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18 Jul 13
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How Can Reading Comprehension Be Improved Through Research-Validated Instruction?
Reading is often thought of as a hierarchy of skills, from processing of individual letters and their associated sounds to word recognition to text-processing competencies. Skilled comprehension requires fluid articulation of all these processes, beginning with the sounding out and recognition of individual words to the understanding of sentences in paragraphs as part of much longer texts. There is instruction at all of these levels that can be carried out so as to increase student understanding of what is read.
Decoding. Perhaps it is a truism, but students cannot understand texts if they cannot read the words
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When children are first learning to sound out words, it requires real mental effort. The more effort required, the less consciousness left over for other cognitive operations, including comprehension of the words being sounded out.
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Fluent (i.e., automatic) word recognition consumes little cognitive capacity, freeing up the child’s cognitive capacity for understanding what is read. Anyone who has ever taught elementary children and witnessed round-robin reading can recall students who could sound out a story with great effort but at the end had no idea of what had been read.
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Vocabulary. It is well established that good comprehenders tend to have good vocabularies
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When all of the work of Beck’s group and others is considered (see, e.g., Beck & McKeown, 1991; Durso & Coggins, 1991), a good case can be made that when students are taught vocabulary in a thorough fashion, their comprehension of what they read improves.
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World knowledge. Reading comprehension can be affected by world knowledge, with many demonstrations that readers who possess rich prior knowledge about the topic of a reading often understand the reading better than classmates with low prior knowledge (Anderson & Pearson, 1984). That said, readers do not always relate their world knowledge to the content of a text, even when they possess knowledge relevant to the information it presents. Often, they do not make inferences based on prior knowledge unless the inferences are absolutely demanded to make sense of the text (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992).
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One way to accomplish this is to encourage extensive reading of high-quality, information-rich texts by young readers (e.g., Stanovich & Cunningham, 1993).
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ypically, however, when readers process text containing new factual information, they do not automatically relate that information to their prior knowledge, even if they have a wealth of knowledge that could be related. In many cases, more is needed for prior knowledge to be beneficial in reading comprehension
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the power of “Why?” questions, or “elaborative interrogation,” to encourage readers to orient to their prior knowledge as they read
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Active comprehension strategies. Good readers are extremely active as they read, as is apparent whenever excellent adult readers are asked to think aloud as they go through text (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). Good readers are aware of why they are reading a text, gain an overview of the text before reading, make predictions about the upcoming text, read selectively based on their overview, associate ideas in text to what they already know, note whether their predictions and expectations about text content are being met, revise their prior knowledge when compelling new ideas conflicting with prior knowledge are encountered, figure out the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary based on context clues, underline and reread and make notes and paraphrase to remember important points, interpret the text, evaluate its quality, review important points as they conclude reading, and think about how ideas encountered in the text might be used in the future. Young and less skilled readers, in contrast, exhibit a lack of such activity (e.g., Cordón & Day, 1996).
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Of the many possible strategies, the following often produce improved memory and comprehension of text in children: generating questions about ideas in text while reading; constructing mental images representing ideas in text; summarizing; and analyzing stories read into story grammar components of setting, characters, problems encountered by characters, attempts at solution, successful solution, and ending (Pearson & Dole, 1987; Pearson & Fielding, 1991; Pressley, Johnson, Symons, McGoldrick, & Kurita, 1989).
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researchers moved on to teaching students to use the individual strategies together, articulating them in a self-regulated fashion (i.e., using them on their own, rather than only on cue from the teacher).
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The case is very strong that teaching elementary, middle school, and high school students to use a repertoire of comprehension strategies increases their comprehension of text. Teachers should model and explain comprehension strategies, have their students practice using such strategies with teacher support, and let students know they are expected to continue using the strategies when reading on their own. Such teaching should occur across every school day, for as long as required to get all readers using the strategies independently -- which means including it in reading instruction for years.
