Expository writing is an important skill in the upper-elementary and secondary grades. Yet few studies have examined the effects of interventions designed to increase students’ expository writing abilities and their ability to generalize their knowledge to write expository texts using novel text structures. The present study examined the effects of an intervention that attempted to improve students’ expository writing abilities through an instructional emphasis on teacher and student dialogues about expository writing strategies, text structure processes, and self-regulated learning. The findings suggested that the dialogic instruction was effective (a) in promoting students’ expository writing abilities on two text structures taught during the intervention (explanation and comparison/contrast) and (b) in leading to improved abilities on a near transfer activity, in which students wrote using a text structure not taught during the intervention. Although students in the control group exhibited some pretest-posttest gains on specific text structures, they were not successful in using their knowledge to write about student-selected topics and text structures. The results support the importance of instruction that makes the writing processes and strategies visible to students through teacher-student and student-student dialogues.

Relatively little is known about the potential of web-based programs to support and scaffold the writing performance of students with disabilities. In this study, an experimental and control group of students planned and organized their ideas in order to write expository papers about self-selected topics. The experimental group used a web-based environment that scaffolded performance by prompting attention to the topical organization and structure of ideas while students were in the situated act of composing their papers. Control students used similar writing tools, but in traditional paper-and-pencil print formats. The results of the quasi-experimental study revealed that the students in the web-based scaffolding condition produced lengthier pieces and received significantly higher ratings on the primary traits associated with writing quality. The greatest effects were evident in terms of experimental students' abilities to produce topic sentences and to generate more topically coherent pieces overall. These findings suggest the web-based software can be designed to offer universally available supports to improve the performance of struggling writers.

An investigation was made of the effects of four major types of expository text on the comprehension performance of children in third and sixth grades and of three ability levels. Children were given topical information from sequence, comparison/contrast, description, and enumeration text structures and were asked to rate how well target and distractor statements belonged with the original stimulus sentences. The results of the experiment showed that discourse types varied in their saliency to children and knowledge of text structure was highly related to grade level and reading ability. The data support the notion that knowledge of discourse types underlies effective expository comprehension and that this ability increases as children reach the upper elementary grades.

This study examined LD students' metacognitive knowledge about expository writing and the relationship between this knowledge and writing performance. Thirty students, equally divided among three ability groups (learning disabled, low-achieving, and high-achieving), were interviewed about their metacognitive knowledge about the expository writing process and the role of text organization; subjects also composed two types of expository text (compare / contrast and explanation). When performance levels among the three ability groups were compared, the results suggested that learning disabled students were less aware than high-achieving students of modeled writing strategies, steps in the writing process, strategies for presenting expository ideas, and procedures for selecting and integrating information from multiple sources. Discrepancies between learning disabled and low-achieving writers also emerged in the metacognitive interview in terms of ability to (a) control and regulate the writing process, (b) use organizational strategies or text structures to generate or group ideas, and (c) monitor the quality of texts. When performance on the composition and metacognitive measures was related, the results revealed that the strongest relationship existed between writing performance and the following metacognitive variables: students' awareness of modeled writing strategies, students' knowledge of processes related to monitoring the completeness of text, and students' categorizing abilities. These findings suggest that writing instruction should focus on both the development of students' metacognitive knowledge of the expository writing process and the organizational strategies for generating, organizing, and monitoring expository prose.

Text structures are considered important organizational schemes underlying effective comprehension and production of expository discourse. The present study examined the differential text structure skills in reading and writing of learning disabled students and two groups of regular class students. The results revealed significant differences between learning disabled students and their regular class peers in the use of text structure in both reading and writing expository discourse. The data support the notion that knowledge of discourse types underlies effective comprehension and production and that learning disabled students' conceptual understanding of these structures is limited.