Language Comprehension Strand

Whether it is reading comprehension in elementary or secondary grades, the same big ideas must be addressed with research-validated practices to ensure student success.

1. Can students read the words?

2. Do students know the meaning of critical vocabulary?

3. Do students have the necessary background knowledge for the passage?

4. Do students use powerful strategies for focusing cognition on critical content in text?

In this session, Dr. Archer will address each of these questions with current research. Leave with procedures that you can put into practice immediately.

Making meaning of text is complex and requires a comprehensive instructional approach. This session will introduce a blueprint, based in the science of reading, that addresses the development of critical comprehension competencies. This framework identifies and explores the language comprehension processes and skills necessary for extracting and constructing meaning. It structures and scaffolds the educator’s planning and preparation of instruction by posing questions related to these processes and the design and delivery of informed instruction. The blueprint calls for the use of best practices for developing the reader’s ability to make meaning of words, comprehend sentences, use text structures, access background knowledge for inference making and express understanding. Come prepared to explore the blueprint components, examine examples of related instructional routines, and to discuss application to narrative and informational texts and potential assessment activities.

For students to be successful reading the complex texts emphasized in standards, students need background and vocabulary knowledge. If we can give them this information, they can access complex texts better. There are a few simple things you can do to teach background knowledge and vocabulary. In this session, a procedure for teaching these skills is presented.

Vocabulary knowledge is a fundamental contributor to skilled reading comprehension; yet many children show lags in their vocabulary development and don’t have sufficient skill in this area to read for meaning. This session is designed to: (1) provide a primer on vocabulary development (What is it? Why is it important?), (2) summarize the current best evidence on how to improve vocabulary knowledge from PreKpre-K to the early grades, and (3) make suggestions on how to improve vocabulary instruction in the classroom.

An understanding of morphology, or the meaning parts that comprise words, is valuable for the development of vocabulary as well as spelling and word attack skills. In this interactive, hands-on workshop, Van Cleave engages participants in an introduction to morphological awareness. He first frames the discussion with an understanding of essential terminology and then guides participants through experimentation with words, examining their meaning parts and considering how this affects literacy skills. Participants consider components of an effective morphology-based lesson plan and leave with strategies they can use the very next day with their students.

In order to read fluently and comprehend connected text, students must know how to read and write a variety of sentences that are included in all their texts. This means that teachers must understand why grammar is important and how to teach it. Participants will learn a few tips on how they can support students’ reading fluency and comprehension by teaching phrasing and sentence structure with a focus on oral language and written expression.

More often than not, students struggle at the sentence level far more than they struggle at the paragraph level; teachers ignore this fact if they move directly to practicing prompts for assessments.

This workshop focuses on parts of speech and sentence parts as they apply to developing student reading and writing skills. Participants learn about the components of a good lesson and strategies for developing sentence sense in student writers. They consider parts of speech as a method of understanding the way words interact with each other and sentence parts as building blocks for creating and understanding different kinds of sentences. They leave with strategies they can use the very next day with their student

While inference making is usually associated with the expression “filling in the gaps,” this description is not complete. This session will explore two types of inferences necessary for creating coherent representations of text meaning. Understanding text actually requires inferring meaningful relationships between various parts of the text as well as between those parts and related background knowledge. The proficient reader uses local coherence inferences to integrate information found directly in the text while global coherence inferences fill in details not explicitly stated. This session will explore how cohesive ties and connectives support the bridging of ideas and concepts within text and instructional strategies that develop the student’s ability to use local coherence inferences. Participants will also examine the role of global inferences in filling in the gaps between the text and background knowledge and those instructional practices that prompt students to use this type of inference to construct deeper comprehension of text.

For students to be successful reading the complex texts emphasized in standards, students need background and vocabulary knowledge. If we can give them this information, they can access complex texts better. There are a few simple things you can do to teach background knowledge and vocabulary. In this session, a procedure for teaching these skills is presented.

In this session the signpost strategy developed by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst is shared. The annotation strategies shared in this presentation can help students identify important features in both fiction and non-fiction to support analysis of text.