EngEd 370 – Week 8 – Chapter 9 and Reading Rockets – Nicole Kavajecz
Reading Rockets is a well known and widely used source for young readers to gain confidence in all areas of reading (2021). There is a wide variety of resources for teachers and other adults in a child’s life to implement to grow young readers. The comprehension section of this site has an overview of the topic (understanding and interpreting what we read), as well as adult assessment tools (pre and post tests for our understanding). The site states that explicitly teaching comprehension strategies to all our students has a positive impact for each and every one of them, no matter the skill set they meet us with. For people to reach a skilled reading level, they must understand the language and make connections through comprehension of that language. Teachers and other adults in the child’s life can build their knowledge base daily: it takes time and experience to build this, and every word exchange assists the process. “Verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge, and knowledge of language structure are all part of language proficiency. We can help our students develop their language proficiency at the word, sentence, and discourse (paragraph and text) levels” (Reading Rockets, 2021).
A story or narrative text is a fictional piece of literature (not true or entirely true), and include many genres such as mysteries, fantasy, and myths (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 248). The elements of a story include beginning, response with a goal or problem, attempts, one or more outcomes, resolution, and a reaction. Students can create a story map to identify major structural events as a way to show their comprehension. Teachers must scaffold instruction, meaning start where the child is and grow them from there, model step-by-step strategies, and explicitly demonstrate what they seek the student to do. Active comprehension, or making connections to their existing knowledge and to the portions of text they have already read, can be categorized into three categories. Literal questions are based on information they can directly find in their text. Inferential questions include students using their background knowledge along with text information. Evaluative (or critical reading) questions allow students to make judgements and decisions about what they have read.
ReQuest, or reciprocal questioning, is a great strategy to encourage readers to involve themselves in their comprehension development (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 258). “Initially questions will tend to be literal. It is important for teachers to model higher-level questions such as why, why not, how come, how do you know, what do you think?” (p 258). QARs, or question-answer relationships, help readers become more sensitive to the processes they should be going through within their reading mind. Explicit instruction by the teacher ‘thinking out loud’ for the students is vital to this strategy’s success. QtA, or questioning the author, has the reader pause during reading to think about where the story might be going next based on the text they have already read. It ensures the reader is developing their ability to critically evaluate their mental connections along the way.
Reading short passages of a text over and over again and then answering questions is known as close reading (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 263). This strategy for the development of reading comprehension develops a wide range of proficiencies including logical references, summary skills, and interpretation. Documenting evidence as a student reads is known as annotating text. Students can complete this activity in the margins of the text, in a separate journal, or on note cards.
There are four strategies for reciprocal teaching: predictions about the text, questioning the text, summary, and clarifying difficult vocabulary and concepts (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 265). The teacher explicitly teaches each strategy through modeling, then the students are monitored as they practice. Gradually, the teacher withdraws support and students are able to complete all on their own. Think-aloud reading involves both student and teacher sharing what they think about as they read. A perfect opportunity to take full advantage of think-alouds is during teacher read-alouds, because the teacher can control when the sharing happens. Whether using story frames, circular story maps, or another activity to activate their schema, doing so is vital to teaching text-to-thought interactions within students.
The directed reading-thinking activity, or DR-TA), can involve story mapping as the children read and reflect, and always begins with open ended discussions towards ending with very focused statements (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 268). Discussion webs require students to discover different sides/facets of a discussion before drawing conclusions. This graphic aide guides thinking while reading and develops the child’s critical thinking and connecting skills.
There are three categories of text connections that are made while actively comprehending a text: text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 270). Text-to-self reminds the reader of some experience they personally have. Text-to-text is making connections about what they have already read to what they are currently reading. Text-to-world is very inferential as it asks the reader to build knowledge about the world they may only have heard about or have ideas about. For example, Does the little red hen bring up ideas of socialism or workaholism? In today’s world, our CCSS require digital literacy for all students as well. This means they are not only making connections in a linear style with printed materials, but also a hyperlinked space through the internet. Their skills improve drastically and differently than ever before, especially when thinking about text-to-world connections. They can ‘google-it’ and find nearly anything they seek within seconds. What a fortunate time to be learning!
Resources
Reading Rockets. (2021). Comprehension. Retrieved on 13 July 2021 from https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101-course/modules/comprehension-introduction.
Vacca, J., Vacca, R., Gove, M., Burkey, L., Lenhart, L., & McKoen. (2010). Reading and learning to read. (Tenth Edition). Pearson.
