Open book

Certain features of informational texts make them particularly useful for special populations. Informational texts provide unique opportunities to learn new vocabulary words, often with contextual scaffolding such as images and pronunciation guides. While all students benefit from such focused exposure to content-specific vocabulary, these opportunities are particularly important for at-risk students, English language learners, and students with certain learning disabilities. Explicit attention to content-area vocabulary helps these students to fill content knowledge gaps, develop strategies for content-area reading, and strengthen comprehension.