Bridge the Gap in Reading Comprehension Between Narrative and Informational Text

I have been a teaching assistant for a teacher-preparation class during the Fall 2020 semester. My students are mostly pre-service and in-service K-12 literacy teachers working in various areas of Michigan. This position enables me to listen to different voices about what daily difficulties my interns may encounter across their literacy curriculum. For example, Ms. Blake, a grade four teacher, shared with me a challenge (cited above) that demonstrates the extent to which stories can capture students’ attention, which is certainly more than nonfiction can do. Indeed, Ms. Blake described a problem that is shared by many K-12 teachers in the U.S. Our teachers are concerned about how to pique students’ reading attention and inspire their curiosity to learn to the greatest extent. At the same time, teachers also understand that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, 2010) encourage K-12 teachers to incorporate informational and scientific texts as major parts of the reading curriculum. This imbalance of emphasis on different genres that exists between teachers’ accountability and students’ interests seems to be a dilemma for all K-12 reading-class teachers.

One major task of this teacher-preparation class is to carry out a series of formal and informal assessments with a case student who is facing literacy challenges. Standardized testing as a formal assessment approach is conducted via Zoom during this unprecedented year. I was able to observe some instances of our interns’ test battery administration with their case students. Something noteworthy that I noticed while observing this testing was that many children actually did a great job recalling the essential plot of a narrative—how Lucia met a stray puppy by accident, whereas they struggled with retelling the highlights of an informational text about a special type of African tree called the baobab. On the other hand, these kids could easily respond to passage comprehension questions when reading a narrative story, while they were more likely to meet difficulty answering questions from an informational text. Andrew, a fourth grader, did not know the meaning of Africa, so when we asked him where baobab trees usually grow, he said, “land” instead. These disparate reading performances between narrative and informational texts led me to think about what defined the differences between the narrative and informational genres, and how to bridge the gap between them.

With these inquiries in mind, the ultimate purpose of this article is to provide teaching implications that will allow K-12 teachers to improve their students’ reading comprehension of both narrative and informational texts. Prior to offering such implications, this article engages in a discussion of how the Common Core’s Anchor Standards for K-12 reading will help the audience identify the state’s expectations for both narrative and informational text. Next, some evidence-based ideas are addressed in order to later provide matching instructional strategies that might be considered when using both narrative and informational texts for instruction. This article concludes with the hope that these practical implementations can be expanded to other genres across the curriculum.

What Do Common Core State Standards tell us about reading?

Common Core State Standards are commonly adopted in many U.S states as a set of research-based, nationwide guidance for K-12 students who are preparing to enter college or the workforce upon graduation from high school. Ten anchor standards for reading are stated in CCSS, which expect students at all grade levels to excel at reading and comprehending narrative and informational texts. Students will read increasingly challenging narrative and informational texts as they get older. Meanwhile, informational texts are emphasized more than narrative texts for students in higher grades. According to CCSS, by 12th grade, students should spend 70% of their time reading informational text and 30% reading narrative texts (Donovan & Smolkin, 2002). To help build up to this expectation, the amount of informational text reading required increase each year, starting with fourth grade, where the amount of informational and narrative text is at 50% each. The increasing reading time for informational texts not only places some reading pressure on students, but it also challenges teachers to find an appropriate way to incorporate a large amount of informational text into their classroom, instructions and assignments.

However, many teachers like Ms. Blake point out that increasing reading time on informational texts does not remedy students’ deficiency in comprehending these texts. Instead, their world knowledge, genre awareness, vocabulary recognition, and linguistic and decoding skills are what should be more appreciated by teachers. Narrative text can provide a real-world context for learning content area material, but informational texts present a series of important pieces of information about a specific topic with which students might not be familiar. Good choices and uses of trade books to teach science and social studies should be supported by institutions, such as the National Council of Social Studies and the National Science Teachers Association.

In the next few sections, I will focus on three critical insights that have emerged from recent theory and research on reading comprehension in narrative and informational texts. I believe that these perspectives are helpful for our teachers to understand the ways in which children can improve their comprehension in both texts: 1) world knowledge as a cornerstone to establish comprehension, 2) text features as tools to build comprehension, 3) decoding skills as adhesives to optimize comprehension.

