Text Comprehension
As we mentioned earlier, just because readers are able to sound out words does not guarantee that they will comprehend what they read. Many reading teachers have witnessed group reading sessions where students could sound out a story with great effort but really had little understanding of what had been read. Children who are first learning to sound out words are using substantial mental effort, so fewer cerebral resources remain for the cognitive operations needed to comprehend the words being read aloud. It is critical for children to develop fluency in word recognition. When they are fluent, word recognition requires far less mental effort, freeing up the child’s cognitive capacity for understanding what is read. Thus, explicit instruction in word recognition to the point of fluency is a vital component for text comprehension.
Tan and Nicholson (1997) conducted a study that showed the importance of word-recognition instruction to the point of fluency. Struggling primary-level readers who were taught new words with instruction that emphasized word recognition to the point of fluency (i.e., they practiced reading the individual words until they could recognize them automatically) answered more comprehension questions correctly than did students who experienced instruction emphasizing individual word meanings (i.e., instruction involving mostly student-teacher discussions about word meanings). Having a student-teacher discussion about the reading passage topic, prior to actually reading it, improves comprehension, even in poor readers. Prior knowledge of the passage topic was found in one study to significantly increase fluency and reduce reading errors in poor readers (Priebe, Keenan, & Miller, 2012). Possessing prior knowledge of the reading topic could be stimulating neural networks and visual processing sites, thus making word recognition less challenging.
Text comprehension occurs when readers derive meaning as a result of intentionally interacting with the text. Such comprehension is enhanced when readers actively relate the ideas represented in print to their own knowledge and experiences and can construct mental representations in their memory. Hence, good readers are both purposeful and active. Purposeful means they may read to find out how to use a computer, read a magazine for entertainment, read a classic novel for enjoyment, read a guidebook to gather information about a tourist spot, or read a textbook needed for a course. Good readers are active in that they get the most out of their reading by using their experiences and knowledge about the world, their understanding of vocabulary and language structure, and their knowledge of reading strategies. When problems with reading occur, they know how to solve them.
The scientific research on text comprehension reveals the following:
• Comprehension is a complex interactive process that begins with identifying words by using knowledge outside the text, accessing word meaning in context, recognizing grammatical structures, drawing inferences, and self-monitoring to ensure that the text is making sense. When confronted with several meanings for a word in a sentence, the brain needs to select the one that makes sense in context. How this happens is the subject of much research. One possible mechanism, called the structure-building framework (Gernsbacher, Robertson, Palladino, & Werner, 2004), suggests that readers construct meaning by activating mental representations of concepts that are relevant to the text and blocking those that are irrelevant. Figure 4.1 illustrates the cognitive mechanism, using the example of a reader encountering the sentence “The man planted a tree on the bank.” Bank has two common meanings, but only one fits the context of this sentence. The mental lexicon may activate both at first, but skilled readers quickly suppress the irrelevant meaning. Less skilled readers, however, spend more time considering alternative meanings and may not make the correct selection in the end. Many English words have dozens of meanings, depending on their context. Thus, developing the ability to quickly block irrelevant meanings becomes a necessity for reading fluency and comprehension. (This process is similar to the syntactic blocking described in Chapter 1, whereby syntactic rules are blocked for the formation of irregular verbs.)
• Text comprehension is improved by direct, explicit instruction that helps readers use specific strategies to make sense of the passage. These strategies represent the purposeful steps that enable readers to reason strategically whenever they encounter barriers to understanding what they are reading. Comprehension strategies include self-monitoring, graphic and semantic organizers, answering questions, generating questions, recognizing story structure, and summarizing.
• Teaching comprehension strategies in the context of specific academic areas can be effective at all grade levels. Cooperative learning is a particularly useful technique for helping students to understand content-area texts (see Chapter 7).
Figure 4.1 This diagram illustrates how the brain deals with multiple meanings of a word. Spoken language experience activates the relevant meaning while blocking the irrelevant meaning.
How Do I Teach for Text Comprehension?
Text comprehension occurs when the brain’s frontal lobe is able to derive meaning by processing the visual and auditory input that result from reading with the reader’s prior knowledge. Teachers should emphasize text comprehension as early as the primary grades, rather than waiting until children have mastered reading basics. The basics of decoding can be learned in a few years, but reading to learn subject matter does not occur automatically and requires constructing meaning at all grade levels.
