The research is on the older side, but the recommendations are still true for today.
Comprehension
Decoding
Fluency
Best Practices for Comprehension
Although teachers assess strategy usage, many aren’t teaching comprehension strategies.
- A reading comprehension strategy is a sequence of steps for understanding text (p. 39).
- Strategies are conscious plans under the reader’s control (p. 169).
- Students must have a good understanding of how strategies work and when to use them.
- Good strategy lessons are “clear, accurate, and rich in example and demonstration” (p. 87).
- Students receive opportunities to practice a strategy. The teacher guides and the student uses many texts until he is proficient in the strategy.
- Strategy teaching needs feedback, practice, and weekly and monthly reviews (Ellis & Worthington, 1994).
- Teach comprehension strategies one at a time.
- Pressley (2006) said to teach a set of strategies “so readers can use them in a self-regulated fashion” (p. 17) to enhance comprehension.
- Strategy instruction improves student understanding of the text (Pressley, 2002, p. 12).
Dymock, Susan, and Tom Nicholson. “High 5!’ Strategies to Enhance Comprehension of Expository Text.” The Reading Teacher 64.3 (2010): 166-78. Web.
Read about 4 research-based strategies:
Reciprocal Teaching/Fab 4
Explicitly Teaching Strategies
High 5
PALS
Reciprocal Teaching/Fab 4
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Reading levels increase by one to two grade levels in three to six months (Oczkus, 2005; Spörer, Brunstein, & Kieschke, 2009).
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English learners increase vocabulary knowledge and comprehension (García, Jensen, & Scribner, 2009).
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It is a successful strategy for students with disabilities (Alfassi, Weiss, & Lifshitz, 2009; Takala, 2006).
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Struggling and disenchanted readers engage in reading (Goodman, 2005).
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Advanced and gifted students increase their knowledge and comprehension (Ash, 2005).
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A benefit of making reciprocal teaching fun and hands-on is students’ enjoyment. They learn how to work with classmates. They become confident in their reading skills.
Reciprocal teaching uses predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing.
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Students predict before reading and then check their predictions during reading. They stop to clarify unknown words or ideas during reading. They ask “teacher questions” during and after reading to check for understanding. Finally, they summarize a page or the entire text selection after reading.
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Students create their own questions.
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Students are assigned one of the 4 roles! Make the roles theatrical ~ by dressing up for each role or create role puppets. For example ~ Predicting Paul is a parrot who predicts. Clarifying Clarabelle is a cow who likes to chomp on words and ideas. Questioning Queen is a queen bee who loves to question her worker bees. Summarizing Sam is a snake who likes to wrap himself around important information. The goal is to teach students how to use the 4 strategies!
Teachers have three primary responsibilities during a reciprocal teaching session:
1. Before reading, activate prior knowledge.
2. During reading, guide and encourage students to use the Fab Four.
3. After reading, encourage students to share which strategy helped them the most and why. This part is critical to the success of reciprocal teaching.
Best practices for comprehension
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Metacognitive thinking is essential. It gives students insight into their learning styles. It allows them to reflect on which tools help them the most (Israel, Block, Bauserman, & Kinnucan-Welsch, 2005).
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When introducing students to reciprocal teaching, it is crucial to make an impact. The goal is to have students remember the Fab Four always to use the strategies.
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Use visuals to remind students of the Fab Four as the purpose for reading every day ~ to own these 4 skills! Use charts (poster board in 4 sections), bookmarks, paper plate dials (visual and tactile), props, sticky notes (students get 4 each, one for each of the Fab Four), and sentence starters: ■ Predicting—”I wonder…” or “I think that…” ■ Clarifying—”I was confused about…” or “I don’t understand…” ■ Questioning—”How…?” or “Why…?” ■ Summarizing—”The author wants us to know…” or “The big idea is… ■ A 5th post-it can be used for Metacognitive thinking—”What helped me most was…”
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Reciprocal teaching involves lots of discussion among students. ■ Partner sharing—”Turn to your partner and share your prediction.” ■ Response cards—”Hold up your smiley face card if you agree, your frown face card if you disagree.” ■ Face-to-face—Students form two lines and share their summaries with the person facing them (Oczkus, 2005). ■ Passing notes—”Write a note to your friend about a word or idea you do not understand.”
