Commercial Reading Programs: What’s Replacing Narrative?

There has been a widespread appeal for the inclusion of more informational text in elementary reading programs and instruction. This appeal is motivated by claims that children's early reading material is dominated by narrative texts and by recognition of the importance of learning to read other types of text. Commercial reading programs provide a significant source of material used in reading instruction, yet there is little empirical research on the proportion of various text types within these programs. We conducted a systematic analysis of the types of text contained in three of the most widely used commercial reading programs in Grades 1 to 6 in Canada. A comparison of our results to those of previous studies confirmed that current programs contain less narrative than their predecessors. In order to determine whether informational text is replacing the gap created by the reduced amount of narrative, we paid particular attention to the presence of expository texts and other text types with informational qualities.