• emphasize not only the nature of the strategy but also when and how to apply it in actual reading;
• model the use of the strategies by thinking aloud in the presence of students about their own use of comprehension strategies;
• encourage students to discuss their comprehension of texts as well as the strategies they are using to achieve that comprehension. When students talk about what they are learning, they are more likely to remember it; and
• teach students to attend to their own reading processes, to the context in which they are reading, and to the text.
For older students, on the menu of the strategies best suited to promoting understanding of the text being read (Ness, 2009) are
• thinking aloud, where students talk about character development, identifying with a character, and imagining how a character might feel;
• comprehension monitoring, where students learn how to become aware of their own understanding of what they are reading and to develop procedures to deal with any comprehension problems that arise;
• constructing images, where students use graphic and semantic organizers to represent visually the meanings and relationships of the ideas in the text;
• summarizing, where students identify and write about the most important ideas, especially when the text contains multiple meanings;
• predicting, where students activate their prior knowledge to make a prediction about the outcome of the story;
• questioning, where students look for different points of view and question their validity, and ask the who, what, where, why, when, and how questions;
• clarifying, where students clear up any questionable areas and, where possible, relate the text to their personal experience;
• analyzing story grammar, where students relate one text to another; and
• analyzing text structure, where students look for specific text features, such as point of view, tone, or mood.
Developing Critical Reading Strategies in Older Students
Students read thousands of pages of text as they progress through secondary school. They often need to make judgments about what they are reading. These judgments are based largely on the prior knowledge, beliefs, and values that students bring to the reading process. The brain’s frontal lobe is thought to be the place where critical thinking occurs. Here, past experiences are mingled with the reading to construct meaning and to acquire new knowledge. Critical readers assess the reliability and validity of the text, and ask questions about themselves, the writer, and the writing. They read beyond the obvious meanings to the assumptions, strategies, and arguments behind them. How does the writer reason with readers and manipulate them? Reading critically helps learners separate nonfiction from fiction, creativity from fantasy, and fact from opinion, and is thus a valuable lifelong skill. Regrettably, not enough time is devoted to teaching students how to become critical readers.
If teachers want students to develop critical reading strategies, they should create a classroom climate that fosters inquiry by encouraging students to question, to make predictions, and to support their value judgments. Students employ higher-order thinking skills to evaluate evidence, draw conclusions, make inferences, and defend their line of thinking. This process is made somewhat easier when students write notes and mark up the text to stimulate their thinking, such as when they
• underline key words, phrases, and sentences;
• write comments or questions in the margin;
• number related points in sequence;
• bracket important sections of the text;
• connect ideas with lines or arrows; or
• make note of anything important, questionable, or interesting.
Critical reading strategies include the following:
• Previewing. This strategy allows students to get an overview of the content and organization of the reading by skimming the headnotes, captions, summaries, and other introductory material.
• Contextualizing. As students read, what they comprehend is colored by their own experiences and by living in a particular time and place. But some of the texts they read were written in a radically different place and time. To read critically, they need to put the text in its biographical, cultural, and historical contexts to recognize the differences between their own contemporary values and those represented in the text.
• Questioning to Understand and Remember. Students write down questions that come to mind as they read the material for the first time. The questions should focus on main ideas, not details, and should be expressed in their own words. This activity also helps in retention of new learning.
• Challenges to the Students’ Beliefs and Values. Students put a mark next to sections that challenge their attitudes, beliefs, and values. They make notes in the margin about how they feel or about what particularly challenged them. Then they review their notes and look for any patterns.
• Evaluating an Argument. Writers make assertions that they want the reader to accept as true. Critical readers do not accept anything at face value but evaluate the claim and support for each argument. Students assess the reasoning process as well as its truthfulness. The support should be appropriate to the claim, and the statements should be consistent with each other.
• Outlining and Summarizing. Students use an outline to reveal the basic structure of the text, its main ideas, subtopics, and supporting details. This requires a close analysis of each paragraph and a listing of the main ideas. In summarizing, however, the students write a synopsis in their own words of what they have read. Thus, students experience creative synthesis by putting ideas together in a condensed and new form.
• Comparing and Contrasting Related Readings. Different authors discuss the same issues in different ways. Comparing and contrasting the arguments of various authors on a particular issue helps to better understand the approach each author used.
Questions That Promote Critical Reading
Critical reading can be prompted by specific questions that relate to the reader, the author, and the writing. Students can use the following questions to sharpen their critical reading skills (Duncan, 2004; Olson, Larsen, Bolton, & Verhelst, 2007):
About the reader
• What do I know about this topic?