Start Teaching Comprehension Strategies Early. At what grade level can teachers begin to include instruction in comprehension strategies? Tradition curricula have favored honing word-recognition skills in the primary grades while developing comprehension skills in the later grades. Research studies suggest, however, that instruction aimed at improving comprehension (i.e., instruction beyond word-recognition) does make a significant impact on literacy during the primary years (NRP, 2000; Stahl, 2004). Student reading achievement in the primary grades improved when decoding and word recognition were taught systematically with comprehension strategies. This approach was particularly effective in raising reading achievement for children in high-poverty schools (Taylor, Pearson, Clark, & Walpole, 2000).
The instructional approaches that have received the strongest support from scientific research are the following (NIFL, 2001; Stahl, 2004):
• Comprehension monitoring. This is a self-monitoring strategy to help students recognize when they understand what they are reading and when they do not. They also learn appropriate strategies for resolving problems in comprehension. Metacognition (thinking about our own thinking) is an effective means of monitoring comprehension. Before reading, simply ask your students to clarify their purpose for reading this text and preview the text with them. As part of the preview, ask the students what they already know about the content of the selection. During reading, they should monitor their understanding and adjust their reading speed to match the difficulty of the text. Students can use several different forms of monitoring, such as
identifying where the difficulty occurs (“I don’t understand the third paragraph on page 10”);
identifying what the difficulty is (“I don’t know what the author means when he says . . . ”);
restating the difficult passage in their own words (“Oh, so the author means . . . ”);
looking back through the text (“The author talked about . . . in the previous chapter. Maybe I should reread that chapter to find out what he is talking about now”); or
looking ahead in the text for information that might help resolve the difficulty (“Oh, the next section seems to have some information that may help me here”).
After reading, they should summarize in their own words what they understood from the passage. Their summaries can be addressed to the teacher or shared with other students in cooperative learning groups.
• Using graphic and semantic organizers. Graphic organizers are effective visual tools for illustrating the interrelationships among concepts in a text. Known by many different names (e.g., frames, clusters, webs,
text maps, visual organizers), they provide cues about connections between and among ideas that can help students better understand difficult concepts. Semantic organizers look a little like a spider web. They have lines connecting a main idea to a variety of related ideas and events. Both of these types of organizers help students read to learn subject matter in all content areas because they capitalize on the brain’s innate aptitude for remembering patterns. Figure 4.2 illustrates examples of a spider map and a semantic map that can be used to enhance reading comprehension. Chapter 7 contains more on different types of graphic organizers. Moreover, the Internet has numerous sites with many different types of organizers for use at all grade levels. See the “Resources” section of the book for information on these sites.
Figure 4.2 Visual organizers come in many forms. Here are examples of a spider map of types of mammals (left) and a semantic map for a simple classification of living things.
Answering questions. Research and case studies show that teachers’ questions strongly support and advance how much students learn from reading (e.g., Argus, 2012). The questions are effective because they
• give students a purpose for reading;
• focus the students’ attention on what they are to learn;
• help students to interact with what they read;
• encourage students to monitor their comprehension; and
• help students relate what they are learning to what they already know. The instruction helps readers learn to answer questions that require an understanding that is
text explicit—stated explicitly in a single sentence;
text implicit—implied by information presented in two or more sentences; or
scriptal—not found at all in the text, but part of the reader’s prior knowledge or experience.
Generating questions. Teaching students to ask their own questions helps them become aware of whether they understand what they are reading. By generating their own questions, students focus on the purpose of the reading, improve their active mental processing, and learn to integrate information from different segments of the text.
Recognizing story structure. Story structure describes how the events and content of a story are organized into a plot. Teaching about story structure helps students learn to identify categories of content, such as initiating events, goals, setting, internal reactions, and outcomes. How this content is organized into a plot can often be revealed through story maps. Story maps are a type of graphic organizer that illustrates the sequence of events in a simple story. They can be powerful aids for understanding and remembering stories (see Figure 6.2).
Summarizing. When summarizing, students synthesize and integrate the most important information and concepts in the text. To do this successfully, students must identify the main ideas, connect them to each other, eliminate unnecessary information, and remember what they read.
Mental imagery. Readers (especially young readers) who form mental pictures, or images, during reading understand and remember what they read better than readers who do not visualize. Urge readers to form visual images of what they are reading, such as picturing a character, event, or setting described in the text. This will not be easy because children today are exposed to technology that provides many images for them. Consequently, they have little practice at imaging and need to be given clear directions on how to do it.
Paraphrasing. This strategy aids in comprehension by having students first hear the text read aloud, then reading it quietly themselves and taking notes, rewriting it in their own words, and discussing their paraphrased text with their classmates. Paraphrasing is effective because it involves reading, writing, speaking, and listening, all of which lead to a deeper understanding and greater memory of the text (Hagaman, Casey, & Reid, 2012).