World Knowledge as a Cornerstone to Establish Comprehension

The effective activation of world knowledge is a crucial element in making meaning of texts. Much of the previous literature indicated that students benefited most from activities that assess, activate, and develop their content and background knowledge before reading (Sáenz and Fuchs, 2002; Englert & Thomas, 1987; Taylor & Williams, 1983). These findings were grounded in many attempts to see if children were able to develop deep-level comprehension of overall text meaning with activation of world knowledge. The answer was yes.

Text BoxIndeed, thinking back to our own reading class in K-12 education, many adults can see that narrative texts usually present recurring topics—such as friendship, love, parting with a friend—in a specific context that involves particular characters, settings, times, and places. Teachers focus on teaching essential narrative elements such as story structure, figurative language, plot, characterization, simile, metaphor, etc. Understanding these aspects is not a difficult task because our students have extensive real-life experience and knowledge regarding the events and situations described in typical narrative texts. Sometimes, students can even use their funds of knowledge to answer some challenging questions correctly because these events may happen in their daily lives.

Text Box Nevertheless, our child readers may face a difficult time in processing science books and informational texts. Scholars of reading comprehension reveal that the increased structural complexity and increased demands for domain-specific information are the reasons of potential reading deficiency (Kraal et al., 2008; Olson, 1985). Informational texts contain abstract and logical relations. Early graders such as 3rd to 5th graders are beginning to learn about content domains such as science, and they lack previous knowledge about that particular domain. You might have heard of fourth-grade slump before. This is a critical period in reading development since an emergence of comprehension difficulties around fourth grade will occur. This period is also important to note because third and fourth grade students face critical comprehension challenges from informational texts, particular those covering scientific material (Bowen, 1999; Snow, 2002). The information in narrative is generally more familiar to readers, and readers generally show less variation in terms of the knowledge necessary to understand narrative as opposed to informational texts.

Text features as Tools to Build Comprehension

Students utilize their ability to differentiate between common text structures of narrative and expository texts when reading. Englert and Thomas’ (1987) study indicated that child participants tend to be unsure of the characteristics of informational texts and consequently experience difficulties using their knowledge of text structures and recognition of the different purposes of texts as a potential tool to build comprehension. RAND Reading Study Group (2002) also indicates that students who understand the idea of text structure and how to analyze it are likely to learn more than students who lack this understanding. Hence, acquiring knowledge of texts’ structural development and using them properly can help students build up comprehension ability.

Thinking of your teaching experience on informational texts. Structure elements are varied, so you may introduce students to the components of various texts throughout the entire school year. Usually, comprehension strategies of recognizing text structure are initially taught to suit story-oriented texts at the start of student’s school years. Therefore, the ability to recognize other patterns of text structure need more time to be developed when applying these strategies to science and other informational texts. In all, the ability to identify and analyze these text structures in informational texts helps our students comprehend the text more easily and retain it longer.

Common text structures in informational texts

Description: The author describes a topic.

Sequence: The author uses numerical or chronological order to list items or events.

Compare/contrast: The author compares and contrasts two or more similar events, topics, or objects.

Cause/effect: The author delineates one or more causes and then describes the ensuing effects.

Problem/solution: The author poses a problem or question and then gives the answer.

Decoding Skills as Adhesives to Optimize Comprehension

Reading decoding skill represents the ability to apply letter-sound correspondence rules when reading words and non-words. Many children in elementary school years may exhibit slow or inaccurate decoding skills. In Hoover and Gough’s (1990) study, they demonstrated that both basic and advance literacy have in common basic decoding ability. An interesting equation was provided in their finding:

Decoding×Linguistic Comprehension=Reading Comprehension

This equation informs our teachers: even if students have great oral language comprehension, if they cannot decode the text, they still cannot access and comprehend it. An appropriate use of decoding skill is a strong predictor of reading comprehension and contributes to different portions of reading comprehension differed by genre.

Imagining when a mathematical text introduces a new geometrical shape, when a historical text describes a new event like civil war, when a scientific text contains unfamiliar and difficult academic words, how will your students perform in answering the reading comprehension questions? They might experience a lot of difficulties reading these informational texts because the overall complexity and academic words were increasing tremendously. Instruction for lower comprehenders of informational text may require an initial emphasis on decoding, whereas higher comprehenders may need instruction to emphasize and build vocabulary knowledge.

