Marie Coleman's List: Reading

• Metacognition
• it involves both  the conscious awareness and the conscious control of one's learning
• reading to learn
• four variables: texts, tasks, strategies, and learner  characteristics.
• text
• text
• text, refers to the textual features of learning  materials which influence comprehension and memory
• three basic points: (1) text structures influence learning  even if the learner is unaware of their effect; (2) knowledge of the  effect of text structures on learning is dependent on age and ability;  and (3) a reader can optimize learning by becoming aware of text  structures and the resultant effect they have on learning.
• By detecting the  organizational patterns or structures of texts, students can observe  how authors arrange ideas and determine which kinds of structures are  used to interrelate ideas
• three  strategies designed to help students read and comprehend informational  texts. These include hierarchical summaries, conceptual maps, and  thematic organizers
• Teachers need to  instruct students to use text structure to enhance learning.
• recognition of inadequacies in prose
• Ambiguous words or confusions within the text affect cognitive  processing.
• Another variable of metacognition in reading to learn pertains to the  task that the reader is required to perform.
• Fundamental to any task in reading is the derivation of meaning from  the text. In order for learning to occur, students must be aware that  the purpose of reading is to construct meaning. The reader must learn  how to adapt reading behavior to specific tasks.
• with regard to the task  is the reader's ability to accurately predict his or her performance  on the task.
• knowing how to remedy comprehension failures. It is not enough to be  aware of one's understanding or failure to understand--a learner must  be able to self-regulate his or her reading process in order to read  for comprehension. The reader needs knowledge about metacognition  strategies.
• discuss several strategies for improving comprehension. These include  forming a mental image, rereading, adjusting the rate of reading,  searching the text to identify unknown words, and predicting meaning  that lies ahead.
• Good readers  tend to use the most effective strategy that leads to a thorough  processing of the text. The research also supports that readers can be  taught to develop self-awareness and control of learning.
• Study strategies are important in reading to learn and can be applied  to enhance text processing. Common studying strategies include  underlining, outlining, notetaking, summarizing, and self-questioning.
• A final category of metacognition in reading to learn is the awareness  of the learner of his or her own characteristics--such as background  knowledge, degree of interest, skills, and deficiencies--and of how  these affect learning. Again, the reader must be able to take that  awareness and translate it into a change in reading behavior.
• Thus, learner characteristics, like texts, tasks, and strategies, are  age and experience dependent. The development of metacognition appears  to be linked to proficiency in learning. A related conclusion about  metacognitive development is that knowledge precedes control. The  researchers suggest that learners must first become aware of  structures of text, as well as knowledge of the task and their own  characteristics as learners, before they can strategically control the  learning process to optimize the influence of these factors

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• Textbooks may  be the most predominant instructional tool in America
• Although research suggests that textbook organization affects reading comprehension,  evaluations of textbooks have found many to be poorly written. Poorly written textbooks may play a part in the comprehension difficulties of poor readers, especially those  who have difficulty recalling content, organizing information, identifying main ideas,  and discriminating between relevant and nonrelevant information.
• students with diverse learning needs
• In these contexts, students have demonstrated varying reading comprehension difficulties, whether the text was a story, social studies chapter, science experiment,  or mathematics word problem.
• provided evidence that the organization of  text, students' awareness of that organization, and students' strategic use of text  organization affect their comprehension.

• organization of text includes the visual,  physical organization (e.g., headings, subheadings, location of main idea, spacing)  as well as less visible, more abstract text structures (e.g., narrative, sequence,  or descriptive text structures) (see Figure 3). The three general areas of convergent  evidence from this literature review are:

    Well-presented physical text facilitates reading comprehension.

    Text structure and student awareness of text structure are highly related to reading  comprehension.