• What are my beliefs and values about this topic?
• Why am I reading this material?
About the writer
• What is the writer’s background?
• How might that background affect the writer’s approach to the topic as well as the selection and interpretation of the evidence presented?
• What are the writer’s value assumptions about this topic?
Writer’s arguments, evidence, and conclusions
• What is the basis for the writer’s argument?
• What evidence does the writer present to support the argument?
• What is the writer’s conclusion?
Writer’s use of evidence to support the conclusion
• Are there any logical fallacies?
• What evidence does the writer use to support the conclusion(s)?
• Are the writer’s sources credible?
• If the writer uses research studies:
• Is the research timely?
Is the sample group representative of the target population?
Who conducted the research and what was its purpose?
Has the research been replicated?
Do the graphic illustrations represent the data in a truthful manner?
What is the source of the data in the illustration?
Do the physical dimensions of the graphic illustration accurately portray numerical relationships?
Are the statistical findings and the writer’s conclusion focused on the same topic?
Reader’s reaction to the reading
• Do I accept the writer’s evidence as reliable and as a valid support of the conclusion?
• Ho
w does the conclusion relate to what I already know about this topic?
• How has the writer’s argument changed my views on this topic?
Teaching students to read, write, and think critically takes time and may represent a shift from what happens in many secondary school language arts classes. Teachers feel pressed for time and face the ever-increasing demands of high-stakes testing. Nonetheless, critical reading strategies can make reading much more productive and satisfying and thus help the students handle difficult material well and with confidence.
Students Who Are English Language Learners
Children for whom English is a new language continue to enter schools across the country in ever-increasing numbers, posing unique challenges to teachers of reading. These challenges have been intensified by recent state and federal policy initiatives mandating that all students demonstrate adequate yearly progress. Thus, schools with large English language learner (ELL) populations are under pressure to help these students succeed. One of the more vexing problems is whether it is better to promote literacy in these children’s native or second language. The research evidence suggests that initial reading instruction in a child’s home language (e.g., Spanish) contributes positively to that child’s ability to attain literacy in both languages, and also to the prevention of reading difficulties (Rolstad, Mahoney, & Glass, 2005; Slavin & Cheung, 2005).
At first sight, this result may seem counterintuitive. How can improving reading skills in the ELLs’ native language help them read in their second language? Several possible explanations exist, but the most likely one is the powerful concept of transfer, whereby skills in one content area transfer to another. Research studies have suggested that literacy as well as other skills and knowledge transfer across languages. Thus, if a student learns something in one language, such as decoding or comprehension strategies, then the student can learn it in another language. Phonological awareness might transfer across languages, but does not appear to be helpful if the ELL’s native language has a very different writing system, such as Russian, Arabic, or Chinese (Bialystok, McBride-Chang, & Luk, 2005).
It is generally counterproductive to hasten young non-English-speaking children into reading in English without adequate preparation. Reading in any language requires a solid mental lexicon of spoken vocabulary. Thus, learning to speak English becomes the child’s first priority, because it provides the foundation for hearing and reflecting on the structure of spoken words and then to learning the alphabetic principle as it applies to the sounds of English. Likewise, learning to read for meaning depends on comprehending the language of the text being read.
Reminder About Orthography
You may recall from Chapter 2 that written English has a deep orthography; that is, its 44+ phonemes can be represented by many different letter combinations. This makes it difficult for ELLs whose native language, such as Spanish or Italian, has a shallow orthography. They are accustomed to very consistent rules of spelling with few exceptions. Thus their pronunciation of a word they have never seen in their native language is almost always accurate. In English, however, they are faced with inconsistent rules and a large number of exceptions. This is an important matter to keep in mind when working with ELL students and assessing their progress.
The report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (August & Shanahan, 2006) suggested that if children come to school with no proficiency in English but speaking a language for which there are instructional guides, materials, and locally proficient teachers, then these children should be taught how to read in their native language while acquiring oral, and eventually reading, proficiency in the English language. Those non-English-speaking children with a native language for which there are no materials should focus on developing their oral proficiency in English. Formal reading instruction should be postponed until the child can speak English with an adequate level of proficiency.
