Reading+Comprehension+09

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=Reading Comprehension= media type="custom" key="4722699"

Reading as Meaning Making
’Tis the good reader that makes the good book.~Ralph Waldo Emerson Every text is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work.~Umberto Eco Reading a book is like rewriting it for yourself. . . You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.~Angela Carter Reading is a creative activity.~Madeleine L’Engle

On Reading and the Right Book
(found poem from students' freewrites in response to the quotes above)

In a perfect world, the right books would fall from the sky To play out like a movie in our heads To make the book come alive

As you read a book you build meaning based on what you already know The pictures all colored with images and settings familiar to us Past experiences can make the series of 26 letters enjoyable

An author cannot include every context Readers have to bring their own knowledge to the table Reading will show you a new world When we read, we recreate them for ourselves Tis the good book that makes the good reader

Inexperienced Readers vs. Experienced Readers
-Anyone can be a struggling reader. What differentiates an independent reader from a dependent reader is how they approach the text that they struggle with. Independent readers have strategies to help them discern meaning from the text such as making connections to their own lives or using context clues to figure out words they do not know. Dependent readers cannot use these strategies and have strategies of their own that actually make them more dependent. These strategies of dependent readers include stopping when the reading gets difficult, relying on the teacher to tell them the meaning of the text and do their work for them, and reading through quickly without comprehension. (Beers WK 15-16) -Amanda -Dependent readers do not know what kinds of books they like or what genres there are. They lack the confidence to make the attempt to understand and push through a text that they deem difficult. They may feel incapable of reading because they have had little success with it or because they cannot attain comprehension, vocabulary, word recognition, or automaticity. (Beers WK 17) -Amanda -"Using Reading Workshop to Inspire Lifelong Readers" addresses the issue of having both experiences and inexperienced readers in the same classroom. The article does a fabulous job of pointing out that a Reading Workshop where students are constantly reading something by choice (with significant teacher input) creates the opportunity to challenge ALL types of readers. For example, free choice allows a struggling reader to begin with the R.L. Stein or Nancy Drew to increase fluency and confidence before approaching more difficult texts later in the year. What the article refers to as an "expert reader" can benefit greatly by books suggested by the teacher that challenge an already avid reader with new ways of looking at literature (Lause 28-29). -Jess

Readers need many different types of confidences to become "experienced," these include: cognitive confidence, social and emotional confidence, and text confidence. All of these confidences are intertwined and "ricochet" off each other (Beers 18). This section of the chapter reminds me that we cannot just develop one skill and then move on to another one, we must tackle all of them simultaneously. Perhaps the most difficult type of confidence for me to imagine forming with a student is the social and emotional confidence. I feel that when students are "willing and active participants in a community of readers," they have already developed the cognitive and text confidences necessary to project social confidence in the classroom (Beers 18). --Lindsey

There are many "dependent reading behaviors" that inhibit students from comprehending what they read. Students that read slowly, cannot differ between genres, have difficulty spelling, see no difference between reading to gather information and reading for fun, do not connect events in a text to events in their own lives all need help moving past these dependent behaviors into lifelong independent reading skills (Beers 24). --Lindsey

It is important to remember that as expert readers, it is easy for us to forget that inexperienced readers do need directions before trying to tackle a text for the first time. "All of you who are reading this book are experienced, expert readers. You needed no specific directions before reading "Love"...Even students reading at or above grade level often need help especially if the text is umfamiliar or complex. Telling students simply to 'read the chapter' without giving them any other directions or support can produce poor reading."(Gallagher 21). Inexperienced readers need guidance through texts in order for them to really grasp what is going on. -Inexperienced readers lack one or more of the confidences that reading in a class setting requires: Cognitve confidence, social and emotional confidence, and text confidence (Beers 18). An increase in one of these confidences can have a tremendous impact on another of the confidences, allowing readers to become less dependent and more independent (Beers 19). Inexperienced readers might be confident in their reading skills at first while they are still learning how to read, but once the type of text they are reading changes, their confidence quickly fades away. "They may be excited, confident, and even fairly competent readers. But then the reading situation changes, and so do the texts, the demands that these texts place on readers, and the tasks students are supposed to do with their reading." (Wilhem 25). -Renee

Kylene Beers describes the attitude that teachers generally have toward struggling students: dismissal. "They can't read" they say. But she counters this attitude by presenting a deeper level on which to understand the problems that struggling readers have. Looking closer at the problem, she breaks down "reading" into the many different ways that a student can encounter difficulties in decoding and comprehending text, all of which can be specifically addressed by the teacher. The fact that reading is such a complex skill makes it impossible for the phrase "he/she can't read" to mean anything worthwhile. (Beers WK 24) -- Anna

How Do You Teach Comprehension?
In //Deeper Reading// Kelly Gallagher outlines a process that helps teachers teach comprehension. First the teacher must focus his or her readers before they read the text. It is important that the teacher connect the text with something important to their students' worlds before the class delves into the text and a literary term or technique. Second, the teacher allows the students to silently read the text. Then the students read again and they are asked to look for hints of the literary term or technique. Finally, the students come together in small groups and talk about the literary term or technique and their feelings about the reading. -Stephany Weaver

