- Tuesday 11 January 2022
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As a teacher I find nothing more satisfying than seeing a child experience the joy of reading a book. When they laugh at the right moments or feel sad or angry along with the character, you know they have truly understood what they have read and have connected with the text.
While the focus in learning is often on reading words and sounding out the letters, this means that their little brains are consumed by the task of decoding rather than reading for comprehension, and ultimately for pleasure. For some children it is a struggle to decode and they sometimes never get to the point of discovering what there is to love about reading. For these children, they can only relax and comprehend a story when it is read to them, which is why read alouds are a very important part of classroom activities, especially in early childhood teaching.
Once children are fluent readers, it is important to focus on the meaning of what they have just read. It’s great that they can read the words but can they connect them together and understand what it all means? These skills for reading comprehension can be taught and are vital to the development of a young reader.
Before teaching these skills, it is also important to make sure you have an engaged audience. Choose texts that your students would actually want to read, find texts that cater to their interests and are authentic, provide access to a variety of text types and genres and allow time for children to discuss the texts they have just read. Hopefully this will translate into them wanting to find out more and seeking to comprehend what they have read.
Strategies for reading comprehension
Fortunately, there has been a lot of research into how to best teach comprehension. There are generally an agreed set of strategies that support comprehension, which should be taught explicitly for best results.
These well-researched and proven strategies include predicting, visualising, making connections, questioning, clarifying, summarising, determining importance, inferring and synthesising.
Our Comprehension strategies box sets are a great resource to make teaching the skills for comprehension easier, and our Comprehension through cloze series is a fun way to practice. Both resources closely follow the nine strategies mentioned.
Predicting
Predicting is thinking about what might happen in the story, using information gathered so far. Predicting links prior knowledge and new information.
Predicting encourages readers to look for evidence or clues in the text and revise initial predictions if necessary. Predictions are not wild guesses, but well thought out, logical ideas based on the information provided and some prior knowledge. Remember, predictions will not always be correct.
Predicting can occur at word, sentence or text level. Students may predict the next word, sentence or paragraph. Predicting can occur before, during or after reading a text.
Visualising
Visualising involves using prior knowledge and experiences to create a mental image from what is happening in a text read, viewed or heard.
Visualising brings a text to life, engages the imagination and uses all of the senses—sight (colour and shape), taste, smell, sound and touch.
No two children visualise the same mental image for the same text.
Visualising is like creating an image on a blank movie screen. The text is the script and the reader is the director.
Making connections
Making connections involves linking to the text, background information (prior knowledge) and personal experiences, to construct meaning. It includes text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections.
Text to self links the text to the reader’s own life and personal experiences; for example, ‘That reminds me of when ...’.
Text to text links the reader’s knowledge of other texts to the text being read; for example, ‘This text is the same as/different to the text about ...’.
Text-to-world connections link what the reader knows about the world to the text; for example, ‘This text is like/different to something that happened in the real world ...’.
Questioning
Questioning involves expressing, posing or answering questions to develop a clear understanding of the text.
Asking and answering questions can operate at different levels of thinking and includes literal, inferential and evaluative questions. Literal questions are often referred to as ‘in the book/right there’, inferential questions are ‘think and search’ and evaluative questions are referred to as ‘in my head’.
Questioning should occur before, during and after reading to help the student fully understand the text. For example, ‘before reading’ questions will relate to the illustration on the front cover, the title and the blurb; ‘during reading’ questions will relate to information they have read, the meaning of words, what paragraphs are about, how ideas relate to each other, what has happened so far and so on; and ‘after reading’ questions may relate to how the story ends, the main idea, personal opinions of the characters, what happened to the characters and so on.
Clarifying/Declunking (also known as self-monitoring and fix-up strategies)
Clarifying involves making clear words, ideas and messages in the text in order to understand it better. Clarifying involves using ‘fix-up’ strategies such as reading on (to gain more information), re-reading, looking at pictures, consulting a dictionary, using prior knowledge, reflecting on the text read so far, rephrasing a difficult sentence or section of a text in own words, or thinking about what the writer is trying to say.
Declunking relates to removing chunks or obstacles to understanding such as a difficult word that needs to be decoded.
Declunking can involve developing decoding skills—sounding out, looking for letter blends, prefixes and suffixes, root words and so on—and increasing vocabulary. It can include re-reading a sentence to work out the meaning of a word within the context.
Summarising
Summarising is recalling the main points or ideas of a text and how they relate to each other.
Summarising requires readers to sequence a text, retell a text using its vocabulary, put it into their own words (paraphrase) and, finally, select the most important ideas to sum up what the author has told them.
Summarising involves selecting the keywords in a paragraph; locating the topic sentence—a sentence that contains the main message often found at the start or conclusion of a paragraph (older readers); articulating the idea in a sentence; and repeating this process until they have completed the text (older students).
Knowledge of text structures can make it easier for readers to summarise a text because they can work out which parts of the text are important and which are less important. They can then delete the supporting details from their summary.
Determining importance
This strategy involves separating the essential (big/main ideas) from non-essential information (supporting details) or determining what is important/’weeding out’ unnecessary information.
To determine importance, readers use their background knowledge to:
- identify all key pieces of information or facts in a text
- sort this information into categories
- order the facts in an appropriate way.
Webs and other concept/mind mapping diagrams may be useful tools to help students represent and collate ideas in a text.
Inferring
Inferring involves identifying hidden messages in a text. Readers do this by combining information from the text with their prior knowledge to create opinions. Inferences are not explicitly stated by the writer but are hinted at. Inferring is often referred to as ’reading between the lines’.
Inferring involves piecing together clues from the text and own experiences to draw a conclusion. Readers must be able to justify their inferences using clues from the text.
When inferring, readers:
1. think of background knowledge that relates to the text.
2. look for clues the writer has given in the text.
3. create inferential questions that tie together background knowledge and clues in the text.
4. answer the inferential questions they created.
Synthesising
Synthesising is a very complex process and involves higher-order thinking. It involves many different strategies including retelling, analysing, evaluating, summarising, inferring and linking to personal experiences and knowledge. When synthesising, readers put all the strategies together and use them all at once while reading.
A student definition may mean: putting the pieces together to see them in a new way.
Synthesising is a continuous and evolving process that requires readers to construct and manipulate meaning during and after reading. Synthesising means constantly changing thinking during the reading process so that what was thought at the beginning is often different to what was thought at the end. Synthesising occurs when readers merge new information with prior knowledge to form a new idea, perspective or opinion.
So now you know how to teach comprehension, go on and nourish the minds of your children. Help them discover the joy of getting lost in a story, without getting lost through comprehension.