How do headings help readers

From Theory to Practice. Retooling the reading lesson: Matching the right tools to the job Short. Using expository texts during guided reading allows students to become aware of the purposes for section headings. Understanding section headings in expository texts helps readers become strategic content-area readers. Common Core Standards. Grade Select 3 4 5.

State Standards. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts.

They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features e. National Geographic Kids. Time for Kids. Scholastic News. Student Objectives. Students will Participate in a brainstorming discussion about the purposes for section headings Read a sample text and insert the missing section headings with the teacher's assistance Read a sample text and insert the missing section headings independently Be able to express to the teacher the purposes for section headings.

Session 1: Model Lesson. Explain to students that today they will look at an interesting article and talk about a strategy they can use to better understand what they are reading. Distribute the article or text that you have selected as sample text 1, and ask students what they notice when they look at the text. Students will probably notice various details, such as pictures, captions, title, and so on.

After someone notices the section headings, tell the students that they are called section headings. Instruct students to circle or highlight all of the section headings in the sample text.

Then, tell them that you are going to read the text aloud. While reading, you want them to think about why the writer included the section headings in the text. Read the entire text to the group with expression or invite students to participate in reading the text aloud. Engage the class in a brainstorming activity to discuss why the writer put the section headings into the text. Make a list of the purposes for the section headings. If students do not generate the following ideas, lead them to realize that section headings also: Tell the reader what to expect in the upcoming section Hint at the main idea of the upcoming section Help the reader organize the article's ideas Provide a preview of what the whole article is leading up to Provide a transition between the last section and the next one, which has a new main idea Allow the reader to make connections with concepts that he or she is already familiar with before reading the entire article.

At the same time, consider the core of your message or the overarching idea of your text. What are the main points you want to express, and how will your headings convey your purpose and objective? Remember that headings should also account for ways audiences differ.

It is important to consider what your audience already knows about your topic, how they might respond to your message, and objections diverse viewers may have. What is the tone of the content you want to convey? To answer this question, consider your purpose and your audience.

To what community or individuals are you writing e. Where is your audience most likely to look, and what are they trying to find? In France, for instance, it has been observed by La Haye et al. Recognizing the demands of complex exposition, authors will often use a variety of writing devices to signal text organization and important content. The inclusion of headings, for instance, can support readers by identifying major topics and ideas, by emphasizing the structure of the text, and by serving as labels that can support access to sections within the text Waller, In fact, there is a relatively extensive empirical literature in psychology that generally supports the hypothesis that signals may help processing of expository text Lorch, In this paper, we briefly review the relevant findings, then we provide a critique of the research literature, arguing that our understanding of how headings influence text processing would benefit from a linguistically-based analysis of headings.

We briefly present a general theory of signaling devices that provides such an analysis and we summarize some recent cognitive research demonstrating the validity and utility of the analysis.

Finally, we address the question of what future research directions are suggested by our framework. Two lines of research on the topic can be identified. Within educational psychology, researchers have been primarily interested in the possibility that well-constructed headings might facilitate learning from text Brooks et al. If principles of heading construction and placement can be identified that consistently improve learning from textbooks then authors can write more effectively to the benefit of student learning.

Within cognitive psychology, headings have been used as a means to manipulate context in order to investigate effects of global context on comprehension and memory processes. In a prototypical experiment, participants read a text with headings or the same text without headings then receive a test of their memory for content.

However, this null result is not surprising because headings conventionally communicate information about text organization and recognition memory tests are often insensitive to organizational factors. The picture is different when memory is assessed by simply asking readers to recall all that they can remember from the text. The presence of headings also aids summarization Brooks et al.

When the research on headings is combined with similar research on the effects of other structure-emphasizing signaling devices e. The general strategy followed in this research was to construct texts with competing themes and manipulate the title of the text to emphasize one of the two themes, then observe the effects on free recall.

