Use of Graphic Organizers and Effective Notetaking Skills to Promote Middle School Students’ Awareness of Text Structures and Abilities to Comprehend Expository Texts(2/3)

Expository passages in the school textbooks are typically structured with the aim to providestudents with background knowledge and subject matter information. However, manystudents have encountered difficulty while reading expository texts. Previous research hasindicated that readers who are sensitive to text structure had better comprehension ofexpository text. Additionally, model the use of graphic organizers with different textstructures has also been shown to be beneficial. Thus, the purpose of the current study is toincorporate the use of graphic organizers and notetaking skills in the explicit instruction oftext structures to increase seventh grade students’ awareness of various text structures andcomprehension and recall of the importance information in expository texts. This three yearstudy will start with a comparison of the textbooks used in sixth grade and seventh grade tosee whether there are differences in the types of text structure used or differences in thequality of text structure. Following the first year’s findings, the aim of the second year is toinvestigate students’ text structure awareness and how individual differences affect students’text structure awareness. In the final year of this study, there will be an instruction designedto improve students’ text structure awareness and use of text structure by incorporating theuse of graphic organizers and effective notetaking skills. At the end of the study, we expectto provide some implications for teachers on how to promote students’ abilities tocomprehend and produce expository text.