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Monitoring. Good readers know when they need to exert more effort to make sense of a text. For example, they know when to expend more decoding effort -- they are aware when they have sounded out a word but that word does not really make sense in the context (Isakson & Miller, 1976). When good readers have that feeling, they try rereading the word in question. It makes sense to teach young readers to monitor their reading of words in this way (Baker & Brown, 1984).
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When readers did not understand a text, they were taught to seek clarification, often through rereading. To improve children’s reading and comprehension, it makes very good sense to teach them to monitor as they read, to ask themselves consistently, “Is what I am reading making sense?” Children also need to be taught that they can do something about it when text seems not to make sense: At a minimum, they can try sounding out a puzzling word again or rereading the part of a text that seems confusing.
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- Teach decoding skills.
- Teach vocabulary.
- Encourage students to build world knowledge through reading and to relate what they know to what they read (e.g., by asking why questions about factual knowledge in text).
- Teach students to use a repertoire of active comprehension strategies, including prediction, analyzing stories with respect to story grammar elements, question asking, image construction, and summarizing.
- Encourage students to monitor their comprehension, noting explicitly whether decoded words make sense and whether the text itself makes sense. When problems are detected, students should know that they need to reprocess (e.g., by attempting to sound out problematic words again or rereading).
Summary. Based on research, a strong case can be made for doing the following in order to improve reading comprehension in students:
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Little, if anything, offered in this section is debatable. That said, there are more debatable -- but very promising -- perspectives being offered, for there continues to be great researcher interest in development of even more effective comprehension instruction. These perspectives are presented in the following section.
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What Comprehension Instruction Could Be: Emerging Issues
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The limits of word-recognition instruction
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Those who argue that comprehension problems can be solved by taking care of word-recognition problems are ignoring a lot of relevant data.
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Early teaching of comprehension skills.
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Traditionally, there has been a tendency among educators to view the primary grades as the time to hone word-recognition skills, with comprehension developed in the later grades. Increasingly, this view is rejected, with many demonstrations that interventions aimed at improving comprehension -- that is, interventions beyond word-recognition instruction -- do, in fact, make an impact during the primary years. The authors in the Block and Pressley edited book, in particular, recognize that the starting point for the development of many comprehension skills is teacher modeling of those skills.
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odeling, monitoring, and so on
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primary-level students to use comprehension strategies and monitoring, the children have benefited greatly from it
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There is definitely interest in expanding comprehension instruction in the early elementary grades, with the expectation that such instruction will affect 5- to 8-year-olds dramatically in the short term and perhaps lead to development of better comprehension skills over the long term.
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Rethinking the “package” approach to comprehension strategies development.
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there is renewed interest in teaching strategies one at a time as a way of encouraging strategic comprehension.
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Cognitive capacity constraints.
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It has been understood for the past quarter century that humans only have so much short-term memory capacity, which limits how much they can do consciously at one time.
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there is additional recognition that much needs to be learned about how to increase fluency of higher order reading processes, including the automatic use of comprehension and monitoring strategies. According to this perspective, comprehension will only be maximized when readers are fluent in all the processes of skilled reading, from letter recognition and sounding out of words to articulation of the diverse comprehension strategies used by good readers (e.g., prediction, questioning, seeking clarification, relating to background knowledge, constructing mental images, and summarizing).
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That use of comprehension processes must be automatic is one of the reasons that successful teaching of higher order comprehension processes occurs over years
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Although much is known about how to teach comprehension strategies when students are first learning them, very little is known about how teaching should occur as students are internalizing and automatizing strategies. Just as there needs to be study of instruction promoting fluency in word recognition, there needs to be study of instruction promoting fluency in use of higher order comprehension processes, including comprehension strategies and monitoring.
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World knowledge.
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by relating prior knowledge to a text that just does not connect well with that text
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here is increasing concern that too much of the elementary reading curriculum has involved reading of narratives, with growing awareness that students need practice reading expository text
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Diverse texts.
