Many adolescent readers experience difficulties comprehending informational text, which may result from underlying difficulties with foundational skills (e.g., word recognition and fluency), knowledge demands (e.g., background, text structure, and vocabulary), and/or reading motivation. Supplemental interventions for adolescents targeting only…

The Institute for Education Sciences identifies main idea and summarization instruction as effective practices for improving adolescent students' reading comprehension. Main idea generation is a higher-level comprehension skill that requires students to read the text, connect information across the paragraph or section, determine the most…

The present case study illustrates the use of explicit text structure intervention for expository reading comprehension with three adolescents with language learning disabilities (LLD). We investigated whether it was feasible to provide direct instruction on the identification of signal words that denote compare-contrast relations between…

This systematic review article summarizes the effects of explicit text structure instruction on expository text comprehension for adolescents with learning disabilities or at risk for reading failure. A thorough literature search with four databases and backward citation search identified nine studies published in the past 22 years for inclusion…