Chapter 14: Building Awareness of Discourse Structure. Skilled readers are tuned into how information is organized, how central themes emerge, and how signaling mechanisms provide cues to this organization. Skilled readers are able to identify the main or topic sentences as they appear in a text and are sensitive to text structures that help identify where to find main idea sentences. The chapter sorts written discourse analysis into two distinct approaches. The first examined specific aspects of the texts themselves, describing the roles of cohesion, information structuring, lexical signaling, anaphoric signaling, topic continuity signaling, text coherence, text genres, and patterns of discourse organization that underlie all prose texts. The second approach involves a focus on intentional inferencing skills and “deep comprehension.” The chapter then reviews research on discourse structure and reading comprehension in both L1 and L2 contexts. It also focuses specifically on the importance of using discourse sensitive graphic organizers. The chapter then describes research on teaching discourse structure awareness, and concludes with implications for instruction.

A visual display is a graphic representation of information communicated to learners. In this chapter, we review research-based principles for the design of visual displays. We begin by providing an overview of visual displays and presenting the case for visual displays in education. This chapter also describes a theoretical framework for understanding how people learn with visual displays and reviews research-based principles for designing visual displays to improve learning. Specifically, we identify three common forms of extraneous processing (induced via spatial distance, unimportant information, and referential confusion) and how to reduce them using research-based principles (spatial contiguity principle, coherence principle, and signaling principle). In addition, we discuss ways to promote generative processing and how different types of graphic organizers (sequence, hierarchy, matrix) can support different types of inferences (temporal, hierarchical, relational). We conclude with a discussion of future directions for research on visual displays.