    Explicit instruction in the physical presentation of text and/or text structure  facilitates reading comprehension.
• Well-Presented Physical Text Facilitates Reading Comprehension
• enables readers to identify the relevant information  in text, including main ideas and relations between ideas, skills that are central  to comprehension
• visual cues
• clearly indicate the main  idea, the relations between important information, and the thought units within a  sentence.
• focus readers' attention on the global, macrostructure of a  text, while the indicators of thought units within sentences focus readers' attention  on phrases rather than letters and words.
• ability to comprehend main ideas differentiates good and poor readers  and is directly related to general comprehension ability
• Yet, main idea statements often do not appear  as the first sentence in a paragraph or are omitted from content area textbooks
• summarizing, and outlining
• clarity and coherence with which main ideas are presented in text has been found  to facilitate their identification
• stating a good topic organization in the opening  paragraph
• ordering topics systematically
• placing the topic  sentence of a paragraph at the beginning of a paragraph rather than embedding or inferring  it
• arranging supporting  details in recognizable patterns that exemplify superordinate/ subordinate relations
• ability to form relations  between important information in text.
• semantic and syntactic cues. Semantic cues include topic sentences  to signal text organization
• ). Syntactic  cues include noncontent signal words such as "first," "second," and "finally" to  indicate sequential organization
• Headings and  subheadings are additional cues
• the effect of "chunking," or using spaces to divide information in sentences  into meaningful thought units or phrases (e.g., noun phrases, verb phrases). Chunking  information allows "perception and recall of idea units rather than letters or single words"
• chunked text benefited  low performers and was not a detriment for high performers. While it may be difficult for teachers to chunk material in textbooks, Casteel suggested having students chunk  verb, noun, and object phrases by placing vertical lines between the chunks or underlining  chunks prior to reading.
• Strategic Use of Well-Presented Text
• Summarizing, integrating information, and forming relations between important information  are important reading comprehension skills. Fluent readers use textual cues to identify  important information to include in summaries
• However, when the main idea is implicit rather than clearly presented, normally  achieving students have demonstrated difficulty identifying main ideas and integrating  information
• Chunked text appears to neither benefit  nor hinder high-ability readers
• when students with LD have comprehension difficulties, teachers need to consider  whether the students are able to identify the important information in a reading  passage. Therefore, they may need explicit training to increase sensitivity to important text information.
• Text that clearly signals main ideas and relations between ideas facilitates comprehension.  Techniques for clearly presenting text include (a) ordering topics systematically;  (b) stating topic organization in the opening paragraph; (c) placing topic sentences at the beginning of paragraphs; (d) arranging supporting details in recognizable  patterns that exemplify superordinate/subordinate relations; (e) using precise language  to make clear the relations between concepts, ideas, and sentences; (f) using signal words such as "first," "second," and "finally;" and (g) using headings, subheadings,  and topic sentences to cue the interrelations between important ideas.
• Area of Convergence # 2: Text Structure and Student Awareness of Text Structure are  Highly Related to Reading Comprehension
• ext structure  appears to play an important role in reading comprehension. Moreover, there is strong  empirical evidence that readers' awareness of text structure is highly related to  reading comprehension.
• two types of text: narrative and expository. Narrative  is more common than expository text and is usually a story written to entertain the  reader
• common expository  texts include persuasion, explanation, comparison/contrast, enumeration or collection,  problem-solution, and description, designed primarily to inform the reader
• narrative text depicts events, actions, emotions, or situations that people in a culture experience
• normally involve (a) animate beings as characters with goals and motives;  (b) temporal and spatial placements usually presented at the beginning of the story;  (c) a problem or goal faced by the main character that imitates a major goal; (d)  plots or a series of episodes that eventually resolve the complication; (e) impacts upon  the reader's emotions and arousal levels; and (f) points (e.g., justice, honesty,  loyalty), morals, or themes
• tory grammar refers to "abstract linguistic representation of the idea, events,  and personal motivations that comprise the flow of a story"
• story grammar components and their  hierarchical relations represent frames or patterns that readers can use to store  information in long-term memory.
• generate predictions about patterns of passage recall, passage summarization, importance  ratings of statement, passage statement clusters, and reading time, but there has been controversy over whether story grammars or other representations of knowledge  (e.g., knowledge about planning, social action, motives) can explain these predictions
• While narrative text structure primarily entertains, expository text primarily communicates  information
• Textbooks, essays, and most magazine articles  are examples of expository text
• While narrative text structures has largely focused on story grammars, research  on expository text has spanned a much broader range of organizational patterns. Common  expository text structures include compare/contrast, classification, illustration,  procedural description
• sequence, enumeration or collection,  problem-solution, and description
• well-structured expository text facilitates comprehension  of main ideas or topics, rather than facts.
• narrative appearing easier to comprehend and monitor than expository  text.
• text type affected recall and comprehension monitoring.  Students recalled significantly more idea units from narrative than expository passages.  When comparing texts with inconsistencies to texts without inconsistencies, students looked back more frequently for inconsistent narrative than inconsistent expository  text, suggesting that inconsistencies were more apparent in narrative than in expository  text. Students were also better able to verbally report on passage consistency after reading narrative than expository passages. Students reread expository passages  more frequently than narrative passages when the passages did not contain inconsistent  information, indicating that students found expository text more problematic than narrative text. Additionally, students reread more frequently when inconsistent text  was adjacent to the correct sentence than when it was far from the correct sentence.
