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- Expository texts are designed primarily to inform, describe, explain, enumerate, compare/contrast, persuade, and problem solve.
- Even if the reader has a schema for the content covered in an expository text, that schema provides no strong expectations about the text grammar form.
- Well-presented or considerate expository text uses a variety of structural, or visual, cues to make the organization clear.
- Each type of expository text structure has an organizational pattern that expresses a different type of relationship between important ideas in the text.
- Expository texts tend to have a greater number of interrelationships among ideas than narratives, making the task of figuring out meaning more complex with expository material.
- The difficulty with comprehending expository text is of major import to students in school since most of the textbooks students have to read to acquire academic information are expository in nature.
- Students who struggle with narratives have difficulties with expository text as well.
- Poor readers appear aware of the need to include important ideas in a summary but have difficulty identifying those ideas in a reading passage and constructing an internal topic structure representation of the text information.
- For proficient readers, text grammar serves as a frame or guide to help them identify important information and logical connections among ideas.
- Low performing students, especially, seem to benefit from the creation of visual devices including networking, flowcharting, mapping, conceptual frames, graphic organizers, etc.
- Poorly organized textbooks may play a part in the comprehension difficulties of poor readers, especially those who have difficulty recalling content, organizing information, identifying main ideas, and discriminating between relevant and nonrelevant information.
- Expository text structures form the basis of strategies for identifying important information and relationships among important information.
- In deciphering macrostructures, teachers need to work with visual and structural cues available from the physical presentation of the text.
- Work with macrostructures can be enhanced by the use of networks, flowcharts, maps, webs, conceptual frames, and other devices to help students visualize and organize content into a structured format.
- Deciphering overall text organization can assist students in identifying main ideas, as well as the relationships among ideas.
- Without the ability to identify main ideas, students are unable to use a main idea strategy to understand or recall information from content area textbooks.
- Telling and writing information can be very helpful to students in becoming familiar with the organization of expository genres.
- A key part of the process presented in TRIMS involves the identification of common idea relationship structures and the signal words associated with these relationship structures.
- When it comes to teaching students to use complex text grammars strategically, teachers need to teach the metacognitive processes with simpler expository passages and then progress to more difficult expository text.
- Some expository texts do not have clearly recognizable structures whether because they are poorly organized or because the authors have mixed purposes.
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