Improving Reading Comprehension of Informational Text: Text Structure Instruction for Students With or At Risk for Learning Disabilities

The ability to comprehend informational texts is critical to students’ academic success in a range of content areas. However, informational texts pose challenges to the reading comprehension of adolescents with or at-risk for learning disabilities (LD). One such challenge is the use of multiple text structures in a single text. Text structure instruction, in which students learn to identify and analyze organizational patterns in texts, may improve the abilities of students with or at-risk for LD to comprehend informational text. Importantly, text structure instruction must go beyond identifying a single overarching structure of a controlled exemplar text. To ensure that students with or at-risk for LD experience rigorous text structure instruction aligned to grade-level standards, teachers need to implement instruction using authentic texts and carefully plan and gradually increase the relative complexity of instructional tasks. The purposes of this article are to describe explicit, scaffolded text structure instruction with authentic, multi-structure informational texts and provide resources that general and special education teachers can use to scaffold text structure instruction.