Another particularly effective strategy for developing comprehension focuses on reading and other activities related to a central theme. Because the varied classroom activities center on this theme, students can more easily comprehend their related readings (NIFL, 2001).
Concept-oriented reading instruction (CORI). The teaching framework for CORI includes four phases: (1) observe and personalize, (2) search and retrieve, (3) comprehend and integrate, and (4) communicate to others. Here is an example of how CORI was implemented in one school. First, the teachers identified a conceptual theme for instructional units to be taught for 16–18 weeks in the fall and spring. The themes selected by third-grade teachers were the adaptations and habitats of birds and insects for the fall. In the spring, the third-grade units were weather, seasons, and climate. Fifth-grade units in the fall were life cycles of plants and animals, and the spring units emphasized earth science, including the solar system and geological cycles.
At the beginning of each unit, students performed observation and hands-on activities both outside and inside the classroom. Third and fifth graders participated in such activities as collecting and observing crickets, constructing spider webs, dissecting owl pellets, and building weather stations. Within each activity, students personalized their learning by composing their own questions as the basis for observing, reading, and writing. Student questions included a structural focus, such as “How many types of feathers does a bird have?” Then conceptual questions, such as “Why does that bird have such a long beak?” evolved as students attempted to explain the phenomena they had observed. These questions generated opportunities for self-directed learning. Students chose their own subtopics, found particular books, selected peers for interest-based activities, and constructed their goals for communicating to others.
The second phase of the CORI framework consisted of searching and retrieving information related to the students’ questions. Students were taught how to use the library, find books, locate information within expository texts, and use a diversity of community resources. In addition, direct strategy instruction was provided to help students integrate information across sources including texts, illustrations, references, and human experts. Along with informational texts, woven through the instruction were stories, folklore, novels, and poetry. Most of the teachers began the units with a narrative related to the theme that students read at the same time they were conducting science observations. Following observation and the formation of conceptual questions, teachers moved to the informational texts. As students concluded their in-depth study of multiple informational texts, teachers introduced novels, novelettes, and poetry related to the conceptual theme of the unit.
The last phase of the CORI framework is communicating to others. Having gained expertise in a particular topic, students were motivated to speak, write, discuss, and display their understanding to other students and adults. In both third- and fifth-grade classrooms, students made posters, wrote classroom books, and composed extended displays of their knowledge. One class made a videotape of its weather unit, providing a lesson on weather prediction and an explanation for the rest of the school.
How Effective Is CORI?
Several studies have looked at the effectiveness of CORI in the classroom. One study of Grade 5 students that included both low and high achievers in reading found that both groups benefitted from CORI when compared to similar student groups in traditional instruction (Guthrie et al., 2009). Figure 4.3 shows the pre- and posttest results of these groups. Although all students benefited from instruction in topics such as comprehension skills, fluency, concept usage, decoding, and inferencing, the students in the CORI groups did better.
Transactional strategies. Transactional strategies combine some of the preceding strategies with whole-language instruction to improve reading comprehension. They begin with the teacher explaining to students how they can
• make predictions about upcoming contents;
• relate the text to prior knowledge;
• ask questions about the information;
• seek clarification when the meaning is not clear;
• visualize the meaning; and
• summarize along the
way.
Figure 4.3 This chart shows the significant gain in reading scores of low achievers in traditional instruction (TI) and in Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI).
Students learn to use these strategies, especially in small reading groups that focus on high-quality literature. As students have trouble decoding a word, the teacher helps them use fix-up strategies they have learned, such as sounding out the word, rereading it, looking it up, and even skipping the word. Skipping the word is acceptable because main ideas are often expressed in several different ways in the text. This approach empowers students to read more challenging material by suggesting that they should not avoid reading texts that contain some unfamiliar words. For transactional strategies to be successful, teachers need to thoroughly understand the components of skilled reading and how to teach the related strategies. Professional development programs devoted to this topic can be very effective for content-area teachers (Concannon-Gibney & McCarthy, 2012).
Transactional and other strategies can even be used in the primary grades. A survey of studies that look at strategies for teaching comprehension in the primary grades (e.g., Alvermann & Mallozzi, 2010; Duke & Block, 2012; Pearson & Duke, 2002; Scull, 2010) show they are effective when teachers
• use explicit instruction, modeling, and discussion as a means of teaching comprehension strategies, focusing particularly on visualizing, questioning, predicting, clarifying, and making associations between the text and the students’ experiences. Anytime you can link new learning to past experiences, retention increases significantly;
How the Brain Learns to Read Page 14