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In addition, there is emerging understanding that our text world is changing dramatically with the proliferation of electronic documents and multimedia. Little is known at this point about how Web-based and hypertext documents can be processed well; less is known about how to teach students to read such documents so as to maximize comprehension of the information encoded in them.
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Students often are asked to read a text in order to answer questions designed to do little more than test whether they have understood and remembered the text read. The problem with this task is that it is so little like the tasks readers carry out in the real world. More positively, in recent years there has been an increase in the study of more realistic tasks. John Guthrie and his associates have done much to increase understanding about how readers search text for information and can be taught to do so more efficiently
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Diverse text tasks.
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There is increasing recognition that comprehension instruction needs to prepare readers to do more than respond to short-answer postreading questions or multiple-choice questions on a standardized test. Much hard thinking is occurring about what real-world comprehension demands are and how instruction can prepare young readers to meet them.
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Diverse populations.
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mary. What might research-based comprehension instruction include in the future? There will still be teaching of decoding skills, vocabulary, important world knowledge, comprehension strategies, and monitoring. The primary years will be richer, however, with improved methods of instruction for word recognition complemented by more teaching of comprehension strategies and reading of more diverse texts, especially texts rich in important world knowledge.
Keene and Zimmermann’s (1997) book might succeed in getting more teachers to use active comprehension strategies, with a byproduct being that they will understand better why comprehension strategies should be taught. Commitment to teaching these strategies should then increase. Further, with increasing understanding that development of word-recognition and comprehension skills to the point of fluency is essential, there should also be more long-term attention paid to both word-level and higher order processes, with teachers requiring extensive practice of word-recognition and comprehension skills. In addition to increasing student reading of information-rich texts, teachers will also be alert to students who are applying errant world knowledge as they read and will be armed with teaching techniques to encourage use of appropriate knowledge. Comprehension will be assessed more broadly than it is now, with application of ideas in text emphasized over short-answer postreading questions. Finally, teachers will be better prepared to teach comprehension to all students, for much will be learned in the coming decade about how comprehension instruction can benefit average and above-average readers in addition to the weakest readers.
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There is good reason to believe that comprehension instruction will improve as the research programs covered in the Block and Pressley (in press) book come to fruition and the findings in that research are translated into practice.
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In Closing
I close by returning to the possibility raised in the introduction of this article: There needs to be experimental validation of comprehensive comprehension strategies instruction. There is a great need to know just how much of an impact on reading achievement can be made by instruction rich in all the individual components that increase comprehension. Of course, the hope is that there will be much benefit; the fear is that such instruction might be overwhelmingly complex. If all the components are simply thrown into the mix, instruction will be confusing and ineffective. With some experience in attempting to mix these components, how to create more effective blends might become more apparent so that meaningfully articulated and effective teaching occurs. There is much interesting work ahead before comprehension instruction is understood fully.
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07 Apr 13
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15 Sep 12
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Henning FjørtoftHvordan kan vi undervise i leseforståelse? Forskningsbaserte råd fra en av verdens fremste leseforskere. #lesing #grlf http://t.co/RammcYtk
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Mathias PoulsenHvordan kan vi undervise i leseforståelse? Forskningsbaserte råd fra en av verdens fremste leseforskere. #lesing #grlf http://t.co/RammcYtk
– Henning Fjørtoft (hennif) http://twitter.com/hennif/status/246846312098697216 -
04 Jun 12
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13 Jul 11
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20 Jun 11
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30 Apr 11
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a first recommendation to educators who want to improve students’ comprehension skills is to teach them to decode well. Explicit instruction in sounding out words, which has been so well validated as helping many children to recognize words more certainly (e.g., Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, online document), is a start in developing good comprehenders -- but it is just a start. Word-recognition skills must be developed to the point of fluency if comprehension benefits are to be maximized
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Just the other morning, I sat in a reading class as a teacher asked students to guess the meanings of new words encountered in a story, based on text and picture clues. Many of the definitions offered by the children were way off. Anyone who has ever taught young children knows that they benefit from explicit teaching of vocabulary.
