Reading Comprehension

'Reading is meaning making' (Campbell and Green, 2006)

Comprehension is the act of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning from the text (Hill, 2009). However, reading comprehension is about more than just understanding individual dictionary meanings of words, althought this is important too. It's about making real world, authentic meaning and creating context of space and time and location. Reading is a social practice; in order to make authentic, real life meaning, reading must draw on a vast repetoir of social, cultural and cognitive resources in order to construct meaning from traditional (paper based) and multimodal texts. 

 

Digital literacy- guided/shared reading using a 'tablet' and headphones.
From: http://dmlcentral.net/blog/john-jones/social-reading-and-foundations-digital-literacy

While reading draws on social and cultural practices, it also requires cognitive skills. These cognitive skills are known as the 4 basic cueing systems- semantic, syntactic, graphophonic, and paralinguistic (Campbell and Green, 2006). Semantic cues involve bringing prior knowledge to the topic you are reading about. Syntactic cues involve understandings of the patterns of language. Graphophonic cues refer to the sound-symbol relationships in language. Paralinguistic cues are the punctuation, pictures, font and layout, all important elements in developing meaning. 

These congnitive skills have also been broken down into 4 different roles that effective readers adopt. These roles are code-breaking, meaning making, text-using and text analysing. Code-breaking is the ability to recognise and use the fundamentals of written language including alphabet, sounds in words, spelling and patterns. Meaning-making is the ability to understand and compose meaningful written, visual, spoken, digital and multimodal texts. Text-using is the ability to use written spoken, visual, digital and multimodal texts outside the school setting. Text-analysing is the ability to critically analyse written, spoken, visual, digital and multimodal texts and uderstand that texts represent particual points of view and influence people's ideas.

(These roles and definitions are taken from Literacy on Track: http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/literacy/program/lit_track/index.htm)

So, how do children learn these cueing systems? Although reading can be broken into different elements and text users, it is not something that can be taught in seperate developmental sections and taught one bit at a time. Reading must be taught as a whole, in a sympathetic and supportive classroom.

The best ways to teach comprehension strategies is by using activities such as making connections, predicting, summarising, monitoring, visualising and questioning. Each one of these activities will need to be taught explicitly to children when they are first introduced. After some practice and frequent use,  they should become second nature to students. 

For example, making connections strategies might include activities such as inference equations, coding strategies and before and after webs. 

Predicting strategies might include activities like Y chart predictions and before, during and after tables.

Summarising activities include activities such as V.I Ps (very important points). 

Examples of these activities will be included as links at the end of this section.

 Reading Comprehension strategies hand, from: http://staffweb.srk12.org/bond_v/forms.htm
This website has a range of little activities that could be used for a range of literacy activities.

The hand above would be great to use with students to help them remember these 5 reading comprehension strategies.

Relevant  reading material is an important aspect of reading comprehension for students. How can students be expected to understand a piece of reading material if it is not relevant, interesting and important to them? In your classroom, be sure to have a range of reading materials (remembering that students are 21st century readers). Include a wide range of factual, fictional texts from a range of genres. Comics, graphic novels, encyclopedias, magazines, ebooks, read-along story tapes, online magazines and webpages, advertisments, manuals, recipe books are all great types of texts to include in your classroom, they will stretch your students reading skills. While many of these are not traditional types of texts, they will be sure to engage your readers and help them develop some interesting understandings of what they have read.

However, as with many things in the teaching world, the most effective way of teaching comprehension techniques will be for you as a teacher to model them. It is important to study your own reading habits; do you question your reading, are you an active and enthusiastic reader, do you create V.I.Ps as you read, do you summarise the information you have read, do you predict using pictures and fonts, do you monitor your own reading, do you close your eyes and visualise scenes from a book? It is important that students see you utilising these skills. In shared or whole class reading (reading from a big book, or whole class text), try speaking out loud as you use your comprehension strategies, encourage your students to work with you while reading a book aloud.

It is important to build student's reading skills in a supportive and sympathetic classroom. Children who arrive in the middle years with reading difficulties will often not be enthusiastic about reading (Fisher and Frey, 2008), therefore it is important to build a supportive environment in your classroom. Encourage and support your readers as they take risks with their reading. Ensure that students in your classroom are not blamed or shunned for their short comings and most importantly, be sure that all students in your classroom are given the opportunity to experience success, and then be sure to celebrate these successes!

A reading corner, designed by students to be like a rain forest, an appealing place for them to read.
This image is from: http://themenagerie.edublogs.org/2010/03/11/hello-world/ a classroom blog!

Comprehension strategies activities:

Making Connections-

Inference questions: 

 Educational leadership- Teaching Inference

This webpage is for teachers. It explains what inference is and how to help students understand what inference is. It contains step by step processes and key questions to ask students as they work through understanding inference. 

Speechlanguage-Resources. Teaching Inference
This is another teacher webpage, although it could be worked through with a small group of students. It provides a definition of inference, discusses some problems you may face when teaching inference to students with learning problems, and several examples. I particularly liked that it showed an example of teaching inference using an image. 

University of Missouri, ethemes- Teaching Tips: Inference 

This is a huge collection of content rich inference activities. There are activity ideas, lesson plans, and graphic organizers.

Coding strategies:

ELL Resources- Coding the Text 

WOW! This is some website, the creator has put so, so much work into orgainising and collecting resources. I spent ages on this page. This particular link is about coding reading. It contains word document instructions that can be printed out and given to students to help guide them through coding their reading. Many of the resources on this webpage are for English Language Learners, however they can be used any children.  

Before During and After:

Before, During and After Reading Strategies

These are activities designed to be used in a guided reading session. After practice with teacher guidance, they should become second nature for a child and provide valuable skills when students begin to read more challenging texts. 

Predicting:

Y Chart Predictions:

Y Chart 

Y Charts are fairly easy to use. This page provides a template to print out, and instructions on how to use them with your classroom. 

Summarising:

V.I.Ps:

VIPs: Very Important Points 

Again these are quite simple, while reading students note down very important points. The procedure in it's self is not difficult, but teaching a child to distinguish between important information and not so important information can be tricky. This page contains short and sweet instructions, and a selection of variations to the task.