Virginia Wilson EngEd 275 – Chapter 8 – Promoting Comprehension: Reader Factors

Comprehension is a creative, multifaceted thinking process in which students engage with text. It is the goal of reading. Comprehension involves different levels of thinking –

• The most basic is Literal comprehension in which readers pick out main ideas, sequence details, notice similarities and differences, and identify explicitly stated reasons.
• Inferential Comprehension is when readers use clues in the text, implied information, and their background knowledge to draw inferences. They make predictions, recognize cause and effect, and determine the author’s purpose.
• Critical Comprehension is when readers analyze symbolic meanings, distinguish fact from opinion, and draw conclusions.
• The most sophisticated level is evaluative comprehension – readers judge the value of a text using generally accepted criteria and personal standards. They detect bias, identify faulty reasoning, determine the effectiveness of persuasive techniques, and assess the quality of a text.

Readers are actively engaged with the text they’re readings; they think about many things as they comprehend the text:

1. Activate prior knowledge
2. Examine the text to uncover its organization
3. Make predictions
4. Connect to their own experiences
5. Create mental images
6. Draw inferences
7. Notice symbols and other literary devices
8. Monitor their understanding

Text complexity is a new way of examining comprehension to determine the cognitive demands of books, or more specifically, how well readers can complete an assigned task with a particular text.

Factors that affect text complexity can both be from the reader and the text:

• Background knowledge
• Vocabulary
• Fluency
• Strategies
• Skills
• Motivation
• Genres – text
• Text structures – text
• Text features – text

For students to comprehend a text, they must have adequate background knowledge, understand most words in a text, and be able to read fluently.

• Background knowledge – having both world knowledge and literary knowledge is a prerequisite because they provide a bridge to a new text. When students don’t have adequate background knowledge, they’re likely to find the text very challenging, and it’s doubtful they’ll be successful.
• Vocabulary – students knowledge of words plays a tremendous role in comprehension because it’s difficult to comprehend a text that’s loaded with unknown words. It’s also possible that when students don’t know many words related to a topic, they don’t have adequate background knowledge either.
• Reading Fluency – Fluent readers read quickly and efficiently. Because they recognize most words automatically, their cognitive resources aren’t depleted by decoding unfamiliar words, and they can devote their attention to comprehension.

Comprehension Strategies are thoughtful behaviors that students use to facilitate their understanding as they read. Some strategies are Cognitive – they involve thinking; others are metacognitive – students reflect on their thinking.

List of Comprehension Strategies:

• Activating Background Knowledge: readers think about what they already know about the topic
• Connecting: readers make text-to-self, text-to-world, and text-to-text links
• Determining Importance: readers identify the big ideas in the text and notice the relationships among them.
• Drawing Inferences: readers use background knowledge and clues in the text to “read between the lines”
• Evaluating: readers evaluate both the text itself and their reading experience.
• Monitoring: readers supervise their reading experience, checking that they’re understanding the text.
• Predicting: readers make thoughtful “guesses” about what will happen and then read to confirm their predictions
• Questioning: readers ask themselves literal and inferential questions about the text
• Repairing: readers identify a problem interfering with comprehension and then solve it
• Setting a purpose: readers identify a broad focus to direct their reading through the text
• Summarizing: readers paraphrase the big ideas to create a concise statement
• Visualizing: readers create mental images of what they’re reading

Comprehension Strategies and What readers do:

• Prereading: students prepare to read by setting purposes, thinking about the topic and genre of the text, and planning for the reading experience
• Reading: students read the text silently or orally, thinking about it as they read, monitoring their understanding, and solving problems as they arise
• Responding: students share their reactions, making tentative and exploratory comments, asking questions, and clarifying confusions, by talking with classmates and the teacher and writing in reading logs
• Exploring: students reread parts of the text, examine it more analytically, and study the genre and writer’s craft
• Applying: students create projects to deepen their understanding of the text they’ve read and reflect on their reading experience.

Comprehension Skills – these skills are related to strategies, but the big difference is that skills involve literal thinking; they’re like questions to which there’s one correct answer. One group of skills focuses on main ideas and details –

• Recognizing details
• Noticing similarities and differences
• Identifying topic sentences
• Comparing and contrasting main ideas and details
• Matching causes with effects
• Sequencing details
• Paraphrasing ideas
• Choosing a good title for a text

In contrast, this group is related to the evaluating strategy-

• Recognizing the author’s purpose
• Detecting propaganda
• Distinguishing between fact and opinion

Teacher’s create an expectation of comprehension in these ways –

• involving students in authentic reading activities every day
• providing access to well-stocked classroom libraries
• teaching students to use comprehension strategies
• ensuring that students are fluent readers
• providing opportunities for students to talk about the books they’re reading
• linking vocabulary instruction to underlying concepts

Teaching Strategies – teachers teach individual comprehension strategies and then show students how to integrate several strategies simultaneously. They use minilessons as a way to describe the strategy, model it for students, and provide opportunities for guided and then independent practice. (see pg. 271 figure 8-5 for a list of instructional procedures) Once students know how to use individual strategies, they need to learn how to use routines, or combinations of strategies, because capable readers rarely use comprehension strategies one at a time.

Having students read interesting books written at their reading level is the best way for them to apply comprehension strategies. As they read and discuss their reading, students are practicing what they’re learning about comprehension.

Assessing reader factors – teachers use the integrated-assessment cycle to ensure that students are growing in their ability to understand complex texts and to use increasingly more sophisticated strategies to deepen their understanding of grade-level texts.

• Planning – Monitoring – Evaluating – Reflecting – Diagnostic Assessment tools
• Comprehension thinking strategies assessments
• Developmental reading assessments
• Informal reading inventories

Cloze Procedure – teachers examine students understanding of a text using this procedure, in which students supply the deleted words in a passage taken from the text they’ve read.

Motivation – is intrinsic, the innate curiosity that makes us want to figure things out. Factors that affect students and teachers motivation:

• Attitude – teachers
• Community – teachers
• Instruction – teachers
• Rewards – teachers
• Expectations – students
• Collaboration – students
• Reading and Writing Competence – students
• Choices – students

Specific activities that influence motivation

• students express their own ideas and opinions
• students choose topics for writing and books for reading
• students talk about what they are readings
• students share their writing with classmates
• students pursue authentic activities – not worksheets – using reading, writing, listening, and talking

Reciprocal teaching – refers to an instructional activity in which students become the teacher in small group reading sessions.

Story Retelling – having a student or group of students retell what happened in a book or story to assist with comprehension.

Classroom Application:

The importance of comprehension in the classroom goes beyond just reading and writing, but they are two of the most important aspects. I could see reading a book to my students and having them write down their favorite part of the book. Then we would discuss each students favorite part. I think that would be a great way for students to have fun, but also a way for me to see if they are comprehending what I want them to get out of the story. I also want my students to work on discussion skills because they show comprehension in every field. We could also re-enact the story for fun. That would get students thinking and would assist with comprehension. My mind is running, there are really so many different ways to incorporate comprehension into my lesson plans because that is really one of the most important aspects of the lesson, making sure the students understand what they just learned about.