- Four-Door Chart: To make the Four-Door, have students:
1. Fold both sides of a construction paper toward the middle with a double door.
2. Cut a line across the middle of both doors to create four doors.
3. Label the doors using the Fab Four names.
4. Students open the doors and record their work of predictions they have made, words they have clarified, questions they have asked and answered, and summaries they have written.
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Summarizing strips helps state the main idea and details in order. Organize students into groups. Assign each group member a different page or section of the text to summarize on a strip of paper. The group mixes up the summaries and puts them in chronological order. Students glue strips to a piece of paper to illustrate the correct sequence.
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Put students into groups and give each group a large paper to summarize their reading in 25 words or less.
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Students write a question for each page they read as they preview the text. Then, as students read, they answer their questions. Students also may trade questions and answer someone else’s questions.
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Make a 1, 2, 3, 4 booklet. To make 1, 2, 3, 4, give students two sheets of construction paper. Students fold the paper into layers and staple it to make four sections visible. Students write one prediction on the first fold. 2 words or ideas they don’t understand go on the second fold. 3 questions and answers go on the third fold. A 4-sentence summary goes on the last fold.
Take ACTION!
1. Decide how you will model the Fab Four strategies to your students (i.e., using dress-up, puppets, and so on). Determine what manipulatives your students will use when it is their turn.
2. Gather props and materials for the modeling and student practice sessions.
3. Activate prior knowledge.
4. After modeling Fab 4, break students into four groups and assign each a Fab Four job.
5. Guide students to try the Fab Four, changing jobs after each page.
6. After reading, bring the class together to discuss which of the Fab Four helped them most and why.
7. Reflect on the experience and consider what instructional improvements you can make.
Stricklin, Kelley. “Hands-On Reciprocal Teaching: A Comprehension Technique.” The Reading Teacher 64.8 (2011): 620-25. Web.
Explicitly Teach Strategies ~ Starting in Kindergarten!
Define the strategy.
Provide a visual representation of its meaning.
Ask students to use the strategy.
Use anchor charts.
ACTIVATE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
Provide a supportive book introduction. • Contagious excitement – excite students with each new book. Introduce it in ways that connect with their interests and make them feel it will be fun to read independently. • Get students familiar with the story, unfamiliar phrases, unusual names, and new words.
“Key Reading Recovery Strategies to Support Classroom Guided Reading Instruction” by Jamie Lipp and Sara Helfrich in The Reading Teacher, May/June 2016 (Vol. 69, #6, p. 639-646).
MAKE CONNECTIONS
“Velcro Theory.” When we get a new piece of information, it’s easier to remember if we can stick it to something we already know. During read-alouds, have children make a C with their hands to show they made a connection. Categorize these connections by using the think-aloud strategy. Model text-to-self, text-to-text, or text-to-world connections. Categorization helps students understand ways to connect and make meaning with texts.
VISUALIZING
Visualization encourages students to make movies in their minds. When a story is read aloud, students close their eyes and raise their hands with V fingers to share their mind movie. Have them draw their mind movies and later compare those to the books’ illustrations! Use poetry as poetry is shorter. Provide opportunities to discuss visualizations. Visualizing is an important strategy as students move to pictureless chapter books.
QUESTION
The questioning strategy involves children asking questions about the text. Children create and revise meaning based on the information provided by the text. Display “Expert readers ask questions before, during, and after they read.” Read aloud. Children wiggle their fingers when they have wonderings about the story. Record questions on a chart.
INFER
This strategy uses all the strategies. Inference involves our background knowledge and the author’s words. Start by creating anchor charts at the beginning of the story with questions. After reading, discuss the questions. Can the questions be answered in the text, or do we need to use our brains? Whenever we need to use our brains, we make an inference. Asking questions increases children’s ability and inclination to make inferences (Hansen, 1981).
Gregory, Anne E., and Mary Ann Cahill. “Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers.” The Reading Teacher 63.6 (2010): 515-20. Web.
Prompt as students read the book. See Reading Strategy Prompts.
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Minimal teacher talk – Too much teacher talk can impede learning. Brief, gentle interventions might include: Do this. What did you notice? Why did you stop? Think about what you know that might help.
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The right prompts –Remain flexible with prompting.
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Listen – Teachers must take time to observe what children can do. This includes listening, chatting with children about a story, and using running records.
