Which text structures should a first-grade teacher explicitly teach to support comprehension?

• A. Phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge, and phonics rules
• B. Preface and appendix structures
• C. Sequencing, cause/effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast, and description
• D. Settings and characters in stories

Answer: (C)

Understanding how texts are organized helps young readers make meaning from what they read. In first grade, explicitly teaching common text structures gives students a clear framework for comprehension and the habits to use it across many types of text.

The structures listed—sequencing, cause/effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast, and description—cover the ways information can be arranged. Sequencing helps students retell the order of events or steps; cause/effect makes connections between actions and outcomes; problem/solution shows a challenge and how it was addressed; compare/contrast helps notice similarities and differences; and description focuses on describing attributes or features. When teachers model these patterns and provide practice with simple, concrete texts, students gradually learn to recognize the structure, predict what comes next, and summarize what they’ve read.

To reinforce this, you can use explicit modeling with think-alouds, anchor charts that name each structure, and graphic organizers like sequence charts, three-column cause/effect frames, Venn diagrams for compare/contrast, or description boxes for attributes. Read-alouds and guided practice give students opportunities to spot the structure, discuss why it matters for understanding, and apply it in their own retellings.

Other topics, such as phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge, and phonics rules, are essential for decoding and word recognition, but they focus on how readers access text, not how texts are organized to support comprehension. Preface/appendix structures are book-specific parts, and settings or characters are story elements rather than general text structures that organize information across texts. The best choice centers on teaching these text structures explicitly to bolster comprehension.