• learners "familiar" with text structure who read well-structured,  clearly cued text performed better on measures of global comprehension (e.g., main  topics) than students who did not demonstrate familiarity with test structure.
• Student awareness of structural patterns in expository writing (e.g., sequence, causation,  comparison/contrast) facilitated recall of not only more text information, but more  theses or main ideas
• strong research support that students have a greater  awareness of narrative than expository text structures
• and that students remember and comprehend narrative text structure  easier than they do expository text structure
• First, narrative content is more familiar to students than expository  content.
• Second,  this familiar content of narrative includes event sequences  (e.g., intentional acts in pursuit of goals; events that occur in the material world).  Event sequences are the core content of children and adults' experience in everyday  life.
• Third, narrative structure  is prevalent in oral language
• Normally achieving students appear more facile with both narrative and expository  text structures than diverse learners. One indicator of facility with text is the  number of times readers look back at text to correct comprehension failures. Good  readers had significantly more look-backs than poor readers for difficult (i.e., expository)  text and significantly more look-backs for expository than narrative passages. Good  readers also had more look-backs for inconsistent text than poor readers, though  the differences were not significant. Good readers correctly reported significantly more  inconsistencies than poor readers
• The evidence is clear that text structure and students' awareness of text structure  are positively related to reading comprehension. Student sensitivity to text structure  may be developmental and varies according to text structure type. Generally, narrative is easier than expository text for students and some types of expository text are  easier than others (e.g., sequence was found to be easier than enumeration and description,  which in turn was found to be easier than compare/contrast)
• Teachers should be aware of these variations and may want to attend more carefully  to text structure as students move to reading more expository text in the upper-elementary  school grades. Zabrucky and Ratner (1992) posed that teachers be concerned with increasing students' awareness of different text structures and informing students of  the impact of these structures on evaluation, regulation, and memory. Students should  be taught to adjust their reading and rereading skills and to assess their readiness  for recall when text information varies in difficulty. This instruction may be more  effective if it occurs for narrative before expository text.
• Area of Convergence # 3: Explicit Instruction in Text Organization
• What to Teach
• xplicit, task-specific instruction on (a) how to  recognize the physical presentation of important information in text, including topic  sentences and where these usually occur in well-organized paragraphs; and (b) headings  and subheadings and their purposes.
• two additional structural cues to teach students: the patterns that exemplify subordinate and superordinate relations; and signal words (e.g., "first," "finally").
• teaching students  a summarizing strategy using the headings, subheadings, and paragraph topics of textbooks  resulted in more recalled text information than answering questions or studying.
• Approaches to text structure instruction included both  systematic attention to clues that signal how authors relate ideas to one another  and systematic attempts to impose structure upon text.
• suggested that teachers be concerned not only with increasing  students' awareness of different text structures, but also with informing students  of the impact text structures have on evaluation, regulation, and memory. They suggested generalizing metacognitive skills to more difficult expository passages after  training with narrative passages.
• teaching students to study or create visual representations of key ideas  in text (e.g., networking, flowcharting, Con Struct, mapping, conceptual frames,  graphic organizers, conceptual mapping) benefited reading comprehension.
• Graphic organizer instruction consisted of reading and rereading for 15 minutes, and  completing and studying graphic organizers for 20 minutes.
• graphic organizers helped make mainstreaming a  valid instructional delivery system for all students.
• major contribution of research has been to transform reading skills (e.g., summarize,  identify main ideas, identify relations between main ideas) into explicit strategies  that students can be taught directly
• includes teaching students how to use (a) the physical presentation of text (e.g., location of topic  sentences, headings, subheadings, signal words) as a strategy to identify main ideas  and form interrelations between concepts, main ideas, and supporting details (Seidenberg, 1989); (b) a story grammar to identify the important ideas in narrative text (Gurney  et al., 1990; Newby et al., 1989); and (c)  expository text structures > to identify  concepts and interrelations or to impose interrelations upon poorly written text.  Examples of imposing text structure include visual representations of text (Horton et al.,  1990; Pearson & Fielding, 1991) and note sheets organized around text structure (Englert  & Thomas, 1987). Strategy instruction holds particular promise for students with  LD as they seem to lack the ability to engage in strategic activities and do not spontaneously  access and use cognitive strategies when these are needed
• Expository text structures
• Strategies to identify the main idea in text appear particularly important.
• strong support  for explicit and direct instruction in text presentation and text structure.
• cited studies that used  either a model-lead-test or model-guided practice-independent practice format.
• followed a general pattern of (a) explaining the skill or component of text structure; (b) telling the importance;  (c) modeling how, when, and where to use the skill, and how to evaluate the effectiveness  of the skill; (d) providing guided and independent practice; (e) teaching for transfer; and (f) evaluating.
• Caveats for Instruction

