Effective Reading Comprehension Strategies for Teachers

1. COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES -Why we read the word and the world-

2. Basic Goals of Reading • To enable the learner to gain understanding of the world and of themselves • To develop appreciations and interests • To help the learner to find solutions to their personal and group problems • To develop strategies to support independent understanding and thinking

3. Teachers’ Role • To support comprehension teachers need to: • Activate students’ prior knowledge • Guide students’ reading of a text • Foster active and engaged reading • Reinforce concepts gleaned from the text reading • Encourage careful/critical thinking • Pursue inquiry on different topics

4. Approaches for constructing meaning • Visualizing • Monitoring • Inferencing, including predicting • Identifying important information • Generating and answering questions • Synthesizing • Summarizing

5. More approaches for constructing meaning • Tapping prior knowledge • Organizing ideas • Figuring out unknown words • Making connections • Comprehension monitoring • Applying fix-up strategies • Revising meaning • Playing with words

6. Guidelines for Skill and Strategy Instruction • Teach mini-lessons • Differentiate between skills and strategies • Provide step-by-step explanations • Use modeling • Provide practice opportunities • Apply in content areas • Use reflection • Hang charts of skills and strategies

7. Modeling • The process of showing or demonstrating for someone how to use or do something s/he does not know how to do. • The process by which an expert shows students (non-experts) how to perform a task. • A component of scaffolding learning within the constructivist framework.

8. Types of Modeling • Implicit modeling • Explicit modeling • Talk-alouds • Think-alouds

9. Where modeling takes place • During daily activities • Process writing • Literacy lessons • Mini-lessons

10. Guidelines for Effective Strategy Instruction • Determine the need for instruction on the basis of student performance • Introduce only 1 or 2 strategies at a time • Model and practice the strategy in the meaningful context of a reading experience • Model each strategy at the point where it is most useful

11. Guidelines – (cont’d) • Be sure that modeling and practicing are interactive and collaborative activities • Gradually transfer modeling from yourself to the students • Help students experience immediate success • Encourage the use of a strategy across the curriculum • Guide students to become strategic readers

12. Mini-lesson • Introduction (includes telling why and when strategy can be useful) • Teacher modeling • Student modeling and guided practice • Summarizing and reflecting

13. Follow-up to mini-lesson • Independent practice • Application • Reflection

14. Comprehension Strategies

15. Reciprocal Teaching(RT) • RT is an interactive process in which the teacher and students take turns modeling 4 strategies after reading a meaningful chunk of text • Strategies in RT • Predict • Question • Clarify • Summarize

16. Summarizing steps • Delete trivial information • Delete redundant information • Substitute superordinate terms for lists of terms • Integrate a series of events with a superordinate action term

17. K-W-L Purpose: intended to help teachers become more responsive to helping students access appropriate knowledge when reading Rationale: students need a mix of individual and group activities and procedures to scaffold their own ideas and interests Audience: any age level with expository text

18. K-W-L Procedures • Step K- What I know • Step W- what do I want to learn • Step L- What I learned

19. K-W-L modifications • K-W-L Plus (incorporates mapping and summarizing) • K-W-H-L (H stands for How do I intend to learn; what resources, tools will be needed • K-W-L with paragraph frames (incorporates writing) • K-W-L with focus questions

20. Anticipation Guides Purpose: to activate student;s knowledge about a topic before reading, and provide purpose by serving as a guide for subsequent reading Rationale: prediction serves to activate prior knowledge; controversy can be an effective motivational device Audience: any grade level

21. Anticipation Guides-procedure • Identify major concepts • Determine students’ knowledge of these concepts • Create statements • Decide statement order and presentation mode • Present guide

22. Anticipation Guides-procedure (cont’d) • Discuss each statement briefly • Direct students to read the text • Conduct follow-up discussion

23. Text Preview Purpose: • build students’ background knowledge about a topic before reading • Motivate students to read • Provide an organizational framework for comprehending a text

24. Text Preview Rationale: comprehension is enhanced when readers draw on their prior knowledge and are interested in the topic Audience: upper elementary through high school

25. Text Preview-Procedure • Preparation and construction of text previews • An interest-building section • A synopsis of the selection • A section that includes a purpose-setting question or directions for reading

26. Text Preview-Procedure • Presentation of text previews • Tell students that you’re going to introduce a new story • Read the interest-building section of the preview • Give time for students to relate the information to their prior knowledge and discuss it • Read remainder of preview • Direct students to read the selection

27. ReQuest Procedure Purpose: • Formulate their own questions and develop questioning behavior • Adopt an active, inquiring attitude to reading • Acquire reasonable purposes for reading • Improve independent reading comprehension skills

28. ReQuest Procedure Rationale: it is important for students to develop their own abilities to ask questions and set their own purposes for reading Audience: all levels and all ages

29. ReQuest Procedure • Procedures • Preparation of material • Development of readiness for the strategy • Development of students questioning behaviors • Development of students predictive behaviors • Silent reading • Follow-up activities

30. Question-Answer Relationships Purpose: enhance students’ ability to answer comprehension questions by giving them a systematic means for analyzing task demands of different question probes Rationale: students become independent comprehenders by learning how to respond to different types of comprehension questions Audience: grade four through eight

31. Question-Answer Relationships • Procedure • Lesson 1: introduce students tot the task demands of different questions, provide practice at identifying task demands related to answering questions • Lesson 2: provide students with review and further guided practice as they read slightly longer passages • Extend task to longer selection

32. Think-Alouds Purpose: to help readers examine and develop reading behaviors and strategies Rationale: with teacher modeling students will realize how and when to use effective processing strategies for understanding Audience: all levels

33. Think-Alouds: Procedures • Teacher modeling • Make predictions or show students how to develop hypotheses • Describe your visual images • Share an analogy or show how prior knowledge applies • Verbalize a confusing point or show how you monitor developing understandings • Demonstrate fix-up strategies

34. Think-Alouds: Procedures • Student partnerships for practice • Independent student practice using checklists • Integrated use with other materials

35. More Effective Comprehension Strategies • Dialogical-Thinking Reading Lesson • Inquiry Chart • Graphic Organizers (story maps, semantic web) • DRA and DR-TA • Inferential reading • SQ3R • Discussion • Reciprocal Teaching