Reading Comprehension

Hi teachers-

All of you do a fabulous job with your efforts to understand and employ the strategies associated with reading comprehension. No doubt it's one of the hardest things to teach well, or teach at all. When I started teaching, I soon realized that the literature I had learned in college would quickly take a backseat to what I was really there to do-- teach students how to read complex materials.

This article sums up reading comprehension strategies for expository texts pretty succinctly. Naturally, the topic is more complicated than 5 steps can summarize, but given its nebulous nature, I think this is a good, cogent summary of what's involved.

Enjoy!
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A Five-Part Strategy for Good Comprehension

            “Do you have students whose minds go blank when you ask, ‘What was this article about?’,” ask New Zealand professors Susan Dymock and Tom Nicholson in this article in The Reading Teacher. “Do you have students who write screeds of notes about an article but cannot boil it down to four or five main points?” Their answer is the “High 5” strategy to help students boost comprehension of expository texts:

            • Activating background knowledge – Good readers ask what they already know about the text and fill in gaps through discussion or Internet searches.

            • Questioning – Good readers generate their own questions about the text at three levels: information that is right there in the text; think and search questions about the author’s intent, and beyond the text questions about what’s not said that needs more thought or research.

            • Analyzing text structure – Good readers look at subheads and key words to see what kind of text they are reading, for example, a list, a web, a matrix, a step-by-step description of events, a cause-and-effect sequence, or a problem-solution sequence.

            • Creating mental images – Good readers create and often sketch an image of the structure of the text; it’s as if they could see the ribs and bones of the content they are reading.

            • Summarizing – Good readers pull together the big ideas, the key skill being to discard unimportant and redundant information and zero in on what’s most important.

“‘High 5!’ Strategies to Enhance Comprehension of Expository Text” by Susan Dymock and Tom Nicholson in The Reading Teacher, November 2010 (Vol. 64, #3, p. 166-178), no e-link available; the authors are sdymock@waikato.ac.nz and t.nicholson@massey.ac.nz.