-Kylene Beers argues that modeling is a good technique for teaching specific strategies such as making inferences about what will happen later in the text. Modeling is where the teacher reads the text aloud to the class while they follow along in their own books and the teacher acts out/thinks aloud the task that the kids need to learn to do on their own. Then, the teacher should give the students multiple chances to use the strategy that the teacher demonstrated. Eventually, the students should be able to do it on their own, without the support or guidance of the teacher. (Beers WK 43-44) -Amanda

-Jeff Wilhelm argues that comprehension truly comes from relevance to students. His concept of think out louds transforms the idea of comprehension into a conversation with the author and oneself throughout the entire reading process. In other words, comprehension no longer equates the ability to make an inference here, summarize there, identify a symbol on a test, etc- it becomes a more free flowing relationship that is consistent and relevant throughout the text. The student is able to learn not only from the teacher's means of "talking" to the text, but can learn from his/her own conversation with it. The idea builds confidence in that it shows kids that they already have many of the strategies required to read well, they just do not typically slow down to go through the process and listen to it! Furthermore, it enables new teaching by having kids build on their own process, adding news strategies and trying them out over and over again. This conversation-style comprehension strategy not only enables students to interact with a book in a unique way, but it also increases comprehension and translates into a variety of real world scenarios where they would be required to "read" the surroundings. -Jess

We need to remember that we can teach comprehension. Sometimes, as teachers, we equate teaching students what is happening in a text with how to comprehend it. Students cannot make the leap between what is happening and comprehension on their own. By teaching student strategies for comprehending texts, we help create independent, lifelong readers. Some of the strategies we can teach students are predicting what comes next in a text, compare and contrast, making a summary of the text, or visualizing what is occurring in the text (Beers 40-1). --Lindsey

We teach comprehension in a direct and explicit way. There are steps teachers can go through to model these strategies so that students are not left guessing what they were supposed to take away from the lesson. Explicitly teaching comprehension comes in 6 steps. These steps can be simplified down to: decide what you would like to model and what text to use, tell the students what strategy you are going to practice while reading the passage, read the passage out loud, modeling the strategy or strategies you are using, give students lots of opportunities to practice the strategies that you have demonstrated, continue modeling the strategies as students need it, finally, give students opportunities to practice without you helping them every single step of the way (Beers 42-4). --Lindsey

According to Kelly Gallagher in Deeper Reading, there are certain steps that need to be followed in order to ensure that the students fully understand what they are reading. The first step is to get the reader focused on the material that they will be reading, and make sure that the reader isn't jumping into the text with no context/background- this can be done through having them relate the topic of the story to thier own life. Once the reader is focused, you ask them to read the story for the first time. After they have read the story for the first time, you ask the students to read the story a second time, this time ask the readers to identify a deeper meaning- like asking them to pick out points in which foreshadowing occurs. After the students have read through the story twice, have the students discuss the reading in small groups. Then have the students use metaphor as a means of better understanding the story/author intention/characters. After all those steps have been taken, the teacher must lead the students into relating the story to thier own lives. -Renee -You have to be able to balance a bicycle with your body before you can ride without handlebars! (Beers 44-45) This is the analogy Beers makes with teaching comprehension skills. Students have to know how to do what you are asking to do before you ask them to do it. It seems simple enough, but how often are these types of strategy instructions neglected in the classroom? To use another of Beers' anecdotes, how often do we ask students to understand //it// before we tell them what //it// is??

Think-alouds are a good way of “actively giving contextualized strategic knowledge over to students” (Wilhelm, p. 30). Once this process is modeled, students can practice it themselves and learn to integrate it into their reading of any text, which will help improve their comprehension and their ability to “converse” with what they read. ~Amy

To teach reading comprehension (and more) we need to help students “internalize what good readers do when confronted with a challenging text," thereby helping them develop into “self-sufficient readers” (Gallagher, p. 24). ~Amy

What Do Good Readers Do?
-Good readers understand that the purpose of reading is to find meaning, whether it be for entertainment, personal gain, or an assignment. (Beers WK 34) -Amanda -Good readers "hear" the text in their heads as they read the words and they read fluently, recognize words effortlessly, and change their reading rate to match the purpose and the level of difficulty of the text. (Beers WK 35) -Amanda

Good readers are active readers. They know that reading is a way for us to gain meaning, whatever the situation or purpose. Good readers use many comprehension strategies that I discussed above in how to teach comprehension. They also infer about the text, whether it is about a word or a bigger idea the text presents. Good readers use context clues to find out the meaning of a word they don't know. They also recognize words very quickly, and read fluently, they "hear" the words of the text being read in their head as they read. Perhaps one of the most important qualities is that they know if they enjoyed a text or not, and why they did or did not. There are many more characteristics of good readers, and but all of the characteristics lead to the desired result: comprehension (Beers 34-5).--Lindsey

Good readers are able to connect the material that they are reading to their life as an adolescent. (Gallagher) Good readers read 45 minutes a night, five nights a week. They read outside of class. (Lause) -Renee

-Good readers monitor their own understanding of a text -Good readers make inferences about the text -Good readers use a variety of comprehension strategies to understand a difficult text (Beers WK 34-35) -- Anna

Good readers actively engage with the text through 10 different strategies, including “evaluating one’s own reading, evaluating the construction of the text, and conversing with the author” (Wilhelm, p. 28). Good readers do not see reading or authors as mysterious, but “consider the author, her message, how she construct[s] a text to communicate that message, and what that message should mean for the way we live” (Wilhelm, p. 28). Good readers are not afraid to ask “why,” or to question a book or its author. ~Amy