•  The first two areas are three-pronged, involving (a) presentation and structure of  text, (b) students' awareness of text presentation and structure, and (c) students'  strategic use of text presentation and structure. Text presentation facilitates reading  comprehension if (a) main ideas are clearly stated and located at the beginnings of  paragraphs; and (b) the relations between important information are clearly indicated  by headings, subheadings, signal words, and sentences or paragraphs signaling text  organization placed at the beginning of the passage. Extra spacing between thought units  in sentences facilitates attention to ideas within sentences. Text structure facilitates  reading comprehension, with narrative text structure being generally easier for students to recall and monitor than expository text structures.

   However, it may be that simply presenting text in a clear, well-organized manner is  not sufficient. Research suggests that students' awareness of that presentation and  strategic use of text are also needed to enable students to identify relevant and  nonrelevant information, main ideas, and relations between ideas. Normally achieving students  appear to strategically use text organization to identify main ideas and relations  between ideas. However, if main ideas are not clearly stated, even normally achieving students have demonstrated difficulty identifying important information, summarizing,  and integrating information.

   Unlike normally achieving students, diverse learners appear less aware of text organization  and its use as a strategy. Many comprehension difficulties of diverse learners have  been attributed to their deficits in text structure awareness. For example, they have demonstrated difficulty identifying main ideas, and discriminating between relevant  and nonrelevant information. While demonstrating a knowledge of strategies, they  fail to demonstrate a use of strategies.

   The first two convergent areas and the importance of students' awareness and strategic  use of text presentation lead to the third convergent area -- explicit instruction  in text organization facilitates comprehension. Research supports instruction in  the physical presentation of text, text structures, and strategic use of text organization  to benefit reading comprehension. Research evidence also supports explicit instruction  that follows a general pattern of (a) explaining the skill or component of text structure; (b) telling the importance; (c) modeling how, when, and where to use the skill,  and how to evaluate the effectiveness of the skill; (d) providing guided and independent  practice; (e) teaching for transfer; and (f) evaluating.

