Building comprehension through explicit teaching of text features

The research question addressed, How does explicit teaching of text features in nonfiction text improve student comprehension? demonstrates increased student access to information in nonfiction text and as a result, improved comprehension. This Capstone study documents student use of text features for comprehension as observed while creating a Nonfiction Conventions Notebook. Students in grade four completed a pre and post-teaching information-gathering sheet as well as an observation of leveled text reading. Throughout the study, students explored a variety of nonfiction text. Nonfiction and informational text are compared. Text features, text structure and language of text (signal phrases) are defined. Examples of quality nonfiction titles are included in an appendix with text features