy of this study procedure. In the remainder of the article, we describe the introduction and implementation of computer‐based outlining in two high school global studies classes. Focusing on students who had been performing in the lower third of each class, we examine the differences between students who were successful in using computer‐based outlining to improve their performance on tests and those who were not successful. Results are interpreted in light of variables suggested by research as influencing the study process.

Considerate and inconsiderate text instruction in postsecondary developmental reading textbooks: A content analysis

Abstract The primary objective of this study was to determine the extent to which postsecondary reading textbooks provide an awareness of and strategies for the use of both considerate and inconsiderate text features in the reading of content area textbooks. Forty‐six postsecondary developmental reading textbooks were analyzed to ascertain the presence or absence of such strategies. Results demonstrated that substantially more strategies in these texts concern considerate text features than inconsiderate text features. This suggests that postsecondary reading textbooks are providing strategies for reading text that is easy but not for reading text that is difficult. Discussion includes an analysis of relative strengths and weaknesses of the texts in their provision of strategies for both considerate and inconsiderate conditions.

The Science of Reading as Applied to the Reading of Science

H ow does one tie in the science of reading with the reading of science? The science curriculum introduces the learner to a whole new concept in reading. Instead of reading pure narrative from readers and English literature texts, the student is exposed to mathematical formulas, chemical and physical equations, experimental procedures, charts and graphs of data, and countless other concepts. How do teachers prepare their students for reading in this new discipline? Do instructors automatically assume that all students can read the material and comprehend it adequately? Should reading specialists be entrusted with this task or do teachers assume the responsibility themselves? Do they confine their teaching of the discipline solely to the textbook and, if so, how does the appropriate textbook get chosen? What other media are available and how do teachers access them? What methods can be used to facilitate understanding of the textbook material and to make comprehension enjoyable and meaningful? I will attempt to answer these and other questions and to provide promising alternatives. Who is ultimately responsible for teaching content reading in a particular classroom? Should it be the content teacher, a reading specialist, or the content teacher in another class? Davis (1978), in her workshop report, attempts to address this issue. The attendees agreed that it is the science teacher (not the reading teacher) who is best equipped to prepare lessons, lectures, worksheets, games, puzzles, and demonstrations that enable students to efficiently use the parts of their specific content-area textbooks. How does a school go about developing a good, well-organized program for encouraging teachers to use content reading strategies? Gove (1981) states that for a program to be successful, it must

Text Effects on Main Idea Comprehension

IN TWO STUDIES the authors examined the effects of selected text features on students' main idea comprehension. Seventy-five fourth-grade, 78 sixth-grade, and 107 eleventh-grade students in the United States participated in the studies. In Study 1, students were asked to identify the main ideas of two kinds of text with a listing structure: contrived instructional texts, and less constrained texts like those in content area textbooks. In Study 2, the same students identified the main ideas of texts of four different structures: listing, sequence, cause/effect, and comparison/ contrast. In half of the texts of each structure, the main idea was explicit; in the other half, it was implicit. Students in both studies inferred significantly fewer correct main ideas for the less constrained texts than for the contrived texts. The authors suggest that students who have been taught to identify main ideas using only contrived texts such as those found in basal reader skills lessons will have difficulty transferring their main idea skills to naturally occurring texts. Thus, instruction in main idea should include the opportunity for students to practice applying their skills to naturally occurring texts.

On Selecting "Considerate" Content Area Textbooks

“Considerate” content area textbooks are “user-friendly”---they are relatively easy to read, understand, and learn from. Recent research in cognitive psychology and reading suggests some features of content area textbooks that contribute to considerateness. This article addresses three of these features: Structure, coherence, and audience appropriateness. For each feature, the article describes the research basis for the feature, states briefly some problems with textbooks that we have observed in our analyses, and presents some practical suggestions for evaluating textbooks.

DEVELOPING HIGHER LEVEL THINKING SKILLS THROUGH INTERACTIVE TEACHING

As reading/learning disabled students enter secondary settings, they face ever‐increasing demands in terms of the higher level thinking skills associated with content area courses and textbooks. This article presents an interactive model for teaching content area concepts to students with reading/learning disabilities. It provides teachers with procedures for activating student background knowledge and for assisting students in developing the relationships among concepts that are critical for concept evaluation, synthesis, and application.

Forms of Discourse in Basal Readers

Although claims have been made that contemporary basals include a variety of types of writing, a thorough analysis of eight reading basals shows that their content is almost exclusively literary. 65% of the selections and 72% of the pages in these eight programs are either narratives or poems. Expository and nonfiction selections are rarely included. Basal readers of the future need to include more varied discourse forms to ensure exposure to and instruction in various writing types before students are asked to read complex content-area textbooks. Furthermore, the designers of content-area texts need to include provisions in their texts for helping students to develop and extend the reading skills they learned in their basal reading programs.