How to Teach Reading Comprehension September 25th, 2009 | Mark Pennington, MA Reading Specialist Goto commentsLeave a comment
Teachers struggle with how to teach reading comprehension. The implicit-instruction teachers hope that reading a lot really will teach comprehension through some form of reading osmosis. The explicit-instruction teachers teach the skills that can be quantified, but ignore meaning-making as the true purpose of reading. The die-hard implicit-instruction teachers want to believe that reading comprehension is something caught, and not taught. They want to believe this \u201cfeel-good\u201d saying because it assuages guilt and legitimizes pedagogical laziness. These same teachers spend tremendous amounts of time reading out loud and enjoying literature with their students. Occasionally, these \u201csages on their stages\u201d may drop pearls of literary wisdom to their enraptured audiences. Of course, students enjoy this implicit, spoon-fed \u201cinstruction\u201d because it keeps them from having to read challenging text on their own. The die-hard explicit-instruction teachers believe that every instructional moment must be planned as part of the teachers\u2019 instructional objectives. If the reading skill cannot be measured and put on a progress monitoring chart, then it is simply not worth teaching. Unfortunately, these teachers focus on the appetizers of reading and not the main course. The appetizers of discreet reading skills are easily diagnosed and are frequently easy to teach. The main course of reading comprehension is difficult to diagnose, even more difficult to teach, and just cannot be quantified on traditional recording matrices. Having detailed the extremes, here are the reading comprehension strategies that will help teachers strike the balance between implicit and explicit instruction and turn their students into capable independent readers. 1. The explicit direct instruction advocates are right: the appetizers are necessary to enjoy the meal. But the appetizers are not the meal; reading comprehension is the meal. So, as efficiently as possible, teach the pre-requisite reading skills and help students unlearn theirbad reading habits. How? Know your readers. Each comes to your class with different skill-sets and deficits. Each needs mastery of phonemic awareness, phonics, syllabication, sight words, and grade-level fluency to master the reading automaticity that will allow them to attend to meaning-making. Effective whole-class diagnostic assessments that won\u2019t take up all of your teaching time and differentiated reading skills instruction are crucial to setting the main course. However, students need to understand the purpose behind the appetizers. Teachers accomplish this by helping all students \u201ccatch up\u201d in their areas of reading skill deficits, while they concurrently \u201ckeep up\u201d with challenging reading comprehension strategies instruction and practice. Read about the value and purpose of reading assessments and get the free diagnostic reading assessments that will inform your instruction. Learn about the importance and role ofphonemic awareness, phonics, syllabication, sight words, and fluency in shaping reading comprehension for you readers. 2. Use shared reading to model the synthesized process of reading. Shared reading means that the teacher reads stories, articles, poetry, songs, etc. out loud to students to model the whole reading process. Students need to see and hear modeled reading that integrates all of the reading skills with a focus on meaning-making. Without this \u201cwhole to part\u201d modeling, isolated reading skills instruction will fail to develop readers who read well on their own. The teacher shares the reading strategies as she reads that help her understand, interpret, and enjoy the text. She models self-questioning strategies and problem solving. Learn how to do a reading think-aloud and teach selfquestioning skills. 3. Use guided reading to teach discreet reading comprehension strategies. Guided reading means that the teacher reads or plays a CD and stops to help students practice a pre-selected reading comprehension strategy. At stops, students share whole group, pair share, or write responses to the comprehension strategies. Students do not read out loud as they are generally poor models. Learn how to teach the following SCRIP reading comprehension strategies: Summarize, Connect, Re-think, Interpret, and Predict. 4. Teach independent reading by getting students to practice guided reading strategies on their own. Teach students to make personal connections with the text. This does not mean that students relate aspects of the reading to their own experience. Instead, readers access their prior knowledge and experiences to understand and interpret the reading. The focus is on the author-reader relationship. Learn how to teach students to visualize and connect their lives and knowledge to the text to increase reading comprehension. Assign reading homework with required parental discussion, even at the middle school level. We have to get students practicing reading for at least two hours weekly at 5% unknown word recognition with accountability. SSR in the classroom won\u2019t get this done, even with response journals. Immediate discussion at the summary and analytical
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levels builds comprehension. Parents can quite capably supervise this independent activity. Learn how to develop a
strategies that “kill two birds with one stone” and learn how to teach an effective read-study method for expository text.
