Reading comprehension

Reading comprehension

1. National Reading Panel: comprehension instruction

   • 1. Vocabulary should be taught both directly and indirectly
   • 2. Repetition and multiple exposure are important
   • 3. Incidental learning can enhance aquisition
   • 4. Use of computers can be an effective means of vocabulary instruction
   • 5. Direct instruction should accurately engaged the student
   • 6. Vocabulary should be taught with multiple methods
   • Comprehension
     • Many interpretations of comprehension
       • Intentionally thinking during which meaning is constructed through interactions between text and reader
         • Intentional problem solving, thinking process of the reader that occur during an interchange with a text
     • Various effective instructional strategies for classroom instruction include:
       • Comprehension monitoring; cooperative learning; question and answer; question generation; summarization; multiple-strategy teaching
     • Implications for instruction
       • Teaching a variety of reading comprehension strategies leads to increased learning of the strategies, to specific transfer of learning; to increased retention and understanding of new passages and general improvements in comprehension

2. Headsprout Reading Comprehension

   • Programme development
     • Skills are expected
       • Factual, inferential, summative and vocabulary questions found to be what reading comprehension assessments and core standards typically require
     • Repertoire required
       • 2 major repertoires
         • Verbal repertoire - built gradually through the years of speaking, listening, reading, and writing
         • Strategy repertoire - series of general steps to be taken to solve a problem
           • Read passage; reading the question and possible answers; determine which strategy is best to use on the question; applying the strategy by looking for specific information in the passage; answering the questoin
             • 4 main question types: Literal - find the fact; Inferential - clue words; Main idea - mostly about; Vocabulary

3. General considerations in DI approaches to Reading Comprehension

   • Role of background knowledge
     • Anticipate what background knowledge students will need and the reasoning learners must use to answer inference questions
   • Must overtly guide in strategies and integrate these into daily text reading exercise
   • Preview to determine vocab and background knowledge are critical to understanding
   • Preteach critical vocab and background knowledge
   • Decide on questions to ask during the story and prepare to provide necessary prompting to lead to correct answer

4. Reading comprehension instruction in the Morningside Academy

   • Enabling application
     • Most struggling readers need explicit, up-front, direct instruction of isolated comprehension skills
     • Teaching is not complete if these skills are not strategically applied in context as the need arises
     • Even explicit and direct comprehension skill, teaching often omits direct teaching of strategic application
     • 1. Teacher think alouds
       • When and why - apply skill at particular place and test. How to apply the skill
     • 2. Delayed prompting dialogues
       • For each comprehension skill and with every learner
     • 3. Teaching the strategies
       • Criterion answers - expected to justify opportunities to correct faulty strategies
     • 4. Language prompt
       • Prompt to fully answer the question using the structure provided
   • Important aspects
     • Unpredictable turns
     • More turns to lower performers
     • Higher performers as models
     • Mastery of strategic application of a specific comprehension skill occurs over successive stories, factual passages and opinion pieces not within a given passage
     • List comprehension skills how to talk about them on a poster and place in easy view
   • 5 steps to creating strategic, engaged reading performance
     • 2. Teacher provided when, why, and how - think aloud models of comprehension skills during group readings
     • 1. Teacher teaches comprehension skills
     • 3. Teacher uses delayed prompting during group selection reading until skills are strategically applied without assistance
     • 4. After mastery in group context, use peer coaching. Each student self-monitors during oral reading while a coach observes and comments
     • 5. Students engage privately during silent reading and content study