   The effect on reading comprehension of the presentation and structure of text is more  global than local. Well-presented and structured text results in better comprehension  of main ideas and relations between ideas than poorly presented or structured text.  Likewise, students who are aware of or have had instruction in the physical presentation  of text or text structure demonstrate more global comprehension than students who  lack awareness or have not had instruction. Although students who are aware of text  structure recall more than students who are not aware of text structure, there is often  no difference between these students for local (i.e., details) comprehension.

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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.
• saw little comprehension instruction but many teachers posing postreading comprehension questions
• 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.
• 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
• Emerging Issues
• 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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• most basic definition of fluency is simply the ability to read text accurately and quickly.
• Researchers add a few more characteristics: for example, good prosody. This is a linguistic term that refers to the melody in our speech and our ability to express it. That’s what underlies what we often call “good expression”.
• reading words and sentences with melody or prosody aids comprehension and this is the most basic reason why fluency is so important: comprehension. Fluent reading is the bridge to comprehension.
• The first and most common reason for not being a fluent reader is that the child does not yet know how to decode very well yet.
• econd reason why some children do not acquire early decoding skills is because they have weaknesses in areas called phoneme awareness. They literally are not as aware as other children of the tiny sounds or phonemes that make up words in speech.
• Third, there are other children whose decoding skills are accurate but halting, and who simply need a great deal of practice. Some of these children may be second language learners. For these children the best resource for a teacher or parent is to supply your child with every opportunity to practice -
• And finally, a fourth reason why some children don’t become fluent readers is a very subtle one,
• For them, quite literally the areas in the brain that put together visual and verbal processes don’t work together as automatically. The good news is that we can predict who these children are as early as kindergarten,
• three measures to every kindergarten teacher to predict fluency, it would be: 1) a phoneme awareness task; 2) a set of rapid automatized naming tests or naming speed tests (for letters, numbers, colors, objects); and 3) a vocabulary test.
• three things: phoneme awareness, automatic decoding skills, and practice you probably already knew before you came to this course. But there are two or three areas that you might not know that can contribute mightily to the development of fluency. First, vocabulary development
• children’s growth of fluency begins with word knowledge
• The child who knows that the same words can be used in multiple ways depending on the context is already bringing more knowledge to what they read that will translate into more speed and thus more fluency AND comprehension in reading.
• Until now, most research viewed fluency as an outcome. And for years most people have used something called “repeated reading” techniques as the best way to increase fluency. It is a method where the child is given a passage at his/her level or just above (90-95% accuracy), and reads it repeatedly till their reading becomes smooth, accurate, and faster. This is a great method for the child who already has some skills, but you can tell it is aimed at an outcome view of fluency, not a whole developmental process perspective.
• fluency is a developmental process and that many linguistic areas contribute to it. You can almost guess from my other remarks what these other linguistic areas are: phonology, orthography (knowledge of letter patterns), vocabulary, syntax (knowledge of grammatical functions), and finally an area called morphology, which simply means a knowledge of word roots and parts like affixes. What makes this view so interesting to us is that it means you can be developing fluency from the start and not waiting till you know it’s a problem. Further, we think fluency instruction begins with letters and word levels, not just later developing text.
• explicitly connecting your decoding, spelling and vocabulary work together? Are you trying to encourage children to read “am” words accurately and THEN ever more rapidly? Game formats are wonderful for steadily moving your students from accuracy to faster and faster speeds.
• Teach the connections between types of word knowledge. EXPLICITLY teach spelling, vocabulary, suffixes, grammar. Teach words, words, words. Teach accuracy, and then give opportunities to move to fluency, BUT don’t push too fast. Use partner reading. Read to them yourselves! Finally, use repeated reading techniques for stories, and have children graph them.

