A Lesson Cycle for Teaching Expository Reading and Writing

This article presents a lesson cycle of activities for teaching reading and writing skills for expository text. The lesson cycle consists of four parts: (1) vocabulary words, (2) text structures, (3) modified sentence completion activity, and (4) rewriting text. Sixth- and seventh-grade summer school students were taught to recognize and deconstruct five different types of expository paragraphs into their main ideas and supporting details over a five-week period. The students were also encouraged to rewrite the expository paragraphs in their own words. The results of the summer program showed that students improved their ability to locate main ideas. The results also demonstrated that students were willing to take ownership of expository paragraphs when they understood the texts they were reading and could work with the texts to further demonstrate their comprehension. © 2010 International Reading Association, Inc.