Expository Text Structure: From Concept to Practice for the Enhancement of English Reading Skills

Abstract

Reading texts in English is a part of an individual’s everyday life and often serves different purposes, such as learning courses based on an educational system, pursuing knowledge-based routines, applying information for quality of life, and assessing English proficiency in test format. Most English texts are written with an expository text structure, whereby the text is systematically constructed with an internal structure and aims to provide information about its topic to the reader. The expository text structures commonly found in English language texts can be classified into five types: description, sequence, problem–solution, cause–effect, and compare/contrast. Research findings reflect that a reader’s learning experience with a variety of different types of expository text structure plays a pivotal role in enhancing reading comprehension. Readers who are familiar with a variety of different types of expository text structure will read strategically and extract key points from their readings.  By contrast, readers who are not aware of the text structure can tend to read without using reading strategies. Educators have suggested that experience with and training on a variety of different types of expository text structure will improve readers’ reading comprehension for more complicated English texts.