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How does the reading sound? Are students putting words and phrases together, so the reading flows? Are they spending too much time on word-solving? When they slow down to figure out a difficult word, do they speed up again?
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Use strengths – Build off readers’ strengths. Watch for things they are doing better and use those to support further learning.
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Notice struggles – Are they making haphazard attempts at high-frequency words? Do they need more practice?
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Interpret a “told” word – When a student is stuck, and the teacher has to say a word, what caused the problem? Those words or patterns may need to be practiced.
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Who does the work? Assist the student’s problem-solving. Balance strategic teaching with high expectations of accountability. “Reading, to most students, can appear like a puzzle that needs careful solving. Do not jump in immediately to rescue students when they pause or falter.” When students are correct, ask them, “Were you right?” When they’re wrong, ask, “how do you know?”
“Key Reading Recovery Strategies to Support Classroom Guided Reading Instruction” by Jamie Lipp and Sara Helfrich in The Reading Teacher, May/June 2016 (Vol. 69, #6, p. 639-646).
High 5 for Expository Text
Dymock & Nicholson suggest only teaching 5 strategies.
1. ACTIVATING BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE
This helps readers connect what they know and what they are reading. If they don’t know, provide it or have them research it.
2. QUESTIONING
Encouraging the reader to generate and answer questions before and during reading helps comprehension (Block & Parris, 2008; Block & Pressley, 2007; Dymock & Nicholson, 1999; NICHD, 2000). The student can ask three types of questions: right there, think and search, and beyond the text (Dymock & Nicholson, 1999; Raphael, 1982). A right-there question about the text is factual, such as “What are the facts here?” An example of a think-and-search question is, “What does the writer want me to figure out based on the facts?” An example of beyond the text question is, “What is not being said here that I should check by doing some background research?” Before reading, good readers also ask themselves questions that activate background knowledge. Good readers consider the text structure as well. If the text is sequential, they ask what will happen next. If it is descriptive, they ask what the subtopics are.
High 5 for Expository Text
3. ANALYZING TEXT STRUCTURE
Meyer and Rice (1984) explained text structure as “how the ideas in a text are interrelated to convey a message to a reader” (p. 319). The reader looks for the text structure. They look at text features and signal words. Exposition has many types of structures, and some are complex. The use of design sketches to capture the structure helps comprehension. Capturing the design of the text in the mind as soon as possible is part of text structure awareness. Teachers must teach each type of expository text structure so students can internalize all the structures. Almost all the expository texts students read can be separated into two groups: texts that describe and texts affected by time (Calfee & Patrick, 1995). Elementary students encounter three descriptive and three sequential structures – Nonfiction Text Structures.
Descriptive structures focus on the attributes of something or the qualities that distinguish it from other things. For example, the writer may present the attributes of New York, glass, or rattlesnakes. The three descriptive patterns that readers encounter most frequently are list, web, and matrix (see Dymock and Nicholson [2007] for an in-depth discussion on these structures).
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List. The simplest descriptive pattern. This may be a grocery list, a list of countries that grow wheat, a list of goods and services sold by street merchants in India, or in science, the attributes of a kangaroo.
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Web. A web is a more complex structure than a list. This text structure is called a web because it looks like a spiderweb (Calfee & Patrick, 1995). A spiderweb has a center and several fine threads that form a network of lines. On a web, the attributes of an object are discussed. The attributes have a common link. The important thing for the student to remember is that, like a list, a web describes one thing or idea, but the difference is that a web has categories.
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Matrix. A matrix is more complex than either a list or a web. The difference between a matrix and a web or list is that a web or list describes just one thing, and a matrix describes more than one thing. It compares and contrasts two or more topics. For example, it could compare types of bears or bicycles.
High 5 for Expository Text
Sequential structures present a series of events or steps that progress over time.
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String. A string is a detailed description of events (e.g., the sequence for baking cookies).
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Cause-Effect. Two (or more) ideas or events interact in the cause-effect text structure. One is the cause, and the other is an effect or result. For example, a text may cover the causes and effects of environmental disasters, such as an oil spill in the ocean. This pattern is common in history, science, and health publications.
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Problem–Solution. In the problem-solution text structure, the writer states a problem or poses a question followed by a solution or answer. This text has a sequence: the problems and the solutions.