The general strategy in this research has been to construct texts containing vague referents then manipulate the title to alter the context for interpreting the referents. This research shows that a title influences attention to ambiguous words that are specifically related to the title. Their influence is achieved via at least three mechanisms. First, when headings are used to highlight the organization of topics in a well-structured text, they lead to better memory for that organization; in turn, better memory for text organization leads to better overall recall.

Finally, by establishing a context, headings can influence the interpretation of text content by causing readers to use relevant background knowledge to guide comprehension. Thus, the psychological literature presents an informative, coherent body of results on the effects of titles and headings. These shortcomings limit the theoretical and practical impact of the research.

There are even examples of studies that do not provide examples of the headings they actually used e. Brooks et al. This statement is a rough definition of headings that corresponds well to the implicit definition that most researchers appear to use, but it is demonstrably inadequate as a general definition of titles and headings.

These examples do not state the topic or theme of a section of text; rather, they provide information about the function of a section of text. Ho-Dac, Jacques and Rebeyrolle approach this plurality of functional dimensions in texts by referring to the three metafunctions which, in systemic functional linguistics, organize language resources Halliday, : 1 the interpersonal metafunction is concerned with the way language encodes interaction; 2 the ideational metafunction refers to language resources used to represent experience; and 3 the textual metafunction refers to language resources concerned with the construction of text.

From this perspective, psychological researchers appear to have taken a simplistic view of titles and headings, ignoring their capacity to fulfil and possibly combine several functions. The empirical literature should therefore be critically revisited, as it may overgeneralize findings which apply only to certain types of headings. Even within the category of topic-identifying headings, it is possible to identify several dimensions of variation in headings.

One potentially important dimension concerns the visual properties of headings; headings vary in their typographical and spatial properties. Many studies fail to provide information about the visual properties of their stimuli. This is unfortunate because it is likely that the titles and headings used in different experiments vary on this dimension in ways that might influence processing.

Therefore, variation in the visual properties of titles and headings may be associated with variation in their effects on text processing. Some headings provide only the major referent for a section of text. The heading provides a context for integrating subsequent information, but leaves it to the reader to identify or construct the main points of the section. Assuming that the heading is, in fact, an accurate statement of the main point of the section, the reader is relieved of the ambiguity and work of identifying or constructing this conclusion.

Again, previous investigations generally fail to provide information about this potentially important source of variation in their text construction. Let us contrast two situations. In one e. The control version of the text omits the headings but retains the topic sentences and therefore retains the same information content as the experimental version of the text.

The function of the headings is to foreground specific content that is also available in the text. It is likely that text processing is different under these circumstances than under conditions where headings are redundant with specific text content. A comparison of a text with vs.

The nature and extent of the effect on processing of manipulating headings in this way almost surely depends on exactly what information is lost when the headings are omitted. Not only is it the case that conclusions are restricted to topic-identifying headings, but there has also not been any careful examination of how their visual realization, informativeness, and relationship to text content may influence text processing.

To take one simple example, consider an experiment in which memory for a text is compared for a version of the text that contains topic-identifying headings and a control version of the text that omits the headings and the white space inserted to set off the headings from the body of the text.

Are differences in performance on the two text versions attributable to the fact that the control text omitted topic-identifying headings? Or are performance differences due to the loss of segmentation cues provided in part by the white space? Or both? For example, an educator interested in text design might want to make recommendations about how to construct headings to facilitate learning from text.

Some relevant questions are: What types of information should be included in the headings e. How should the headings relate to the content they signal? What should the visual properties of the headings be? In short, the types of variation we have noted are very relevant to text design, but we have not yet designed research to answer these questions. To pursue such questions, we require a broader conception of headings and a systematic analysis of variation in headings.

In the next section, we summarize a general theory of text signals that addresses these goals. SARA is a theory intended both as an analysis of signaling devices and as a framework for understanding how signaling devices influence text processing.

As one important type of signaling device, headings are addressed within the SARA framework. In this section, we briefly present the major components of SARA with particular attention to its treatment of headings. The text-based analysis of signals defines signaling and provides a structured approach to characterizing a signaling device along several dimensions. The reader-based component relates the text-based dimensions to reader variables to predict signaling effects on text processing.