One format for providing this type of instruction is paired bilingual instruction whereby ELL students are taught to read in their native language and in English at different times of the day. This can be expanded to two-way bilingual instruction in which ELL and native English speakers learn to read in both languages (Calderón & Minaya-Rowe, 2003). In an analysis of 17 research studies, Slavin and Cheung (2003) found that most studies showed significant positive effects of the bilingual approach, especially the two-way format, on the students’ reading performance. Most of these studies evaluated the Success for All program, which is a comprehensive reading program emphasizing systematic phonics, cooperative learning, tutoring for struggling students, and family support programs. Evaluations of both the English and Spanish versions of the Success for All program have consistently found them to improve English and Spanish reading performance in beginning readers. Two other programs that have been successful with helping ELL students learn to read in their native language and then in English are the Spanish version of Reading Recovery (Escamilla, 1994) and the small-group version of Direct Instruction (Gunn, Biglan, Smolkowski, & Ary, 2000).
Cooperative Learning Strategies With ELL Students
As children with limited English proficiency begin to acquire English, cooperative learning seems particularly appropriate and effective for bilingual education. First of all, cooperative learning should improve the reading performance of students in their native language. In an analysis of nearly 100 studies, Slavin (1995) showed that student achievement in a variety of settings using cooperative learning methods increased significantly those of the control groups.
Answer to Test Question #5
Question: Non-English-speaking children can be taught to read English even if their spoken English vocabulary is weak.
Answer: False. During reading, the brain relies heavily on a person’s spoken vocabulary to decode words. With only a small number of English words in the mental lexicon, learning to read in English becomes very frustrating. Bilingual programs that build a child’s native reading skills while also enhancing English language skills have shown success in helping the child learn to read English.
Research on second-language learning has found that students need to engage in a great deal of oral interaction, jointly solving problems and determining meaning, if they are to achieve a high level of proficiency in the new language. Because cooperative learning provides many opportunities for students to work together to share understandings, it is likely to be an especially beneficial strategy for students making the transition to reading in English.
One form of cooperative learning has been particularly successful with bilingual students. Known as Bilingual Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (BCIRC), this method assigns students to four-member heterogeneous learning teams. After their lesson, the students work in teams on cooperative learning activities including identification of main story elements, vocabulary, summarization, reading comprehension strategies, partner reading, and creative writing using a process writing approach. In a major study (Calderón, Hertz-Lazarowitz, & Slavin, 1998) of 222 students with limited English proficiency in Grades 2 and 3, teachers used the BCIRC model, first working with students in their native language and then helping them to make the transition to English. As part of BCIRC, the teachers used a total of 15 different strategies before, during, and after reading. Most of the activities were completed in a five-day cycle. They were the following:
1. Building background and vocabulary. Teachers select vocabulary that might be particularly difficult, strange, or important. They write the words on chart paper and develop semantic maps with the students. The maps are displayed on a wall and are used later during reading, discussion, and writing activities.
2. Making predictions. Teachers model how to make and confirm predictions. Students then work in their teams with the title and illustrations of a story and predict the elements of that story.
3. Reading a selection. Students track as the teacher reads aloud the first part of a story. During the second par
t, the students are encouraged to read in a whisper with the teacher.
4. Partner reading and silent reading. For partner reading, the students sit in pairs and take turns reading alternate paragraphs aloud. They assist each other in pronouncing and decoding the meaning of words. Then each student reads the assigned text silently.
5. Treasure hunting: Story comprehension. After partner reading, pairs discuss the answers to questions about key elements of a narrative, such as characters, setting, problems, and problem solutions. Working together, students help each other to understand the questions, to look up the answers, to look for clues to support their answers, to make inferences, and to reach consensus.
6. Mapping the story. After the treasure hunts are done, each team reviews a variety of graphic organizers and chooses one to map the story. This visual aid helps to organize the story elements. After discussing story elements, such as character names, the setting, the main idea, major events of the story, and problems the characters encountered, the team members represent these creatively in the story map. They can use the maps later to provide visual clues for retelling the story and for story-related writing later in the cycle.
7. Retelling the story. Students use the maps to retell the stories to the partners within their teams and evaluate their partners’ verbal summaries. Afterward, the students discuss with their partners what they liked about the story.
8. Story-related writing. In this part of the lesson cycle, students engage in a variety of writing activities that are related to the selection they have been reading all week. For the students who are acquiring English, the teacher models the writing process extensively each time. Then, with a partner or in teams of four, students write in various genres. During this time, the students help each other to develop story lines and characters, to sequence events, and to give each other feedback. They are also learning to engage in a process of drafting, revising, rewriting, editing, and publishing.
How the Brain Learns to Read Page 15