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That children do develop knowledge of vocabulary through incidental contact with new words they read is one of the many reasons to encourage students to read extensively. Whenever researchers have looked, they have found vocabulary increases as a function of children’s reading of text rich in new words
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eading researchers have developed approaches to stimulating active reading by teaching readers to use comprehension strategies. Of the many possible strategies, the following often produce improved memory and comprehension of text in children: generating questions about ideas in text while reading; constructing mental images representing ideas in text; summarizing; and analyzing stories read into story grammar components of setting, characters, problems encountered by characters, attempts at solution, successful solution, and ending
-
Good readers know when they need to exert more effort to make sense of a text.
-
- each decoding skills.
- Teach vocabulary.
- Encourage students to build world knowledge through reading and to relate what they know to what they read (e.g., by asking why questions about factual knowledge in text).
- Teach students to use a repertoire of active comprehension strategies, including prediction, analyzing stories with respect to story grammar elements, question asking, image construction, and summarizing.
- Encourage students to monitor their comprehension, noting explicitly whether decoded words make sense and whether the text itself makes sense. When problems are detected, students should know that they need to reprocess (e.g., by attempting to sound out problematic words again or rereading).
-
Automatic, fluid articulation of comprehension strategies develops slowly, when it develops at all. There is increasing awareness that teaching of comprehension strategies has to be conceived as a long-term developmental process. Although much is known about how to teach comprehension strategies when students are first learning them, very little is known about how teaching should occur as students are internalizing and automatizing strategies. Just as there needs to be study of instruction promoting fluency in word recognition, there needs to be study of instruction promoting fluency in use of higher order comprehension processes, including comprehension strategies and monitoring.
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Sadly, just as it was a quarter of a century ago, so it is now: Students often are asked to read a text in order to answer questions designed to do little more than test whether they have understood and remembered the text read. The problem with this task is that it is so little like the tasks readers carry out in the real world. More positively, in recent years there has been an increase in the study of more realistic tasks
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06 Apr 11
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As part of such work, LaBerge and Samuels (1974) made a fundamental discovery. Being able to sound out a word does not guarantee that the word will be understood as the child reads. When children are first learning to sound out words, it requires real mental effort. The more effort required, the less consciousness left over for other cognitive operations, including comprehension of the words being sounded out. Thus, LaBerge and Samuels’ analyses made clear that it was critical for children to develop fluency in word recognition. Fluent (i.e., automatic) word recognition consumes little cognitive capacity, freeing up the child’s cognitive capacity for understanding what is read. Anyone who has ever taught elementary children and witnessed round-robin reading can recall students who could sound out a story with great effort but at the end had no idea of what had been read.
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31 Mar 11
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06 Sep 10
myoung923Michael Pressley article on reading comprehension. A great overview.
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04 Aug 10
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26 May 10
Judy ByersMichael Pressley discusses a variety of well-validated ways to increase comprehension skills in students through instruction.
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02 Nov 09
austinfrostRelated Readings - Comprehension Instruction: What Makes Sense Now, What Might Make Sense Soon
reading comprehension education classroom strategies literacy online electronic
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27 Jul 09
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Everyone in reading education knows about Dolores Durkin’s (1978-79) now classic research.
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Given the large volume of research on the topic in the past quarter century,
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no revolution has occurred.
