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Reading Comprehension and the Reading Rope
Reading Comprehension and the Reading Rope
A common problem of teachers at the secondary level is "my students don't understand what they're reading." Scarborough's Reading Rope (below) is a useful tool to use in trying to answer the question of "where is the breakdown in understanding happening?" This page will provide strategies to help support students with different components of language comprehension that are barriers to understanding.
General Guidelines for Assigning Reading
General Guidelines for Assigning Reading
Research shows that good readers are skilled at setting a purpose to help them stay focused while reading. This mean that when we assign reading to students, it's important to provide them with a "why" and a "what." Students should have an essential question or questions they are trying to answer and a product or task to complete with the information they find while completing the reading so that they understand why they are reading and what they are supposed to do with the reading.
Reading Strategies for Each Area of Language Comprehension
Reading Strategies for Each Area of Language Comprehension
Background Knowledge
Language Structures
Verbal Reasoning
Literacy Knowledge
It's also important to consider the language demands of the texts students are reading. This means teachers need to look at the sentence structure, verb tenses, potentially confusing Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary, and figurative language to determine if the text will be accessible to their students, particularly those who are struggling readers or early on in the process of learning academic English.
The list of strategies/protocols below should help teachers looking to add structure/purpose to their reading assignments.
Annotation:
Annotation:
Teachers often ask students to annotate assigned readings without identifying what students should be annotating for and without explicitly teaching what they believe annotations should look like in their class. As with any skill, students need to be explicitly taught how you want them to annotate a text (as shown in the video to the right).
Also, if all students are asked to do is mark up a text with symbols, it's very easy for them to avoid the actual thinking you want them to do and just put random symbols on the paper. Therefore, it is essential that any annotation protocol ask students to write notes in the margins of the paper (or add comments if they are annotating digitally).
Annotation Best Practices:
Provide an essential question or questions to give students a purpose for reading. If students have multiple questions they are trying to answer, they can use a specific color to underline or highlight information that helps them answer each question.
Use an annotation guide that shows students different reading strategies and provides sentence frames that they can use to write notes in the margins. I've linked a good one here
If you really want students to meet a specific standard of annotation, grade students with a rubric
Reading Guides + Partner Reading
Reading Guides + Partner Reading
Reading guides are a great way to hold students accountable for the reading they're supposed to do in class and model less intuitive reading strategies. Having students complete reading guides in partners is a great way to make learning more collaborative. Check out one partner reading protocol here:
These are a few example reading guide formats:
Double Entry Journal - Double entry journals with articles are a great way to chunk texts and guide students to engage in critical thinking as they read, which will allow them to develop a better understanding of the text and be able to better utilize information from the texts on subsequent tasks
Close Reading
Close Reading
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