1. An Overview of Informational Text

Whether you’re trying to understand photosynthesis or find out the rules for the board game “Ticket to Ride,” learning something new often requires turning to an informational text.

Informational text, also called expository text, is a type of nonfiction writing designed to convey factual information about a specific topic. History and science books, newspapers, magazines, biographies, and instructional manuals are all examples of informational texts. The purpose of these texts is to inform, describe, explain, and report information.

As students move through the grades, more and more of their content knowledge and vocabulary will be gleaned from informational text.

Informational text has five agreed-on text structures (Meyer, 1985 (opens in new window)): description; sequence; compare and contrast; cause and effect; and problem and solution. Authors use these structures to organize the information they're presenting in a way that's clear for readers.

Students should receive explicit instruction about each informational text structure, its characteristics, its purpose, and the words often used to signal it.

Informational Text Structures

Compiled from The Reading Comprehension Blueprint (Hennessy, 2021) and Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A Handbook (Oakhill et al., 2014)

Structure	Purpose	Words That Signal This Text Structure
Description	Describes the characteristics and features of a topic, including examples	for example, to illustrate, for instance, in addition
Sequence or chronology	Tells the order or timing of events	first, before, finally, initially, at that point
Compare and contrast	Examines the similarities and differences between two or more people, events, concepts, and/or ideas	similarly, in common, either/or, different than, on the other hand
Cause and effect	Gives how or why (cause) and the result (effect)	because, since, as a result of, reasons why
Problem and solution	A problem and solution are presented	because, result, answer

There are also certain features specific to informational text, such as an index, a glossary, graphs and charts, captions, and pull-out quotes. Students need to learn about these features explicitly as well.

Why is learning about informational text structures important for reading?

Knowing the informational text structures, and being able to recognize them while reading, allows readers to anticipate what they’ll read and focus on content and meaning rather than on organization. 

If a student knows the word first likely signals a sequence or chronology, they can anticipate the following sentences or paragraphs will continue with that chronology. This allows the student to build a timeline in their mind and process the information more easily. Learning these structures in isolation sets students up for reading more advanced texts with multiple structures.

Graphic organizers can help make these structures visible for students. For example, you might have students fill out a graphic organizer that looks like a timeline to help them understand the sequence of events in a historical text.

Graphic Organizers for Reading Comprehension

These graphic organizers provide a scaffold for teaching narrative and informational text structures.

The Common Core State Standards significantly increased the focus on informational texts compared to what many schools were doing previously, requiring a 50-50 balance between informational and literary texts (opens in new window) for K-5th grade students.

What does the research say?

Children with poor reading comprehension often lack knowledge of text structural features. Explicitly teaching informational text structures in reading and writing lessons has proven effective for even beginning readers (Oakhill et al., 2014). 

More to Come!

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