To sum up, improving a student’s reading comprehension on both narrative and informational texts is a challenging task for our current U.S. teachers to overcome. Implementing a variety of instructional strategies to support comprehension development provides teachers with opportunities to engage students in purposeful reading, thinking, and learning narrative and informational texts.

Instructional Strategies

Some interesting warm-up and pre-reading activities can serve to make the text accessible to students and enable them to remember what they have learned. These activities aim at activating students’ prior and background knowledge in preparation for new learning, so that students can form a schema in their mindset and get ready for new things.

The tried-and-true K-W-L chart (Ferlazzo & Sypnieski, 2018) is an effective pedagogical approach to measure students’ background knowledge about a specific topic or concept. Students write and share what they already know about the topic in the K (What I know) section. They then add questions in the W (What I want to know) section and write up their learnings in the L (What I learned) section. Variations of K-W-L, as Figure 1 showed, extend the chart to include columns for how students can find answers to their questions, what actions they might take after learning this new information, and what new questions they have based on what they have learned.

Wordstorming to anticipate content (Allen, 2008) is another popular instructional strategy to support academic vocabulary in both narrative and informational texts. This variation (see Figure 2) invites students to record in the appropriate boxes both important concepts related to the narrative text and important informational words used in the text.

In addition to teaching academic words, text structure strategy (TSS) is also a popular method to implement. The TSS instruction focuses on guiding many of the comprehension promoting activities using one of the more complex and higher order text structures, such as comparison, cause and effect, problem and solving, etc. Therefore, TSS applications use the text structures to guide selecting important ideas, write a main idea, generating inferences, monitoring comprehension, and writing. Teacher can introduce text structure early in each lesson as the reading materials are initially previewed and throughout the lesson at every turn. This will encourage students to connect their memory structures and comprehend using the logical connections presented by the text structures. For example, teachers may pose questions when considering informational texts, such as “What is the cause for the problem?” “Does the solution address the cause?”, etc. Teaching the features of different genres promotes readers to recognize what they are reading and quickly adjust their reading styles as well.

Genre and context awareness activities ask students to focus mainly on the purpose of the communication and the people involved (Millar, 2011). Types of activities could include noticing how language becomes more or less formal depending on the audience; discussing what topics may be taboo in certain contexts or with certain people; listing genres and stating when using them is appropriate and polite; searching through piles of authentic texts and identifying what the genre is and what its purpose is; etc.

For instance, teachers can divide students into small groups and ask them to discuss what a specific genre is, why people write this genre, who will be the audience. Ask them to come up with a list of possible combinations of: Text Type + Audience + Purpose, and put these combinations on sticky notes or cards. After reading and creating, students put their cards or notes in a shared bag. One at a time, students select a card or note (not their own), read it aloud to the class, and use it to facilitate a discussion that focuses on addressing these genre-specific questions.

Some Final Thoughts

The extent of K-12 students’ comprehension is different by genres. Students are more familiar with text features of narrative stories than those of nonfictions. From this perspective, bridging the gap between these two genres is a challenge for all K-12 teachers. Increasing reading and teaching time on informational text is not sufficient. Other aspects should also be considered.

In this article, I compare a student’s prior knowledge as cornerstones of skyscrapers. The more cornerstones we have, the more stable the skyscraper is. Students benefited most from activities that assess, activate, and develop their content and background knowledge before reading. Their funds of knowledge help recognize and evaluate the essential ideas of texts. Moreover, understanding text features is more like using a tool to build up your comprehension. Our children will be more confident to comprehend texts when they know text characteristics, text structure, academic vocabulary in a specific text type. Lastly, a mastery of decoding skill can also optimize students’ reading comprehension. Even if students may grasp linguistic comprehension very well, an appropriate use of decoding skills is still important to comprehend texts.

Nowadays, some scholars introduced a hybrid text, which integrated narrative and informational text as a whole (Donovan & Smolkin, 2002). It is proven to be an engaging text, and also offers new potentials for learning across the curriculum. Juxtaposing narrative with informational texts draws readers attention, and meanwhile, adds facts and depth to students’ understanding. Unfortunately, this article has not spaced some lines to introduce this avenue. More detailed discussion can be furthered in the future research.