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14 Aug 08
Mollie GoingsAn invited article for the e-journal Reading Online
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09 May 08
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Good readers are extremely active as they read, as is apparent whenever excellent adult readers are asked to think aloud as they go through text (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). Good readers are aware of why they are reading a text, gain an overview of the text before reading, make predictions about the upcoming text, read selectively based on their overview, associate ideas in text to what they already know, note whether their predictions and expectations about text content are being met, revise their prior knowledge when compelling new ideas conflicting with prior knowledge are encountered, figure out the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary based on context clues, underline and reread and make notes and paraphrase to remember important points, interpret the text, evaluate its quality, review important points as they conclude reading, and think about how ideas encountered in the text might be used in the future. Young and less skilled readers, in contrast, exhibit a lack of such activity
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Of course, excellent readers do not use such strategies one at a time, nor do they use them simply when under strong instructional control -- which was the situation in virtually all investigations of individual strategies. Hence, researchers moved on to teaching students to use the individual strategies together, articulating them in a self-regulated fashion (i.e., using them on their own, rather than only on cue from the teacher). In general, such packages proved teachable, beginning with reciprocal teaching, the first such intervention (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), and continuing through more flexible approaches that began with extensive teacher explanation and modeling of strategies, followed by teacher-scaffolded use of the strategies, and culminating in student self-regulated use of the strategies during regular reading (e.g., Anderson, 1992; Brown, Pressley, Van Meter, & Schuder, 1996; Duffy et al., 1987). The more recent, more flexible form of this instruction came to be known as transactional strategies instruction (Pressley et al., 1992), with the body of research on this approach recently cited by the National Reading Panel (2000) as exemplary work in comprehension instruction. When such instruction has been successful, it has always been long term, occurring over a semester or school year at minimum, with consistent and striking benefits.
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Good readers know when they need to exert more effort to make sense of a text.
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Contemporary approaches to word-recognition instruction also include a monitoring approach, with readers taught to pay attention to whether the decoding makes sense and to try decoding again when the word as decoded is not in synchrony with other ideas in the text and pictures
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Traditionally, there has been a tendency among educators to view the primary grades as the time to hone word-recognition skills, with comprehension developed in the later grades. Increasingly, this view is rejected, with many demonstrations that interventions aimed at improving comprehension -- that is, interventions beyond word-recognition instruction -- do, in fact, make an impact during the primary years.
-
It has been understood for the past quarter century that humans only have so much short-term memory capacity, which limits how much they can do consciously at one time. It also has been recognized that the more automatic reading is, the less capacity it consumes. Much attention has been given to this capacity-automaticity tradeoff with respect to word recognition and word comprehension
-
There is increasing awareness that teaching of comprehension strategies has to be conceived as a long-term developmental process. Although much is known about how to teach comprehension strategies when students are first learning them, very little is known about how teaching should occur as students are internalizing and automatizing strategies. Just as there needs to be study of instruction promoting fluency in word recognition, there needs to be study of instruction promoting fluency in use of higher order comprehension processes, including comprehension strategies and monitoring.
-
There is increasing concern that too much of the elementary reading curriculum has involved reading of narratives, with growing awareness that students need practice reading expository text. (Much of mature reading, of course, focuses on exposition.)
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25 Mar 08
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16 Mar 08
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Given that there are some types of instruction that improve comprehension, it might just be sensible to do all of them. No one, however, has ever done an experiment to explore what happens when teaching is full of comprehension-enhancing approaches versus absent of them.
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saw little comprehension instruction but many teachers posing postreading comprehension questions
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Skilled comprehension requires fluid articulation of all these processes, beginning with the sounding out and recognition of individual words to the understanding of sentences in paragraphs as part of much longer texts. There is instruction at all of these levels that can be carried out so as to increase student understanding of what is read.
-
critical for children to develop fluency in word recognition. Fluent (i.e., automatic) word recognition consumes little cognitive capacity, freeing up the child’s cognitive capacity for understanding what is read.
-
he students who had learned to recognize the words to the point of automaticity answered more comprehension questions than did students who experienced instruction emphasizing individual word meanings.
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teach them to decode well. Explicit instruction in sounding out words, which has been so well validated as helping many children to recognize words more certainly
-
comprehension improved as a function of vocabulary instruction.
