“What’s the Main Idea?”: Using Text Structure to Build Comprehension

Abstract

This teaching tip aims to build awareness of using a text’s structure as a framework for building students’ reading comprehension. The authors detail the Framework for Accelerating the Strategic Comprehension of Text (FASCT) to support elementary students reading comprehension abilities by explicitly teaching students to use the structure of a text to support the development of a main idea statement after every text read. FASCT then teaches students to expand this main idea statement into a summary by adding key supporting details. Furthermore, this teaching tip outlines how teachers can implement FASCT instruction using any genre of text. Although comprehension instruction, such as FASCT, is only one part of the overall literacy block, it may be essential for building a solid foundation from which students’ complex comprehension skills can grow.

Paragraph Comprehension from the Perspective of Conjunctions and Structure under Structuralism

“…Teachers must help students understand the logical relationships in texts, build the awareness of using the logical relationships in texts as the framework for students' reading comprehension, and explicitly teach students to use the logical relationship in the text to understand the text structure, so as to support students' reading comprehension ability. Although comprehension instruction is only one part of the overall literacy block, it may be essential to lay a solid foundation for students' complex comprehension skills (Hudson et al, 2021). Therefore, teachers must strengthen the guidance of understanding the logical relationships in texts, determining the text structure and identifying the main idea, and use some practices and skills to help students with continuous reading comprehension difficulties.…”