What are comprehension strategies and how should they be taught?
- Strategies are reasoned plans that are applied consciously and adapted to the particular situation.
- Comprehension is a strategic process. Good readers proactively search for meaning as they read.
- The trend (at the time of this article) has been to teach fewer comprehension strategies in a year, but to teach each one more thoroughly. There has also been an emphasis on the importance of combining strategies.
Techniques teachers could use to encourage children to approach text in ways that promoted comprehension:
- Experience-text-relationship method - tying background and text to construct meaning
- KWL - “What you KNOW already, what you WANT to know, and what you LEARNED from your reading”
- Reciprocal teaching - teacher and student share a conversation around predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing
- QAR (question-answer relationships) - reader assesses whether an author provides info explicitly or if the reader has to infer meaning
- Struggling readers particularly benefit from explicit explanations of how to think with strategies.
What should teachers know about teaching comprehension strategies?
- Without professional development, teachers had difficulty implementing explicit comprehension explanations.
- Teachers, rather than chaining themselves to a particular method or program for all kids, should be collectors of methods.
- Highly effective teachers monitored their students’ understanding, and were “reactive-corrective.”
- Comprehension is more about being strategic than learning individual strategies.
- Comprehension is a fluid process of predicting, monitoring, and re-predicting in a continuous cycle.
- Teachers do not teach one strategy at one time. Instead, they should teach the entire comprehension process at each grade level.
- Students learn best when they understand why they are reading in the first place - Why is it important to comprehend. Why is it useful to us?
What research has taught us about direct teaching of comprehension:
- Understanding the classroom environment in which instruction occurs:
- A rich learning environment is essential.
- Different types of learning environments lead to growth in certain types of comprehension abilities for certain types of children.
- In a study, it was found that the most successful comprehension situations shared 3 features: (1) it allowed students choice of books to be read for guided independent reading practice, (2) reading 7+ pages of continuous text from fiction-nonfiction or “little” books, and (3) 20 minutes of silent reading combined with specific teacher actions (examples of teach actions can be found on page 26 of the original source)
- Understanding the complexity of explanations
- Powerful explanations cannot be scripted. Teachers should be able to modify their explanations based on student responses.
- Teachers should be “relentless.” When an explanation does not work, teachers must adjust and try again.
- Understanding the scaffolded nature of instruction
- Scaffolding” is the gradual movement from teacher control of an explanation of how to do a strategy to students’ control of the strategy as they apply it independently.
- Students should be held accountable for (1) comprehension during silent reading, (2) knowing when and why they became confused, and (3) identifying comprehension processes they need and want to learn.
Direct teaching in the classroom:
- Teacher-dominated talk in the classroom should be limited, as when instruction is too teacher-dominated, students do not learn how to apply the strategies.
- But, instruction should not be too free flowing. Unmonitored students do not develop the tools necessary to comprehend independently.
- Include an increase in authentic tasks with real-world situations and full texts.
- Instruction should only be provided when students are struggling to learn a particular comprehension process.
