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Current Research
“
Teachers must ensure that students can
make sense of the content, regardless of how
difficult it may seem to novices. To do that,
teachers must build and activate students’
background knowledge – two of the most
important things that they can do to improve
student understanding.
”
– “Building and Activating Background
Knowledge,”
Principal Leadership
,
Frey and Fisher, 2010
“
After acknowledging that our intermediate
students failed to read or gave little import-
ance to text features when reading, we
developed the text feature walk strategy.
The text feature walk is a technique that
F
iTEXT
®
:
Using Text Features to
Increase Reading Comprehension
Family members want to help their children with reading, but they don’t
always know how to begin. In this interactive workshop, adult family mem-
bers will learn strategies for assisting upper-elementary and middle-school
children with reading nonfiction informational text. Students must develop
nonfiction reading skills to become strong readers throughout their lives.
Teachers and library media specialists can explore tools and scaffolds for
teaching students how to preview, ask questions, and visualize information
in nonfiction texts. Students attending the workshop will explore and prac-
tice these reading strategies with their family members or peers through
engaging hands-on activities.
follows a protocol similar to the primary
picture walk
…
As students move through
text features in a given section, they
become familiar with the text’s organization
and access important background
knowledge related to the content (Honig,
Diamond, and Gutlohn, 2000).
”
– “Guiding Students Through Expository
Text with Text Feature Walks,” Kelly and
Clausen-Grace,
Reading Rockets
, 2007
iTEXT
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