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• STAGES OF SPELLING DEVELOPMENT
• precommunicative stage
• phonetic stage
• phonetic stage
• semiphonetic stage
• transitional stage
• correct stage
• nstruction in standard spelling shapes the developmental  process in important ways.
• An awareness of spelling development can help teachers plan instruction
• purposeful writing experiences are the key to cognitive  growth in spelling.
• provide opportunities for frequent writing
• avoid overemphasis on absolute  correctness, mechanics, and memorization
• make use of instructional games
• select spelling words from varied sources. For example,  teachers can select words for formal instruction from two sources: their  students' own writing and a list of high frequency word

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• level of phonemic awareness that   children possess when first beginning reading instruction and   their knowledge of letters are the two best predictors of how   well they will learn to read during the first two years of   formal reading instruction.

• In summary, as good readers go through a text, they are active. They relate ideas in text to their prior knowledge, construct images, and generate summaries. They do a lot of monitoring, with their awareness during reading affecting how they process the text. Such here-and-now metacognition in the form of awareness is always being generated as the good reader reads, with such awareness going far in determining the nature of the reader's activity.
• Once the good reader makes it through a text one time, there is additional processing of text. Often there is selective rereading. Sometimes the good reader will attempt to recite the text, constructing a summary of it. Good readers often will reflect on what they have just read, perhaps evaluating the credibility of the material. Sometimes they will think about how they are going to use the information in the text
• can be aware of whether their understanding of the text is consistent with all the ideas expressed in it. When the reader senses that something is missing from their understanding, this can motivate additional reading of the text to flesh out the reader's understanding
• Good readers derive the meanings of whole texts by engaging the text before they read it, while they read it, and after a first reading is completed

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• activate prior knowledge, which can then be related to the ideas in the text
• formation of hypotheses,
• skilled readers generally do read texts from front to back. Often, however, they are selective in doing so, for example, skipping information that is not relevant to their current reading goals
• reread
• Good readers are especially attuned to topic sentences and topic paragraphs.
• Prior knowledge permits many unconscious inferences during reading
• Good readers also make conscious inferences as they read, however. Sometimes they try to figure out the referent for a pronoun or what words mean based on context clues.
• Good readers attempt to integrate the ideas in text to get the main ideas out of the text. This can involve analyzing the structure of the text as the reader reflects on the meaning of each part of the text.
• make notes about ideas in different parts of the text to assist integration
• Good readers are highly interpretive as they read.
• paraphrases
• come to conclusions about ideas in the text based on when the text was written, their perception of the author's purpose, the tone of the text, and the author's choice of examples
• mental images
• highly evaluative of the text, deciding whether a text is interesting or the arguments made in it are credible. They make evaluations of the style of the text (e.g., the quality of the writing), as well as its content. They often have affective reactions, from positive ones (e.g., satisfaction with the content of the text) to negative ones (e.g., boredom, frustration).
• monitor as they read,
• also monitor problems they experience as they read. For example, good readers are very aware when they are reading a challenging text, one demanding all their capacity. They are aware of when their concentration wanes during a reading and when they are reading too quickly to understand the text.

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• developing students' vocabulary is also a way to improve their comprehension
• many strategies that are used by good readers as they go through a text.
• goal
• skims the text in advance

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• Good comprehenders are extremely active as they read, using a variety of comprehension strategies
• comprehension strategies can and should be taught beginning in the primary grades
• Metacognition is knowledge of thinking processes, both knowledge of the thinking occurring in the here and now
• and in the long term
• In the case of reading, the most important here-and-now metacognition is awareness of whether a text is being understood
• Long-term metacognition pertaining to reading includes knowledge of comprehension strategies
• as well as the knowledge that good readers use the strategies consciously when they read
• teacher explanations and modeling
• students practice
• internalization of comprehension strategies involves long-term practice with the strategies, including opportunities to reflect on strategies use with others.
• both decoding and comprehension, takes place in and depends on short-term memory, and short-term capacity is very limited.
• nonfluent reader is thinking about the sounds of the individual letters and letter combinations while trying to blend them. When that is the case, there is not much capacity left for comprehension, either of the individual words being read or for understanding the sentences,
• Word recognition skills matter in comprehension

