Strategies to Support Reading Comprehension

1. Strategies to Support Reading Comprehension

2. Fake Reading I expected that meaning would arrive if I could pronounce all the words. Tovani (2000) I Read It But I Don’t Get It

3. What do we mean by comprehension? Activity • Silently Read ‘The Blonke’ • Answer questions • Discuss answers and how you arrived at your answers with a partner

4. The Ahas • Reading is more than decoding • Most could accurately read the passage - • Can get some meaning from the nonsense words – using your structure knowledge (language and text) • Have some sense of it using prediction and inference • Questions are not a true measure of comprehension

5. We need to teach students strategies to read text more effectively – to understand what they are reading. • A strategy is an intentional plan that readers use to help themselves make sense of their reading. • Strategies are flexible and can be adapted to meet the demands of the reading task. • Good readers use lots of strategies to help themselves make sense of text. Tovani (2000) I Read It But I Don’t Get It.

6. 7 Strategies of Successful Readers • They use existing knowledge to make sense of new information • They ask questions about the text before, during and after reading • They draw inferences from the text • They monitor their comprehension • They use ‘fix-up’ strategies when meaning breaks down • They determine what is important • They synthesize information to create new thinking

7. Strategies for Before, During and After Reading • Need to consider what students need to do and teach strategies to help them succeed. Consider: Before reading strategies – set them up to read for understanding During reading strategies – to sustain and extend meaning and monitor understanding After reading strategies – to reflect on and consolidate understanding

8. Learning and Teaching a Strategy • Modeling and demonstration • Practice • Independent application

9. Strategy 1 – Setting the Purpose • Silently read ‘The House’ and underline the important information. • A Second Look – circle the important information as if you were a robber • A Third Look – put a square around the important information as if you were a real estate agent

10. Reflection • What did you do the first time you read ‘The House’? • What happened the second time? • Was it easier to read and find the important information when you had a purpose? • What was your comfort level? What did you find frustrating?

11. Setting the Purpose • As readers, we need to know the purpose for what we are reading • Sometimes we take it for granted that students understand what they are looking for when they are faced with text. • Students need to know why they are reading. • The purpose changes your entire reading experience

12. Strategy 2- Activating Prior Knowledge • In your group use the back of one of your handouts to make a semantic web for the word ‘chair’ • Group Share CHAIR

13. Making the semantic web required you to activate your “schema” for the “chair” – all the meanings and associations related to that word. • Sharing your prior knowledge can provide multiple perspectives, additional knowledge about a concept. • Helps students read the text- predicting what words might be in the text.

14. KWL Strategy • What do you Know about solutions? • What do you Want to know or wonder about solutions • What did you Learn after the lesson

15. KWL Strategy

16. Activating Prior Knowledge • We draw on our prior knowledge as we make predictions to ‘make sense’ of what we hear, see and read. • Students need to learn how to use their prior knowledge in order to understand and respond to what they read.

17. Strategy 3 - Making Connections & Predictions • Stephanie Harvey describes making connections as forming a bridge from the New to the Known. When readers make connections, they use their personal and collective experience to enhance their understanding. • When we say, “This reminds me of”, we are making a connection. We make 3 kinds of connections when we read and we need to teach students how to make these connections. • One way of teaching for making connections is to teach kids to code their text as they read.

18. Making Connections & Predictions Connections can be: • Text to Self (T-S) - relating reading to their own life • Text to Text (T-T) - connections made between different texts • Text to World (T-W) - connections made between the text and bigger world issues

19. Strategy 3- Making Connections/Predictions • Make a prediction for the story “The Only Wheelchair in Town”

20. Strategy 3- Making Connections & Predictions “The Only Wheelchair in Town” • Read page 35 silently • During reading, think about: text/text (T-T),text/self (T-S), and text/world (T-W) connections you may make

21. Making Connections & Predictions • We continue to predict as we read and we read to confirm or revise those predictions • Accessing prior knowledge and making connections is critical to student’s predicting and constructing meaning from text.

22. Strategy 4- Focused Reading • Students can use codes (√ ! ?) to focus and monitor their reading (pg 19) • Provides ‘reading for a purpose’ • Reinforces the idea that ‘reading involves thinking’ • A useful study strategy

23. ReadingAsThinking √√ Got . I know and/or understand this. ! This is really important or interesting. ? I don’t understand this or this does not make sense.

24. Small Group Reflection Share/Discuss with partner or small group: • Any questions you have • What you are already doing to support reading across the curriculum

25. Any Questions or concerns?(end part 3)