Which text structures are commonly taught to support elementary readers' comprehension and how should they be used?

• A. Focusing only on narrative structure.
• B. Sequence/chronology, cause/effect, problem/solution, description, compare/contrast; use graphic organizers.
• C. Teaching alphabetical order.
• D. Random structure.

Answer: (B)

Understanding how a text is organized helps readers make sense of the material and predict what comes next or why something happened. In elementary instruction, students learn a set of common text structures: sequence or chronology, cause and effect, problem and solution, description, and compare and contrast. They practice recognizing these patterns and use graphic organizers to visualize them—flowcharts for steps, story maps for sequence, T-charts for cause/effect or compare/contrast, and Venn diagrams for similarities and differences. This approach gives students concrete tools to track meaning as they read and to summarize or explain what they’ve read later. It works across fiction and nonfiction, because different genres still rely on these organizing patterns. Teaching these structures explicitly, modeling how to identify them, and providing guided practice with graphic organizers helps students transfer the skill to new texts. Focusing only on narrative structure narrows comprehension to stories, teaching alphabetical order misses how text is built to convey meaning, and random structure isn’t a coherent instructional target.