-
vocabulary increases as a function of children’s reading of text rich in new words
-
readers who possess rich prior knowledge about the topic of a reading often understand the reading better than classmates with low prior knowledge
-
eading comprehension can be enhanced by developing reader’s prior knowledge. One way to accomplish this is to encourage extensive reading of high-quality, information-rich texts by young readers
-
power of “Why?” questions, or “elaborative interrogation,” to encourage readers to orient to their prior knowledge as they read
-
Good readers are extremely active as they read,
-
aware of why they are reading a text, gain an overview of the text before reading, make predictions about the upcoming text, read selectively based on their overview, associate ideas in text to what they already know, note whether their predictions and expectations about text content are being met, revise their prior knowledge when compelling new ideas conflicting with prior knowledge are encountered, figure out the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary based on context clues, underline and reread and make notes and paraphrase to remember important points, interpret the text, evaluate its quality, review important points as they conclude reading, and think about how ideas encountered in the text might be used in the future.
-
improved memory and comprehension of text in children: generating questions about ideas in text while reading; constructing mental images representing ideas in text; summarizing; and analyzing stories read into story grammar components of setting, characters, problems encountered by characters, attempts at solution, successful solution, and ending
-
use the individual strategies together, articulating them in a self-regulated fashion (i.e., using them on their own, rather than only on cue from the teacher). In general, such packages proved teachable, beginning with reciprocal teaching, the first such intervention
-
and continuing through more flexible approaches that began with extensive teacher explanation and modeling of strategies, followed by teacher-scaffolded use of the strategies, and culminating in student self-regulated use of the strategies during regular reading
-
transactional strategies instruction
-
Good readers know when they need to exert more effort to make sense of a text.
-
Good readers are also aware of the occasions when they are confused, when text does not make sense
-
seek clarification, often through rereading
-
- Teach decoding skills.
- Teach vocabulary.
- Encourage students to build world knowledge through reading and to relate what they know to what they read (e.g., by asking why questions about factual knowledge in text).
- Teach students to use a repertoire of active comprehension strategies, including prediction, analyzing stories with respect to story grammar elements, question asking, image construction, and summarizing.
- Encourage students to monitor their comprehension, noting explicitly whether decoded words make sense and whether the text itself makes sense. When problems are detected, students should know that they need to reprocess (e.g., by attempting to sound out problematic words again or rereading).
Such instruction must be long term, for there is much to teach and much for young readers to practice
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Emerging Issues
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nterventions beyond word-recognition instruction -- do, in fact, make an impact during the primary years.
-
starting point for the development of many comprehension skills is teacher modeling of those skills.
-
he idea that teachers can become hooked on comprehension strategies themselves -- and come to understand the potency of strategies -- by learning them one at a time.
-
the more automatic reading is, the less capacity it consumes.
-
According to this perspective, comprehension will only be maximized when readers are fluent in all the processes of skilled reading, from letter recognition and sounding out of words to articulation of the diverse comprehension strategies used by good readers (e.g., prediction, questioning, seeking clarification, relating to background knowledge, constructing mental images, and summarizing).
-
Automatic, fluid articulation of comprehension strategies develops slowly, when it develops at all. There is increasing awareness that teaching of comprehension strategies has to be conceived as a long-term developmental process. Although much is known about how to teach comprehension strategies when students are first learning them, very little is known about how teaching should occur as students are internalizing and automatizing strategies.
-
There is increasing concern that too much of the elementary reading curriculum has involved reading of narratives, with growing awareness that students need practice reading expository text. (Much of mature reading, of course, focuses on exposition.) In addition, there is emerging understanding that our text world is changing dramatically with the proliferation of electronic documents and multimedia. Little is known at this point about how Web-based and hypertext documents can be processed well; less is known about how to teach students to read such documents so as to maximize comprehension of the information encoded in them.
-
Students often are asked to read a text in order to answer questions designed to do little more than test whether they have understood and remembered the text read. The problem with this task is that it is so little like the tasks readers carry out in the real world.
-
There is increasing recognition that comprehension instruction needs to prepare readers to do more than respond to short-answer postreading questions or multiple-choice questions on a standardized test. Much hard thinking is occurring about what real-world comprehension demands are and how instruction can prepare young readers to meet them
-
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07 Nov 07
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18 Jan 06
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