Comprehension is the reason for reading. If readers can read words but do not understand what they are reading, they are not really reading.
As they read, good readers are both purposeful and active.
Good readers are purposeful. Good readers have a purpose for reading. They may read to find out how to use a food processor, read a guidebook, to gather information about national parks, read a textbook to satisfy the requiremetns of a course, read a magazine for entertainment, or read a classic novel to experience the pleasures of great literature.
Good readers are active. Good readers think actively as they read. To make sense of what they read, good readers engage in a complicated process. Using their experiences and knowledge of reading strategies (or plans), good readers make sense of the text and know how to get the most out of it. They know when they have problems with understanding and how to resolve these problems as they occur.
Research over 30 years has shown that instruction in comprehension can help students understand what they read, remember what they read, and communicate with others about what they read.
The following six strategies appear to have a firm scientific basis for improving text comprehension.
Monitoring Comprehension.
Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix up" problems in their understanding as the problems airse.
Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to
- be aware of what they do understand,
- identify what they do not understand, and
- use appropriate "fix up" strategies to resolve problems in comprehension.
Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing up" any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.
Studens may use several comprehension monitoring strategies.
- Identify where the difficulty occurs.
- Identify what the difficulty is.
- Restate the difficult sentence or passage in their own words.
- Look back through the text.
- Look forward in the text for information that might help them to resolve the difficulty.
Using Graphic and Semantic Organizers.
Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and interrelationships among concepts in a text, using diagrams or other pictorial devices. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters. Semantic organizers are graphic organizers that look somewhat like a spider web. In a semantic organizer, lines connect a central concept to a variey of related ideas and events.
Graphic organizers can:
- help students focus on text structure as they read;
- provide students with tools they can use to examine and visually represent relationships in a text; and
- help students write well-organized summaries of a text.
Answering Questions.
Research shows that teacher/parent questioning strongly supports and advances students' learning from reading. Questions appear to be effective for improving learning from reading because they:
- give students a purpose for reading;
- focus students' attention on what they are to learn;
- help students to think actively as they read;
- encourage students to monitor their comprehension; and
- help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know.
Ask questions that help children understand question-answer relationships - the relationships between questions and where the answers to those questions are found. Readers learn to answer questions that require an understanding of information that is
- text explicit (stated explicitly in a single sentence);
- text implicit (implied by information presented in two or more sentences); or
- scriptal (not found in the text at all, but part of the reader's prior knowldege or experience).
Generating Questions.
Students should be asked to develop their own questions as this improves their active processing of text and their comprehension. By generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions adn if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to integrate information from different segments of text.
Recognizing Story Structure.
Story structure refers to the way the content and events of a story are organized into a plot. Students who can recognize story structure have a greater appreciation, understanding, and memory for stories. In story structure, students learn to identify the categories of content (setting, initiating events, internal reactions, goals, attempts, and outcomes) and how this content is organized into a plot.
Summarizing.
A summary is a synthesis of the important ideas in a text. Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading, to condense this information, and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
- identify or generate main ideas;
- connect the main or central ideas;
- eliminate redundant and unnecessary information; and
- remember what they read.
In class we use the multiple-strategy instruction model (reciprocal teaching) which allows students to use strategies with flexibility as they are needed to assist their comprehension. In reciprocal teaching the teacher and students work together so that the students learn four comprehension strategies:
- asking questions about the text they are reading;
- summarizing parts of the text;
- clarifying words and sentences they don't understand; and
- predicting what might occur next in the text.
Teachers and students use these four strategies flexibly as they are needed in reading literature and informational texts.
Summing Up
Text Comprehension is important because...
comprehension is the reason for reading.
Text Comprehension is...
- purposeful.
- active.
Text Comprehension Can BeDeveloped...
by teaching comprehension strategies.
Text Comprehension Strategies Can Be Taught...
- through explicit instruction.
- through cooperative learning.
- by helping readers use strategies flexibly and in combination.
Text from: Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read. 2001 The Partnership for Reading: Bringing Scientific Evidence to Learning, National Institute for Literacy, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and U.S. Department of Education
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