Reading First Teacher Education Network RFTEN: Teaching Teachers Strategies for Reading Success

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Reading First Teacher Education Network (RFTEN)
Teaching Teachers Strategies for Reading Success

• Ioney James, Ph.D.
• North Carolina AT State University

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What does Research say about Comprehension?

• Comprehension is an active process by which the
  reader uses his/her background knowledge to
  construct meanings from texts (Alexander
  Jetten, 2000).

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What does Research say about Comprehension and
Students

• For students to become lifelong learners they
  must be able to comprehend a variety of texts.

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Comprehension Contd.

• Comprehension involves the
• Reader
• Text
• Context

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What does Research say about the Teaching of
Comprehension Strategies and Skills

• Durkins (1978/ 1979) studies found that
  although teachers often recognize the importance
  of comprehension, they offer their students very
  little explicit instruction on how to comprehend
  texts (contd.).

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Comprehension, contd.

• Durkins study also found that in most
  classrooms, comprehension instruction often
  required of students to answer questions,
  complete workbook pages or take tests.
• Quite often teachers ask students to complete
  various comprehension tasks, such as find the
  main idea, the supporting ideas, but they do
  very little modeling.

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Comprehension- contd.

• In James (2005) survey, in-service and
  pre-service teachers were asked to identify the
  skills that they found most challenging to teach
  during student internship. Most of the students
  responses indicated the teaching of comprehension
  skills and strategies as most challenging.

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How Can Teachers Successfully Teach Comprehension
Strategies?

• Direct explanation by the teacher
• Modeling- verbalize his/her thought process
• Guided Practice
• Provide opportunities students to practice.

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Scaffolding Students Comprehension

• Monitor students responses
• Intervene and lead students to basic
  understanding of concept/s through skillfully
  chosen questions leads.
• Prepare children with carefully crafted
  pre-reading, during reading and post reading
  activities.
• Direct explanation
• Help student to recognize text features and story
  structure fiction and non-fiction expository,
  narratives
• Help students to summarize the most important
  elements in a text. Clark Graves (2004)

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Comprehension Strategies

• Setting purposes
• Model Think- aloud
• Questioning
• Graphic Organizers-
• Reading Types of texts- expository, narratives
• Writing

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Setting Purposes

• Pre- Reading
• Motivating-
• Activating Prior Knowledge,
• Preteaching Vocabulary,
• Questioning
• During Reading
• Silent Reading, or Reading to students.
• Post Reading
• Answering Questions
• Discussions
• Writing
• Drama

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Modeling Think-aloud

• Teacher talk
• Modeling the strategy in action
• I am going to make predictions while I read this
  book. I will start with just the cover here I
  see a picture. This is the question I will ask. I
  predict that . . .

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Questioning

• Taxonomies- Levels of Comprehension
• Literal
• Inferential
• Critical
• - Barretts Taxonomy, Blooms Taxonomy

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Barretts Taxonomy

• Literal Recall and Recognition of Ideas
• Reorganization- classifying, organizing,
  summarizing
• Inferential information implicitly
  stated
• Evaluation making judgments
• Appreciation- psychological aesthetic
  approach

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Recognition
Recognition requires the student to locate
identity or information explicitly stated in the
reading selection itself or in exercises which
use explicit ideas and information presented in
the reading selection. Recognition tasks
are Recognition of details. Recognition of
main ideas. Recognition of
sequence. Recognition of comparison. Recognition
of cause and effect relationships. Recognition
of character traits.
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Inferential

• is demonstrated by the student when he uses
  Comprehension
• is demonstrated by the student when he uses ideas
  and information implicitly state in the passage,
  his intuition, and his personal experience as a
  bases for conjectures and hypotheses.
• Inferring main ideas.
• Inferring sequence.
• Inferring comparisons.
• Inferring cause and effect relationships.
• Inferring character traits.
• Predicting outcomes.
• Interpreting figurative

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Graphic Organizers

• Show conceptual relationships.
• Examples
• webbing
• Mapping
• Semantic feature analysis

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Writing

• Writing and Reading are reciprocal process.
• Similar to reading, writing engages students,
  extends thinking, deepens understanding and
  energizes the meaning-making process (Kipper
  Duggan (2006).
• Teachers can use writing to enhance students
  comprehension.

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Writing activities to enhance students
comprehension

• Free-Write
• Quick write -
• Student-Generated Questions -
• Reading response journal
• Character journals