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This meta-analysis synthesizes results from expository text structure interventions designed to increase comprehension for students in kindergarten to grade 12 published between 1970 and 2013. Twenty-one studies were identified, 19 of which met criteria for a meta-analysis, including 48 studywise effect sizes that were meta-analyzed to determine (a) how effective expository text structure interventions are in improving comprehension and (b) what features of expository text structure interventions (e.g., number of text structures taught, type of implementer) are associated with improved comprehension outcomes. A random-effects analysis yielded a significant mean effect of .95 overall and a significant mean effect of 1 for researcherdeveloped comprehension measures. Moderator analyses indicated significant differences in student comprehension outcomes, favoring researchers as implementers, 11-20 hours of interventions, one or two text structures taught, and students in the elementary grades. Instructional features of expository text structure interventions and implications for research and practice are discussed.

We investigated the roles of classroom supports for multiple motivations and engagement in students' informational text comprehension, motivation, and engagement. A composite of classroom contextual variables consisting of instructional support for choice, importance, collaboration, and competence, accompanied by cognitive scaffolding for informational text comprehension, was provided in four-week instructional units for 615 grade 7 students. These classroom motivational-engagement supports were implemented within integrated literacy/history instruction in the Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) framework. CORI increased informational text comprehension compared with traditional instruction (TI) in a switching replications experimental design. Students' perceptions of the motivational-engagement supports were associated with increases in students' intrinsic motivation, value, perceived competence, and increased positive engagement (dedication) more markedly in CORI than in TI, according to multiple regression analyses. Results extended the evidence for the effectiveness of CORI to literacy/history subject matter and informational text comprehension among middle school students. The experimental effects in classroom contexts confirmed effects from task-specific, situated experimental studies in the literature.

Scene text inpainting is a significant research challenge in visual text processing, with critical applications spanning incomplete traffic sign comprehension, degraded container-code recognition, occluded vehicle license plate processing, and other incomplete scene text processing systems. In this paper, a cascaded dual-inpainting network for scene text (CDINST) is proposed. The architecture integrates two scene text inpainting models to reconstruct the text foreground: the Structure Generation Module (SGM) and Structure Reconstruction Module (SRM). The SGM primarily performs preliminary foreground text reconstruction and extracts text structures. Building upon the SGM’s guidance, the SRM subsequently enhances the foreground structure reconstruction through structure-guided refinement. The experimental results demonstrate compelling performance on the benchmark dataset, showcasing both the effectiveness of the proposed dual-inpainting network and its accuracy in incomplete scene text recognition. The proposed network achieves an average recognition accuracy improvement of 11.94% compared to baseline methods for incomplete scene text recognition tasks.

Comprehending expository reading material is a challenge for many students. Research has shown that students’ expository reading comprehension can improve with the help of text structure instruction. The purpose of this article is to present teachers with a framework for effectively implementing text structure instruction in their classrooms. Within this framework, the authors suggest four possible learning objectives for text structure instruction. They then describe instructional strategies related to each objective and ways to assess whether the objectives were met. Finally, the authors discuss some issues to consider when choosing expository reading material for students and present text structure unit plans for grades 2 and 5 as examples of how teachers might construct a unit.

This article addresses approaches to differentiating instruction to meet the needs of students whose literacy needs, interests, and strengths vary widely. This article was designed to support classroom teachers who understand the importance of differentiating instruction, but are unsure of how best to design and implement differentiation within the parameters of the classroom. The article begins by defining differentiated instruction and discussing its importance, including the role of differentiation with respect to diversity and with respect to Response to Intervention (RTI). The remainder of the article describes in detail two examples of differentiated instruction in classroom contexts. Each example is followed by a discussion of the research and decision‐making underlying the teacher's approach to differentiation. The article concludes with common characteristics of effective differentiation.

The purpose of this study, conducted as a follow-up study of Oshima (2020), was to examine whether Japanese EFL students’ use of vocabulary changed after being given lessons on explicit instruction on text structure and process writing. Two groups of college students—the beginner-level group writing a descriptive essay and the advanced-level group writing an argumentative essay—wrote an outline, the first draft (D1), the second draft (D2), and the final draft (FD), and I examined the differences in lexical richness between students’ D1 and FD with New Word Level Checker (Mizumoto, 2021). The results showed that both groups’ drafts had changed in the number of words used (tokens), the number of unique words used (types), and the number of lower frequency words used. This study’s finding also supports the importance of choosing an appropriate measurement to analyze students’ vocabulary levels. For Japanese students, 1K-word bands, which have been widely used in previous literature, seem too broad to capture their small vocabulary improvement.

In explaining the importance of critical literacy, this commentary suggests what teachers need to be able to do ‐ essential ‘repertoires of practice’ (Comber, 2006). These include making connections with students’ lives, enabling them to do the necessary research, exploring texts and practices, considering the social effects of texts and practices and imagining possibilities for making a positive difference. These ideas are illustrated with an extended classroom example.

In this article, I showcase an informational text reading comprehension unit that centers on text features commonly found in science textbooks. I taught this unit to a sixth-grade class and highlighted the work samples of three focal students here. The overarching question that guided this work was as follows: How can I focus my instruction on three common text structures in informational texts: compare and contrast, cause and effect, and description? Moreover, I show how students’ interaction with informational texts, such as engaging activities, note-taking, and vocabulary, aided in comprehension.

Academic language is frequently assumed to be especially challenging for students from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) and even more so for language-minority students. Due to their often especially disadvantaged position regarding socioeconomic background and exposure to the language of instruction, language minority students are considered to suffer from a double disadvantage when processing complex academic language. To test this assumption, the present study investigated the relationships between various academic language features and differential item functioning (DIF) in a reading comprehension test for language-minority students on the one hand and German monolingual students from low-SES families on the other hand. The analyses are based on data of 19,108 fourth-grade students who took part in the reading comprehension test of the German National Assessment Study in elementary school. Our findings indicate that both lexical and grammatical features of academic language correlate with DIF disfavoring language-minority students, with especially pronounced effects for long and complex words and average sentence length. For German monolingual students from low-SES families, fewer features were associated with DIF, and the correlations were generally smaller than for language-minority students. Findings are discussed in relation to the assumed double disadvantage of language-minority students in the comprehension of academic language.

The CCSS framework indicates more difficult texts are to be used with students. However, the rationale for increasing text difficulty, decreasing text difficulty, is unsupported by the research that shows texts have been increasing in difficulty for at least 50 years. Oral reading accuracy is a traditional method of estimating text difficulty. For 70 years oral reading accuracy of at least 95% accuracy has been the accepted standard. The research available suggest that this traditional level of accuracy is supported by the evidence as optimal for developing reading proficiency.