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• nature of  vocabulary development
• vocabulary, or lexicon, of language encompasses the stock of words of  that language which is at the disposal of a speaker or writer.
• Words are, after all, no more than labels for concepts about the  world around us, and as new concepts emerge or old ones change, the lexical  stock changes accordingly. It is a linguistic paradox that change is a constant  when applied to vocabulary.
• Still more words have emerged by the process of compounding, in which  existing words are joined to form new combining parts of words, or simply by  creating new words out of "whole cloth."
• We do not learn most of our words by looking them up in a dictionary. Rather,  we learn them in the context of our experiences with listening, speaking,  reading, and writing.
• There is, however, an important difference between knowing words and  understanding their broad range of uses and referents, for vocabulary  development is first and foremost a matter of concept development. For this  reason considerable attention has been turned in recent years to children's  semantic development; that is, to the development of word meaning
• how words  are used, not their length or frequency of use, indicates children's lexical  maturity and, commonly, their intellectual maturity as well
• ocabulary  instruction properly belongs in all subjects of the curriculum in which students  meet both new ideas and the words by which they are represented in the language.
• explore the origins and forms of words as a means  of extending and enriching their word knowledge
• use students' personal experiences and prior knowledge to  develop vocabulary
• Semantic mapping goes a step further, grouping the words on the list into  categories and arranging them on the visual "map" so that relationships among  the words become clearer.
• analogies are a useful way of encouraging thoughtful discussion  about relationships among meanings of words

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• vocabulary is an important part of both the decoding and   the comprehension that is necessary for learning to read.

• The National Institute For Literacy suggests following principles   from vocabulary research the have emerged:

   
   
  • Children with meanings of most words through their everyday   experiences with oral and written text.  
  • Some vocabulary should be taught – specific words and word   learning strategies.
     
  • Instruction should center on important words, useful words,   and difficult words.
• • Children who enter school with limited vocabulary knowledge   continue to encounter a gap in vocabulary as they continue in   school.  
  • The number of words children learn varies between 2 and 8   words per day and 750 to 3,000 words a year.  
  • A great deal of vocabulary can be learned from just reading.   Even “children who read just ten minutes a day outside of school   experience substantially higher rates of vocabulary growth between   second and fifth grade than children who do little reading.” (Nagy   & Anderson)

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• roots in their social interaction with other more  competent members of the society through various meaningful, purposeful  activities
• As they grow older, children  usually show an interest in writing if they have opportunities to observe other  people writing and are invited to participate in literacy activities, such as  making shopping lists and listening to bedtime stories
• children's writing development reveal that   their early writing is usually accompanied by talking and drawing
• initially regard writing and drawing as the direct symbol systems in which   meaning is embedded
• Therefore, as children   write, they weave their drawing and speech into their writing to convey meanings
• In addition to speech and   drawing, play characterizes children's early writing development
• Pretending serves as a bridge to literacy development
• allows children to develop and   refine their capacities to use symbols, to represent experience, and to   construct imaginary worlds, capacities they will draw on when they begin to   write and read
• can make   the various roles and activities of people who read and write more meaningful   and hence more accessible to young children
• earliest conventional written words are usually their   own names
• When children are aware of some   letters within their names, they will begin to use these letters in their   writing
• signs, captions, and labels
• explain and identify children's drawings
• announce, assert ownership
• and to   create an imaginary world
• explore and experiment with different forms of   writing which focus on the mastery, competency, and control of writing
• epeatedly write familiar words/phrases
• elaborate and refine their   old forms of writing, and new forms emerge
• As children's forms of writing diversify, their awareness of audience  develops accordingly.
• In addition
• writing  becomes more coherent and internally cohesive during the school years
• text becomes longer and more complex over  time
• most of them already understand the underlying features of storytelling
• learning to write is a socio-cultural, generative, and developmental   process.

