Kourtney Goodman
Reading
Comprehension
The
article “Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension” by C.R. Adler
found on Reading Rockets, addresses the various ways to teach reading
comprehension. This was a very thorough
look at this topic and gave great examples of how to impart this knowledge on
your students. Reading comprehension is
so integral to learning and it is very important for teachers to be aware of
the ways to help their students in this field.
Reading
comprehension is one of the fundamental elements of learning how to read. Students have to learn to understand what
they are reading or the passage or book is rendered useless. Some students understand this concept without
further instruction while some need strategies to come to this
understanding. According to this
article, there are seven strategies that can teach students reading
comprehension; monitoring comprehension, metacognition, graphic and semantic organizers, answering
questions, generating questions, recognizing story structure, summarizing. Teachers can easily incorporate these strategies
into lesson plans to provide a well rounded reading experience for all
students.
During the reading process some students need guidance to
understand the text. By working through
these strategies, students can get to a point where they think more deeply
about the text and come to a deeper understanding of their reading. Teachers need to be aware of their students’
needs and what strategy will work for them.
Some students may benefit from a graphic organizer that can help them
understand the relationships between the different concepts in the text. There are various organizers that can be used
for this purpose; Venn-Diagrams, storyboard/chain of events, story map, and
cause/effect to name a few. If students
learn how to group the concepts of the story on paper, they will eventually
learn to do the same kind of organization in their heads as they read. This will teach them how to pick out main
concepts and how they relate to the story as a whole.
It is important to ask comprehension questions to ensure
that the students have understood what they have read. The questions should address the key
concepts, characters, and plot details.
Students will learn what is important and how to determine what the key
points of a story are and where to look for them. There are four different kinds of questions;
right there, think and search, author and you, and on your own. These questions will become essential tools
for the students and they will begin to think of them as they read on their
own. While reading, some students may also
generate their own questions that help them understand the passage. They will learn to ask themselves questions
about the main idea and how to connect concepts within the story.
By asking themselves these essential questions they will
begin to understand the structure of the story.
The use of a story map may also help students understand the structure. Learning how to understand this will also
help them better understand other concepts in the story (plot). Students need to learn how all of the concepts
come together to create a story. Using
the key concepts, students can summarize the story and understand the main
idea. If the student can accurately
summarize the story, then you know that they have understood what they have
read.
In an observation that I did, the teacher used all of
these strategies while reading in their small groups. One student asked questions, one was a
summarizer, and one was in charge of keeping track of the characters. This format taught the students what to look
for in the story and gave them a better understanding of what they were
reading. The more the students practice
this within their classroom, the more naturally it will come and the more they
will do it on their own. As they get
used to knowing what they are supposed to look for the more they will learn
each time they read.
If teachers effectively teach these strategies to their
students they will create readers who truly understand their readings. They will know what to look for within a
passage and how to make sense of the concepts.
They will learn to link the concepts so that they can effectively
understand the story as a whole and how to summarize it. By answering comprehension questions they can
demonstrate their knowledge even further.
All of these strategies are so important to comprehension and must be
employed in the early stages so that students innately work through them as
they read.
Adler, C.R. "Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension." Reading Rockets. N.p., 2001. Web. 08 Sept. 2014.
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