The goal of TAM is to supply a semantic analysis and a logical model of text formatting properties. It approaches this task by building on the notion of metalanguage Harris, and and key concepts taken from Speech Act Theory Austin, ; Grice, ; Searle, and One central claim in TAM is that text formatting properties are meaningful because they are reduced forms of metasentences.

In contrast to text sentences that refer to the world, metasentences refer to the text itself. A textual act refers to actions concerning the text and its organization. An important implication of these claims is that for any signaling device, one may re-construct its underlying metasentence and extract useful information from it.

Thus, TAM provides a foundation for both a definition of signals and an analysis of their key properties. Within this framework, headings and titles may be defined as text objects that are typographically and spatially distinguished from the rest of the text and whose minimal function is to label another text object.

In the case of titles, the labeled text object is an entire text; in the case of headings, the labeled text object is a text part e. This definition is consistent with those of Virbel and Genette According to Genette , titles may have four different functions: 1 to identify or label a book; 2 to provide information about the text topic; 3 to indicate the nature of the book; and 4 to attract the interest of readers.

However, as in our definition, the only mandatory function that a title must fulfil is the labeling function. Adopting the principle that a heading may be reformulated as a metasentence because a heading is a realization of a metasentence provides SARA with a means to describe titles and headings and, more generally, any signaling device.

Based on this approach to understanding the purposes of signaling devices, SARA proposes that signals may be analyzed along four dimensions:. Moreover, as they have likely implications for text processing, they are used in the reader-based component in order to generate predictions concerning their potential effects on text processing.

Accessibility refers to the ease with which readers can use the information. It should depend upon the other three dimensions of signals: their realization properties, their scope, and their location with respect to the signaled text object. As an example, information about the organization of topics in a text is more accessible if it is communicated by an advance outline than if it is communicated by a system of headings interspersed in a text because the outline relieves the reader of gathering all the information together.

That is, what are the information functions of signals? SARA hypothesizes that any signaling device serves one or more of seven distinguishable information functions:.

Given our definition of headings, all headings demarcate text sections and provide a unique label for each section. In addition, all conventional uses of headings appear to involve emphasis of the heading e. However, headings vary with respect to the other four information functions, as illustrated in Table 1. Many headings are used to identify the topics of the sections they head. As we have already noted, however, not all headings are topic-identifying. Rather, headings are sometimes used to identify only the function of a section e.

It is possible to combine the two functions, too. Headings may explicitly communicate the sequential organization of the sections of a text; in fact, headings sometimes consist solely of numbers at the start of each new text section e. These variations in headings lend themselves to different cognitive functions and can therefore be expected to influence text processing, as we will see in the next section of the text.

Table 1. An analysis of the information function of diverse headings. It is possible to construct signaling devices that communicate the same information i. For example, parallel versions of headings and preview sentences may be constructed. According to SARA, both the preview sentence and heading explicitly demarcate the structure boundary, provide a label for the section, and identify the topic of the section, and —in this example— both receive emphasis.

However, the two signals are realized differently; whereas the preview sentence is completely explicit in its communication that a new section is beginning, the heading communicates this information implicitly by being set off spatially from the preceding and following sections. This visual communication of demarcation by the heading is a more visually salient cue that might result in more attention on the part of the reader.

Both the advance outline and the headings provide the same topic-identifying labels for the text sections, but the headings provide the relevant label immediately preceding the relevant section whereas the advance outline provides the label generally far in advance of the relevant sections.

Conversely, as already mentioned, an advance outline makes information about the sequential and hierarchical organization of the text more accessible compared to a system of headings.

The variation in the length of the text section corresponds to a difference in the scope of the heading. Further, SARA offers a systematic analysis of the dimensions on which signals, including headings, vary and it offers hypotheses about how such variation may influence cognitive processing. We hope that the theoretical framework makes it clear that it is important for researchers to characterize their manipulations of titles and headings with respect to all of these dimensions identified by SARA in order that the conclusions from future research may be theoretically more precise and more useful in applications.