Empowering Readers

To address Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for reading and language, today’s educators strive to help their students develop higher-level understanding with challenging materials. In this book, we share our method for implementing an integrated strategy approach for helping readers understand expository text. This approach can be used to accompany and extend text structure instruction on the five most commonly used expository text structures: compare and contrast, cause and effect, problem and solution, description, and sequence. Within this approach, we designed a method for using key vocabulary in a way that helps readers think about the structure of the text. To aid in the development of higher-level understanding with challenging materials, this approach integrates other essential reading comprehension components that foster understanding, such as predicting and summarizing. The Structure Sort integrated approach embeds these essential strategies before, during, and after reading to empower students to make connections and build comprehension at all stages of reading.

As teachers, every so often, we come across a book that causes us to reexamine our thoughts about what it means to teach literacy. Empowering Readers: Integrated Strategies to Comprehend Expository Texts is one such book that introduces an instructional strategy called Structure Sort, a method used to teach non-fiction text structures to students in grades K-8. Hoch and McNally describe the process step-by-step using authentic student examples that highlight how classroom teachers use this engaging comprehension strategy while teaching specific text structures that good readers identify and use when reading expository texts., Using the Structure Sorts method really helps my students think critically about the expository texts they encounter. This innovative method reinforces the before, during, and after reading strategies students need to be successful when tackling the common text structures. My students love this method and feel confident to take risks in their learning using this method. This shows in the way they make predictions, explain their thinking, and are able to summarize what they read. Structure Sorts are a great way to inspire teachers to teach expository texts and empower students to feel confident tackling them., A true teacher’s guide for empowering readers to comprehend expository texts through integrated strategies. Hoch and McNally’s work provides the reader with practical strategies that can readily be implemented into classroom practice and enhance student learning. The book is full of great research-based practical ideas that I intend to use in my graduate classrooms and summer reading practicum/clinic., As a fourth-grade teacher, I am always looking to integrate strategies that support my students as they build comprehension connections with nonfiction. The Structure Sort method offers students a concrete way to connect text structure and vocabulary, while also building on skills like predicting and summarizing. The Structure Sort organizers provide students a simple tool to read with a purpose and effectively analyze text structure.

Mary L. Hoch is an Assistant Professor and Director of The Reading Center at National Louis University in Chicago.Jana L. McNally is a literacy educator who has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, and professor of literacy education courses for undergraduate and graduate students. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at National Louis University in Chicago.