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• oral language development
• oral language development
• improving their ability  to talk or communicate more effectively
• involves thinking, knowledge, and skills.
• One of these assumptions--that the  teacher's role is to teach--is usually interpreted to mean that to teach means  to talk. Accordingly, teachers spend hours and hours teaching by talking while  the children sit listening passively. Such conventional teaching-learning is one  of the obstacles preventing the real development of oral language.
• The second assumption is based on the fact that children start learning and  using oral language long before they go to school. Therefore, it is assumed that  the primary learning tasks for children in school are reading and writing, which  are usually seen as the two major aspects of literacy.
• steady decline of the use of  oral language in classrooms as a major reason for the inhibition of students'  abilities to reason and to forecast as they progressed from lower to higher  grades.
• classrooms are dominated by teachers talking and by workbook  exercises. Researchers call this phenomenon "teachers-talk-students-listen" or  "teacher-dominated."
• Another result of teacher-dominated classrooms is the negative effect upon  children's attitudes toward learning.
• teachers often fail to see that literacy learning is a  continuum--an ongoing process of learning--for children.
• After a few years students will have become programmed to a kind of passive  learning atmosphere--the teacher talks, the students listen and do their  homework. Here, learning simply means taking down whatever is given. In this  type of classroom environment, students learn the basic skills of reading and  writing. However, they will not learn how to think critically and how to make  sound judgments on their own.
• oral language is indeed an important link in the process of children's   learning and thinking development. It is not merely a language issue; it is also   an intellectual issue which deserves serious attention from both teachers and   researchers.
• For most   children, the literacy learning process actually begins with speaking--talking   about their experiences, talking about themselves.
• development of language has a close relationship to the development of thinking   abilities
• oral language is one of the important means of learning and of   acquiring knowledge
• essential for engagement in intellectual dialogue, and for the communication of   ideas.
• need to overcome the faulty   assumptions mentioned
• should see ourselves as friendly and   interested facilitators of student learning
• ncourage students to bring their ideas and background  knowledge into class learning activities.
• implementation of  oral language development across the curriculum requires teamwork. All  content-area teachers have to be actively involved in this task. The goal is not  only to get children to speak, but also to have them learn and develop through  speech.

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• Although it is not

   

  surprising that children who have spoken language

   

  difficulties also have trouble with written language forms,

   

  the relationships between spoken and written language

   

  delays are not well understood.
• Most researchers

   

  agree that written and spoken expression share semantic,

   

  syntactic, and phonemic processes, but that these two

   

  domains differ mechanically, conceptually, and linguisti-

   

  cally
• Spoken language and writing also differ conceptually

   

  and require different cognitive skills
• This study investigated the relationship of spoken

   

  language abilities to written expression skills in children

   

  with histories of early phonology disorders without

   

  accompanying language disorders and in children with

   

  histories of early phonology disorders + additional lan-

   

  guage difficulties
• linguistic differences

   

  between spoken language and written expression. Writing

   

  requires encoding of words in written form, and this

   

  process demands greater metaphonological skills than does

   

  speaking
• spoken

   

  language impairment can affect written expression abili-

   

  ties, especially written syntax and vocabulary.

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• language
• Speech difficulties
• problems that can interfere with communication and the cognition
• problems with the perception or articulation of speech sounds
• two categories: receptive and expressive
• Receptive  Expressive    Phonology  problems distinguishing between sounds as in 'van' and 'than'  articulatory problems e.g. 'fink' for 'think'    Syntax  problems extracting meaning from grammatically complex sentences e.g. thinking that 'the cat was bitten by the dog' means 'the cat bit the dog'  grammatical construct interferes with meaning e.g. 'the cat that dog bit'    Semantics  understanding meaning  communicating meaning    Pragmatics  understanding the communicative purpose of language, including non-literal meaning as in sarcasm, irony and metaphor e.g. an autistic child may see a sign saying 'Please knock the door' and knock each time he passes  using language in a socially appropriate way e.g. tone of voice, eye-contact, turn-taking, maintaining a shared topic
• three broad categories of intervention for working with language impaired children
• Behavioural
• Naturalistic
• Combined
• eclectic, individualised and principled

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