Reading Comprehension Video

Comprehension is the goal of all reading and in the video Professor Duke said that it can be defined as the simultaneous extraction and construction of meaning.

I thought the video did a good job at pointing out the types of things that good readers do. Here are some of the examples they used:

• They preview the text and think about what it is about and what they are going to learn from it (purpose of text)
• They are extremely active when reading
• They look at the text structure
• They make meaning as they go, question the text and react to it as well
• They apply background knowledge

The video also informed about what teachers can do to develop comprehension; things like:

• Explicitly teaching comprehension strategies
• Building student vocabularies
• Engaging students in discussions about the text and negotiating meaning in a social context
• Building students knowledge base

To help develop comprehension and help struggling readers teachers can:

• Create mini-lessons that focus specifically on comprehension and work in small groups
• Explicitly explain the strategies that they are teaching and model those strategies for the students
• Use coaching to engage students instead of relying too heavily on whole group instruction
• Provide lots of opportunities for students to listen to text and practice independent reading and writing (both in and out of school)
• Teach multiple strategies (context clues, prior knowledge & world knowledge, drawing inferences, look-backs) and teach them how to coordinate multiple strategies
• Build vocabulary by way of interventions
• Ask rich questions that are open-ended and complex. These types of questions help students make deeper connections to the text and they will eventually incorporate these questions and automatically use strategies as they read
• Create authentic learning activities
• Especially important for struggling readers is for teachers to monitor students to help them clarify the text they are reading
• Students who struggle tend to have a hard time with metacognitive activities, like thinking about their own thinking. Teachers can have students re-read sections for clarification and use graphics like charts or pictures to help make connections between and to the text

I thought that there were many great ideas about teaching comprehension. The ideas in the video that I really liked were the explicit teaching of multiple strategies that students can use to help them understand and make connections and modeling those strategies. I also like the idea of coaching students and using mini-lessons for the majority of instruction time rather than relying on a whole group instruction model.

I think I will try to focus on creating authentic learning activities whereby students will be more likely to make meaning from text and apply it to their own lives. I like the expample in the video where the teacher had the students interview their parents about their experiences in America versus those of their home countries, I think the book they were reading was called Why People Move. She did a good job of having the students connect their own personal family experiences to the text.

For the struggling readers, I think monitoring their thinking and modeling text are some of the best ways to help them increase their ability to make connections and increase comprehension. I like the re-read strategy and having them use whatever graphics are available to help them understand and clarify the text. Also helping students improve their metacognitive skills by questioning and re-reading are very good techniques I will use to help these students.

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