Building Comprehension

Building Comprehension

1. Thories of Comprehension

   • Schema Theory
   • Situation Models
     • Surface code: composed of the exact words and syntax of the written piece
     • Textbase: includes the ideas but not the exact words conveyed by the surface structure and low level inferences made by reader

2. Approaches to Teaching

   • Strategies
     • Intensive step-by-step
       • 1. Introduce the strategy
       • 2. Demonstratingand modeling the strategy
       • 3. Guided Practice
       • 4. Independent practice and application
       • 5. Assessment and reteaching
       • 6. Ongoing reinforcement and implementation
     • in reading lessons
     • Preparational Strategies
       • Setting purpose and goal
         • 1st part of new unit and strategy groups
       • Previewing
       • Predicting
     • Selection/Organizational Strategies
       • Main Ideas
       • Summarizing
         • Use naturally occurring occasions to model
         • Graphic Organizers-perfect for ELLs
     • Elaboration Strategies
       • Inferences: the implied details, judgements, or conclusions that readers make basedon their background knowledge and/or information in the text.
       • Responsive Elaboration: the teacher analyzes a student's answer to determine what reasoning processes the student is using and then, building on that anlysis, elaborates the student's response
       • Providing Evidence
       • Imaging: process of creating a representation as you read
   • Content Analysis

3. Accountable Talk

   • Fosters higher level thinking
   • Learn to think carefully and base assertions on passages
   • Respects and builds on what others say

4. Quetions

   • Identify key elements and construct a question map
   • Comprehending
   • Organizing
   • Elaborating
   • Monitoring
   • How questions are asked is almost important as what questions are asked
     • Provide Wait-Time
     • Probes and Prompts

5. Other Techniques

   • Cloze Procedures
     • Way of assessing comprehension by having a student fill in missing words that been deleted from a selection.
     • Modified Cloze
     • Masking
   • Think-Alouds

6. Developmental Retelling

   • Pretelling
   • Guided Retelling