Adrian Lopez

Reading comprehension is the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning. It is often referred to as the "essence of reading." Comprehension tells what the student got from the text and the meaning they have developed because of their reading. Within comprehension, there are three important elements: 1) The reader doing the comprehension, 2) The text that is to be comprehended, and 3) The activity in which comprehension is a part.

How do we assess comprehension?

MAZE Screener:

This assessment is given anywhere between grades 2-10 and measures how well students understand text that they read silently. The first sentence appears normally within the text and then every seventh word is shown in a grouping of three separate words: the correct word and two distractors. The student then chooses by circling the word they feel best fits, and makes sense within, the sentence. The number of correct responses is evaluated and any further instruction or emphasis is planned based on the scoring.

Cloze Procedure:

This assessment for comprehension involves the technique in which words are taken out of, or deleted from, the passage according to specified criteria. Students are given the role of filling in these blanks and inserting words that complete the sentence and create meaning. Cloze passages are typically accompanied by a word bank for the students to choose words from. This assesses a student's ability to predict the meaning behind various words and to construct appropriate and fitting meaning to complete a sentence. They can use textual clues to assess what word would best fit in the text. This technique is typically used before diving into a new text to introduce important vocabulary and assess current comprehension abilities.

IRI (Informal Reading Inventory):

An IRI is an assessment that is administered individually for each student. The students are assessed on comprehension skills and reading accuracy. The results of the IRI can measure the reading level a student is currently at: frustration level, instructional level, and independent level. This assessment begins as students read two fiction and two nonfiction passages while alternating between silent reading and oral reading. The questions that follow the passages are given to assess skills within vocabulary, interpretation of the text, and literal meaning from the passages. IRI's are typically given multiple times throughout the school year to assess reading levels and aid teachers in planning material to meet the individual student needs within the classroom.

Comprehension Teaching Strategies

Building Background Knowledge

Going into any learning activity, students possess prior knowledge that they have gathered throughout their lives. They are constantly learning about the world around them since birth. When introducing an activity or task, it can be key to bring in background knowledge that the students either learned in a previous classroom or acquired from experience. When it comes to comprehension, background knowledge allows and aids students in inferring and elaborating on the text. They can fill in missing information to construct memory to representations that are used with later reading.

These connections, whether it be text-self, text-text, or text-world, that students make can help them to better understand and comprehend the text. An example of accessing and building background knowledge for comprehension would be giving students a list of important words for a text and having them make connections between the words based on prior knowledge.

Questioning

Whether it be answering questions proposed by others or generating questions from the text, the powerful connection between comprehension and questioning is vital. Questions allow the students to think deeply about what they are reading and makes them want to keep reading. These questions can be literal, like looking for a specifically stated answer, or in-depth, like asking the students to ponder and develop well-thought out inferences and responses.

Some examples of this: Reading a story and asking, literally, who the characters are vs. asking, in-depth, why the characters acted in a certain way.

Both types of questioning listed below are essential for overall classroom and comprehension success.

Generating Questions: Teaching students to think about questions they would like to answer as they read a text.

Answering Questions: Teaching students how to respond to questions asked by the teacher or others.

This video goes more into depth about the powerful and beneficial strategy of questioning to aid in comprehension.

Visualizing

Visualizing is creating pictures in your mind of the text as you read. This strategy allows students to use their mental imagery and their senses to picture the text and make important connections. The students can describe more thoroughly what they see, feel, smell, taste, or even hear as they make mental pictures of the text. Students' visualizations differ and are unique to the student. However, the general ideas of the text are aided by the visualization the students present for the main ideas/points of the text or story.

Examples: Asking students to close their eyes and picture the setting of a story. Ask, "How do you know, from the text, how to picture the setting?" or "Are there any key words you read that helped you create a mental image?"

Inferring

Inferring means that students are using key words, text clues, and background knowledge to make guesses about the text. This strategy engages students in critically thinking about the text, what they already know, and what they think could occur within the text. They can access previous knowledge, background information, and textual clues within the words and sentences to make inferences about the text being read. This skill is vital in filling in missing information and establishing memory representations that will help the readers later.

