Connar Kelley

Dr. Leslie Cook

ENG 3580 Teaching Composition
13 November 2015
Annotated Bibliography 3Expository/ Informational
Montelongo, Jos, et al. "A Lesson Cycle for Teaching Expository Reading and
Writing." Journal Of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53.8 (2010): 656-666.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.
Initially, these authors make a claim that students often struggle in summarizing
and paraphrasing the important information they read in expository texts. The authors
believe that this is due to the structure behind informative textbook style readings.
They emphasize that students struggle in comprehension and articulation of the
informative texts based on how the information is generated. To supplement for the
struggles they have seen in their students, these authors created a lesson plan that
provides students with knowledge and strategies that are imperative when digesting
informational texts. They focused the goal of their lesson on providing ways in which
students could more effectively recognize the main idea and then the students could
synthesize the information to produce an expository writing of the information they have
read. They used examples to express key structures that students should look for when
reading an informational text. These structures include generalization, sequence, compare
and contrast, cause and effect, and problem and solution. Along with these structures, the
authors also generated a list of signal words that often correspond with the expository
structures. Overall, this lesson is a great way to provide students with a little extra help in
synthesizing information in a concise and affective manner. The lesson would be great to
use with middle school students, as they transition from reading information from picture
books to reading information out of text-filled textbooks.
Rowan, Katherine E. "Cognitive Correlates of Explanatory Writing Skill: An Analysis
of Individual Differences." Written Communication 7.3 (1990): 316-341. ERIC.
Web. 13 Nov. 2015.
The article opens by encouraging the importance of explanatory writing.
However, as Rowan admits, just because it is important, it is not necessarily an easy task.
She uses examples of how explaining difficult ideas can be hard to transfer to written
word. Her aim for the research she conducts in this article is to find the exact difficulties
of why people struggle in written explanations. As the title suggests, she has found many
cognitive skills that correlate to the skills required to write an expository text. First, she
found that prior topic knowledge had an impact on students ability to write a concrete
explanatory piece of writing. She found that overall cognitive complexity was a factor.
However, it was not as strong as a factor as she hypothesized. This research can be very
useful for teachers in the classroom. It motivates the idea that all students have the
capability to use explanatory skills and that the success in terms of expository writing is
not dependent on the students cognitive skills. It would even be useful to share these

findings with students so that all students can see the potentials they have in their writing.
Especially with expository writing, students should feel confident that they can explain,
in some sense, the world around them through written text.
Sol, Isabel, et al. "Integrating Information: An Analysis of the Processes Involved and
the Products Generated in a Written Synthesis Task." Written Communication
30.1 (2013): 63. SAGE. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.
The authors explored the idea of comprehension when synthesizing historical
texts. The conductors of the study performed in this article were curious to see how
engagement of the text correlated to the students comprehension of the text following
their own written synthesis. Overall, the data showed that students who were more
engaged during the reading of the text produced a written synthesis that was of higher
quality. However, students who did not focus as much during the reading produced a
copied sense of the text. This study proves that it is imperative for students to focus on
the text at hand in order to accurately synthesize the information in an expository written
assignment. It is useful for all teachers to understand this as they should motivate all
student to have a full engagement with the text as they read for facts and details.