Abstract
What are the ingredients of effective reading instruction? And how can students be encouraged to apply their newly acquired reading skills in contexts outside language arts? These and other questions are at the heart of current debates about reading instruction in Dutch primary education. Schools increasingly take a thematic approach,
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or take a functional approach to reading comprehension instruction by integrated it into content area lessons. Still, focused instruction remains important, especially about the structure of informational texts. In the Netherlands, text structure instruction receives little attention, while it is known that insight into the coherence of texts is crucial for deep text comprehension.
This study provides insight into the viability of integrating text structure instruction with science education. Through a materials analysis, we first investigated the extent to which current teaching materials from science teaching programs are usable for text structure instruction. This analysis shows that many science topics certainly offer starting points for text structure instruction. However, the range of clearly structured texts that can serve as model texts is not sufficient for this purpose. This also holds for the science assignments that help students understand these text structures.
During design-based research, conducted in collaboration with primary school teachers, several lesson series were designed and tested in which such an integrated approach was applied. These lesson series proved to be easy to implement, and also ensured that students engaged enthusiastically. The application of the underlying design principles, however, requires professionalization of teachers, including an increase in their knowledge of text structure.
The fact that teachers show a lack of knowledge about text structure, is not surprising. An analysis of the Dutch Language Knowledge Base for students in teacher training for primary education shows that prospective teachers are provided with little theory on text structure, and that this theory is also offered in a fragmented and incomplete way.
From a quasi-experimental effect study in which working with the developed teaching materials (with attention to text structure) was compared to an integrated approach without attention to text structure, no difference in effect on reading and writing skills could be established. However, this was a relatively short intervention, in which the quality of implementation was not always optimal, and teachers in the control condition sometimes allocated more time to reading instruction than teachers in the text structure condition.
Finally, a series of educational videos on text structure and text comprehension were developed and tested among second year pre-service students. Unfortunately, a lockdown during the corona pandemic caused unforeseen circumstances during the intervention. We could show no effect of students' video viewing time on scores on a knowledge test on text structure and text comprehension, but students who had watched the videos were found to be better able to determine the structure of a self-selected reading text.
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