1. COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES
-Why we read the word and the world-

2. Basic Goals of Reading
To enable the learner to gain understanding of the world and of themselves
To develop appreciations and interests
To help the learner to find solutions to their personal and group problems
To develop strategies to support independent understanding and thinking

3. Teachers’ Role To support comprehension teachers need to:
Activate students’ prior knowledge
Guide students’ reading of a text
Foster active and engaged reading
Reinforce concepts gleaned from the text reading
Encourage careful/critical thinking
Pursue inquiry on different topics

4. Approaches for constructing meaning
Visualizing
Monitoring
Inferencing, including predicting
Identifying important information
Generating and answering questions
Synthesizing
Summarizing

5. More approaches for constructing meaning
Tapping prior knowledge
Organizing ideas
Figuring out unknown words
Making connections
Comprehension monitoring
Applying fix-up strategies
Revising meaning
Playing with words

6. Guidelines for Skill and Strategy Instruction
Teach mini-lessons
Differentiate between skills and strategies
Provide step-by-step explanations
Use modeling
Provide practice opportunities
Apply in content areas
Use reflection
Hang charts of skills and strategies

7. Modeling
The process of showing or demonstrating for someone how to use or do something s/he does not know how to do.
The process by which an expert shows students (non-experts) how to perform a task.
A component of scaffolding learning within the constructivist framework.

8. Types of Modeling Implicit modeling Explicit modeling Talk-alouds
Think-alouds

9. Where modeling takes place
During daily activities
Process writing
Literacy lessons
Mini-lessons

10. Guidelines for Effective Strategy Instruction
Determine the need for instruction on the basis of student performance
Introduce only 1 or 2 strategies at a time
Model and practice the strategy in the meaningful context of a reading experience
Model each strategy at the point where it is most useful

11. Guidelines – (cont’d)
Be sure that modeling and practicing are interactive and collaborative activities
Gradually transfer modeling from yourself to the students
Help students experience immediate success
Encourage the use of a strategy across the curriculum
Guide students to become strategic readers

12. Mini-lesson
Introduction (includes telling why and when strategy can be useful)
Teacher modeling
Student modeling and guided practice
Summarizing and reflecting

13. Follow-up to mini-lesson
Independent practice
Application
Reflection

14. Comprehension Strategies

15. Reciprocal Teaching(RT)
RT is an interactive process in which the teacher and students take turns modeling 4 strategies after reading a meaningful chunk of text
Strategies in RT
Predict
Question
Clarify
Summarize

16. Summarizing steps Delete trivial information
Delete redundant information
Substitute superordinate terms for lists of terms
Integrate a series of events with a superordinate action term

17. K-W-L
Purpose: intended to help teachers become more responsive to helping students access appropriate knowledge when reading
Rationale: students need a mix of individual and group activities and procedures to scaffold their own ideas and interests
Audience: any age level with expository text

18. K-W-L Procedures Step K- What I know Step W- what do I want to learn
Step L- What I learned

19. K-W-L modifications K-W-L Plus (incorporates mapping and summarizing)
K-W-H-L (H stands for How do I intend to learn; what resources, tools will be needed
K-W-L with paragraph frames (incorporates writing)
K-W-L with focus questions

20. Anticipation Guides
Purpose: to activate student;s knowledge about a topic before reading, and provide purpose by serving as a guide for subsequent reading
Rationale: prediction serves to activate prior knowledge; controversy can be an effective motivational device
Audience: any grade level

21. Anticipation Guides-procedure
Identify major concepts
Determine students’ knowledge of these concepts
Create statements
Decide statement order and presentation mode
Present guide

22. Anticipation Guides-procedure (cont’d)
Discuss each statement briefly
Direct students to read the text
Conduct follow-up discussion

23. Text Preview
Purpose:
build students’ background knowledge about a topic before reading
Motivate students to read
Provide an organizational framework for comprehending a text

24. Text Preview
Rationale: comprehension is enhanced when readers draw on their prior knowledge and are interested in the topic
Audience: upper elementary through high school

25. Text Preview-Procedure
Preparation and construction of text previews
An interest-building section
A synopsis of the selection
A section that includes a purpose-setting question or directions for reading

26. Text Preview-Procedure
Presentation of text previews
Tell students that you’re going to introduce a new story
Read the interest-building section of the preview
Give time for students to relate the information to their prior knowledge and discuss it
Read remainder of preview
Direct students to read the selection

27. ReQuest Procedure Purpose:
Formulate their own questions and develop questioning behavior
Adopt an active, inquiring attitude to reading
Acquire reasonable purposes for reading
Improve independent reading comprehension skills

28. ReQuest Procedure
Rationale: it is important for students to develop their own abilities to ask questions and set their own purposes for reading
Audience: all levels and all ages

29. ReQuest Procedure Procedures Preparation of material
Development of readiness for the strategy
Development of students questioning behaviors
Development of students predictive behaviors
Silent reading
Follow-up activities

30. Question-Answer Relationships
Purpose: enhance students’ ability to answer comprehension questions by giving them a systematic means for analyzing task demands of different question probes
Rationale: students become independent comprehenders by learning how to respond to different types of comprehension questions
Audience: grade four through eight

31. Question-Answer Relationships
Procedure
Lesson 1: introduce students tot the task demands of different questions, provide practice at identifying task demands related to answering questions
Lesson 2: provide students with review and further guided practice as they read slightly longer passages
Extend task to longer selection

32. Think-Alouds
Purpose: to help readers examine and develop reading behaviors and strategies
Rationale: with teacher modeling students will realize how and when to use effective processing strategies for understanding
Audience: all levels

33. Think-Alouds: Procedures
Teacher modeling
Make predictions or show students how to develop hypotheses
Describe your visual images
Share an analogy or show how prior knowledge applies
Verbalize a confusing point or show how you monitor developing understandings
Demonstrate fix-up strategies

34. Think-Alouds: Procedures
Student partnerships for practice
Independent student practice using checklists
Integrated use with other materials

35. More Effective Comprehension Strategies
Dialogical-Thinking Reading Lesson
Inquiry Chart
Graphic Organizers (story maps, semantic web)
DRA and DR-TA
Inferential reading
SQ3R
Discussion
Reciprocal Teaching