Examples: Using textual clues to assess what will happen next in a story. For a story like The Three Little Pigs, students could use clues about what happened to the previous pig to infer what would happen to the next.

Determining Importance

This strategy involves students working to assess what details or ideas are most important within the text or story. Students identify key concepts and main ideas and differentiate them from the less important details. For a nonfiction text, for example, students would look for main topics, details, and facts. For a fictional text, students would determine the main characters, the setting, the problem(s), and the resolution(s) to the story.

Picking out this important information guides students in comprehending essential and imperative aspects of the text. Teachers can aid students in determining importance by highlighting the differences between supporting details and main events.

Summarizing

Summarizing is a very important reading comprehension strategy that helps students remember what they have read. Summarizing involves students retelling the story or information in their own words. A summarization could also be looked at as their own outline of the text, filled with the most important and relevant information. When students are summarizing, they are reducing a text to its main idea and necessary information.

This strategy goes hand-in-hand with determining importance, as the information deemed important is included within a student's summary. This strategy could be used, for example, when asking students to write a paragraph about a story just read in class and including within it the main ideas and concepts that they think are most important.

Synthesizing Information

Synthesizing is a strategy that sounds incredibly close to summarizing. However, there are key differences. Synthesizing is the process of pulling together background knowledge, newly learned ideas, connections, inferences and summaries into a complete and original understanding of the text. Students can see how their understanding and thinking changes and develops throughout the text. The biggest difference between summarizing and synthesizing is that synthesizing is a personal connection and changing understanding for the reader of the text, while summarizing is simply the main ideas and key details of a text from the author that do not change.

Monitoring Comprehension

Monitoring comprehension is an important strategy that can help students be self-sufficient in their learning. This is the process in which students determine or decide if they understand what they are reading. If they decide that they do not understand, they can take measures to work to repair their comprehension before they continue. These strategies, also called fix-up strategies include rereading, slowing down, visualizing the text, and other useful fix-up methods. Some examples seen in the classroom could be teaching students to reread a sentence or paragraph that they struggle to understand what they're reading and work to find key words that can help them break down the meaning.

Book Clubs

Book clubs are a great and engaging way for students to work on comprehension skills. These clubs consist of students gathering in groups to read independent level texts and to discuss their reading and learning as a group when they meet. This opportunity not only allows students to reflect on their reading and pick out key points, but also helps them to hear the thoughts and insights from their peers. The teacher is there for support and provides explicit instruction on improving comprehension strategies.

Example: Having a small group of students pick a book from the classroom library to read and discuss together.

This video depicts a literature circle in action and shows how students can work together to better understand a text.

Literature Circles

Literature circles are a component of literature-based reading instruction in which students meet to discuss books they are reading independently. The books discussed are usually sets of the same title, sets of different titles by one author, or sets of titles with a common theme. This strategy promotes collaboration between students and assigns roles for members of the literature circles groups. These roles are utilized to give each student a part in expanding on an aspect of the reading material, organizing main ideas and important thoughts, and bringing to light important parts of the text.

Examples: Having students take part in a literature circle, assigning a predictor, a visualizer/artist, a questioner, and an inferrer.

Reading Workshops

Reading workshops are a method for teaching reading using whole group and small group instruction. Whole group lessons focus on one skill, strategy, or reading behavior and are tailored to fit the needs of the class. Small group instruction and conferencing takes place during work time when children are working on their own or in partnership. Reading workshops primarily focus on the independent and consistent reading for each student. There can be mini-lessons given by the teacher to focus on certain skills and opportunities for sharing insights, asking questions, and collaborating on the topics. The primary focus of reading workshops, however, is for students to get independent practice in reading and comprehension skills.

Example: Allocating an hour to work on a reading workshop, allowing time for independent reading and conferring, a mini-lesson for the class from the instructor, and opportunities for sharing.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse