During-Reading+09

toc

=During-Reading Strategies= media type="custom" key="4722791"

What Students Need to do While Reading
While reading a text, students need to make inferences which is the act of making connections about between what is in the mind with what is in the text so that a person can make an educated guess about what will happen later in the text. Making inferences is really important to understanding a text. There are many ways for teachers to help students make inferences, but one of the most crucial of these methods is thinking aloud. When a teacher thinks aloud while reading a text with the students listening, students are able to see how a person can make connections with their own personal knowledge and the text they are reading. The teacher should illustrate her thinking as well on a transparency so that students have a visual aid. --Kylene Beers __When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do__ Ch 5 ~Amanda

Students must annotate while reading, because it "helps teach reading as a process" and"promotes more active reading" by making students "more aware of their thinking process"(Porter-O'Donnel 85, 87). In order to teach students organize their thoughts the teacher must first determine catagories for responding to the text. Gallagher promotes an activity called Reading Symbols in which students write down their predictions for the text, literary devices that they notice, connections, judgements, and questions for the text. The students then swap and try to match symbols, which correspond to the different annotations the readers made, to their partners responses to the text. This activity teachers "students to move beyond surface-level understanding when writing writing reflections and it teachers the reader to actively search for deeper-level reading in the reflection", these are both things that students will need to learn to do with the text (Gallagher 101). -Stephany

While reading students need to make sure that their minds are on the "reading channel"; they need to make sure that they are focused on what they are reading. They also need to make sure that they have a mission and a purpose for reading. Students need to also understand that while they are reading, it is alright/natural to be confused about what they might be reading. It is important that they stay confident while reading, and not give up. (Gallagher)

How can we help students make inferences?
There are many ways we can help students make inferences. One strategy is to put the types of inferences independent readers make on a large poster in the classroom. Teachers can refer to this list over and over to help their students think of inference as a concrete idea. Another strategy we can use is thinking aloud inferences. Amanda discusses the importance of this in the paragraph above. Short texts are great for this because they offer many opportunities for inferencing. In fact, you can build thinking aloud through short texts into your daily classroom routine since it only lasts around 7 minutes. In addition, we can remind students that "readers infer and authors imply" information (Beers 69). --Lindsey

How can teachers keep students focused on comprehending the text as they read?
One method of keeping students engaged in a text they are reading is to use an activity called say something. This activity "is a very simple strategy that interrupts a student's reading of a text, giving her a chance to think about what she is reading" (Beers 105).--Lindsey

My favorite activity that Gallagher gives for helping with text comprehension is the trouble slip system- (he suggests assigning this as homework) As the students read they are supossed to "flag words and passages that are giving them the hardest time." (Gallagher, 69)The next day in class, the students break up into groups and talk about their trouble spots.

Self-Monitoring
Even if students are focused on reading a text and have a purpose, they are bound to get a little lost in reading. This is because no one understands a challenging text 100% the first time they read it. Kelly Gallagher focuses on the importance of helping students to monitor their own reading in order to know their “degree of lostness” (Deeper Reading, p. 64). Gallagher writes that there are three such degrees. The first is “a little bit lost, but no need yet for assistance,” which means that students are confused but recognize that their questions will be answered by continuing to read. The second is “knowingly lost, but with a bit of help could recover,” which means that students are a bit more confused than they should be at the time and might need some strategy to recover information they have lost. The third, and most serious issue in reading, is the “hopelessly lost” category, which means that students are just reading and reading and getting no where. It is these students who perhaps did not know that they were getting lost in the first place, and who need strong guidance to get out of their rut, figure out where they began to get lost, and begin to make sense of the things that are confusing them (Gallagher, p. 63-67). Gallagher provides a number of strategies to help students monitor their own comprehension. ~Amy

What is the number one strategy independent readers use when a text stumps them?
Rereading!! It is also the last strategy most dependent readers use. To make this strategy work in the classroom, students need to be convinced rereading is a valuable strategy. Also it helps for you to model the strategy by thinking out loud as you read a text. Giving students tasks as they reread and reviewing after they have reread is also important (Beers 113-4). --Lindsey

Rereading as well as not giving up...not making the plea for "reader's welfare"- meaning that students don't just come to the teacher hoping that they "will provide them with the meaning without their having to expend any real reading effort"(Gallagher 64).

In Chapter 5 of Deeper Reading Gallagher also argues that re-reading is the key to success for students. Gallagher argues that a 2nd draft reading will enable students to “explore deeper meaning” and for that reason it is up to the teacher to help rid students of their “‘I read it – I’m done’ mentality” and “show them the value of second draft reading” (Gallagher p. 82). In order to inspire students to re-read Gallagher advocates teaching them to make inferences – to see what something does not say – with a series of three questions: “What does it say? What does it mean? What does it matter?” (p. 86). The first question is the literal level, the second reaches below the surface to making inferences about the work, and the third connects the work to a real-world context and gives students an answer to the question “Why are we reading this?” Gallagher recommends several different strategies for getting to the second question and deeper understanding, including a say/mean T-chart, multi-layered timelines, literary dominoes, a flip side chart, paragraph plug-ins, reading symbols, and responsibility pie charts (p. 91-103). ~Amy

How else can we help students construct meaning as they read?
Other strategies to use in the classroom include: think-aloud, double-entry journals, logographic cues, bookmarks, post-it notes, character bulletin boards, syntax surgery, and using signal words (Beers 127-136). --Lindsey

Annotation Skills
I had mixed feelings about the Carol Porter-P'Donnell article, "Beyond the Yellow Highlighter". I thought that it did include some useful strategies but I also think that it may have gone into a little too much depth on a topic such as annotating texts. I can't remeber when or even if I was every formally taught how to annotate texts, I know that it must have happened before my junior year of HS though because I vividly remeber underlining phrases and highlighting passages in books that I was reading during that time. Something that struck me as a little odd in this article was the guide that was handed out to students and the general "rules" that went along annotating. I've always thought of annotation as a kind of shorthand that went along with reading and generally thought that as long as the person taking the notes could understand his/her own notes then there was no need for an outline saying that a circle must go around any person, a square must go around a place, etc. Having said this I understand that soetimes, especially for young readers, the more structure present, the better. -Jeff