4. VISUALIZING
Visualizing while reading helps students make a diagram. Diagrams help students make the structure concrete. Students use different diagrams for different text structures. Skilled readers may continue to diagram the text, while others may visualize the structure in their minds.
5. SUMMARIZING
A concise summary gives only the main points. Research shows that the ability to summarize a text can enhance comprehension. Summarizing is the ability to omit irrelevant details, combine ideas, condense main ideas, and connect major themes (p. 117).
Students can produce a summary using High 5 Strategy 3 ~ Analyzing Text Structure. First, read the text. Second, identify the text structure the writer has used. Third, make a diagram of the structure. Fourth, discard redundant information so that only the key ideas remain. Fifth, circle only the critical concepts that you need for the summary. Diagrams help readers summarize the main idea(s) orally, visually, or in writing (Dymock & Nicholson, 2010).
Dymock, Susan, and Tom Nicholson. “High 5!” Strategies to Enhance Comprehension of Expository Text.” The Reading Teacher 64.3 (2010): 166-78. Web.
PALS
Check out PALS ~ Peer Assisted Learning Strategies ~ as another peer tutoring intervention. It can be purchased.
Teachers determine which students need help with specific skills and which students can help teach those skills. Teachers then pair students in the class to work simultaneously and productively on different activities that address the problems they are experiencing. As a result, every student is on task. Pairs are changed frequently, and all students can be coaches and readers over time as students work on various skills. By creating pairs, individual needs are being met instead of a single, teacher-directed lesson that may address the issues of only a few students. PALS is differentiating at its best! It also creates opportunities for teachers to circulate in the class, observe students, and provide individual remediation lessons. Designed to be used in addition to the existing reading and math curriculum, incorporate PALS 25 to 35 minutes, 2 to 4 times a week. (Vanderbilt Kennedy Center).
Kindergarten PALS
- 3-4x/week
- 30-minute sessions
- children practice letter-sound correspondence, decoding, phonological awareness, and sight words
1st Grade PALS
- 3-4x/week
- 35-minute sessions
- emphasizes decoding and reading fluency, as well as a retelling, summarizing, predicting, inferencing
2-6 Grade PALS
- 3x/week
- 35-minute sessions
- emphasizes decoding and reading fluency, as well as a retelling, summarizing, predicting, inferencing
High School PALS is similar to grade 2-6 PALS but with more age-appropriate motivational and helping strategies. It is done 5x/week every two weeks.
Students must be trained in the PALS procedures; these training lessons are in the teacher’s manuals. The lessons are scripted with wording that successfully communicates what students must learn. An outline of the material covered in each lesson is also presented. (Vanderbilt Kennedy Center).
Additional Information
- What Works Clearinghouse has the very LATEST BEST PRACTICES based on research!
- Research is important: NCTE.
Must-see website: Big Ideas. The site discusses 5 Big Ideas in Beginning Reading:
The National Reading Panel states that the best approach to reading instruction must include the following:
- Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness
- Systematic phonics instruction
- Methods to improve fluency
- Ways to enhance comprehension
The Panel found that a combination of techniques is effective for teaching children to read:
- Phonemic awareness—the knowledge that spoken words can be broken into smaller sound segments known as phonemes. Children who are read to at home—especially material that rhymes—often develop phonemic awareness. Children must be taught that words can be broken into smaller sounds.
- Phonics—the knowledge that letters of the alphabet represent phonemes and that these sounds are blended to form written words. Readers skilled in phonics can sound out words they haven’t seen before without first memorizing them.
- Fluency—The ability to recognize words, read with greater speed, accuracy, and expression, and better understand what is read. Children gain fluency by practicing reading until the process becomes automatic; guided oral repeated reading is one approach to helping children become fluent readers.
- Guided oral reading—reading aloud while getting skilled readers’ guidance and feedback. The combination of practice and feedback promotes reading fluency.
- Teaching vocabulary words—teaching new words as they appear in the text or introducing them separately. This type of instruction also aids reading ability.
Reading comprehension strategies are techniques for helping individuals understand what they read. Such techniques involve having students summarize what they’ve read to understand the material better.
As teachers (and parents), we should follow the GRADUAL RELEASE OF RESPONSIBILITY MODEL found here – Literacy Leader and DIFFERENTIATE instruction.
Copyright 05/14/2016
Edited on 03/07/2024
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