Montelongo, J., Herter, R. J., Ansaldo, R., & Hatter, N. (2010). A lesson cycle for teaching expository reading and writing. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 53(8), 656-666.
This is a clear summary of a detailed instructional framework for teaching middle school students to understand text structures and use that understanding to comprehend the main ideas and details of expository text, and to write summary paragraphs that capture that understanding.
The positives here: Strong evidence is presented that the framework increased student achievement. The target population was summer school students who had failed several classes, which makes the improvement shown extra impressive. Also, this was action research done collaboratively by two university teacher educators and two novice teachers, in an authentic setting, which is a good trend and lends credibility to the findings.
The model is very much in the direct instruction mode, though the skills taught are more holistic (on the paragraph level rather than the sentence level) than is often seen. The model is clearly delineated and could be replicated. My only reservation about such teaching is that actual texts may be "messier" than is implied by the discrete teaching of text structures.
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