Book: Differentiated Reading Instruction : in Grades 4 & 5
by Sharon Walpole , and Michael C. McKenna
Walpole, Sharon, and Michael C. McKenna. Differentiated Reading Instruction : Strategies for the Primary Grades, Guilford Publications, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/massey/detail.action?docID=320575.
Chapter 7: Building Comprehension
pg 104
For the novice and struggling readers, reading comprehension is related to vocabulary, just as it is for older readers, but it is also inextricably linked to decoding and fluency.
pg 105
Another possible route to improving comprehension is teaching organizational patterns in different types of texts. [Joanna Williams (2005)] recommends highly structured instruction in text elements for elementary students.
…a gradual-release-of-responsibility model, in which the responsibility for comprehending, slowly shifts from teacher to child.
John Guthrie and his colleagues (Guthrie et al., 2004)…approach they call concept-orientated reading instruction (CORI). CORI includes strategy instruction but nests that instruction within a larger framework designed to enhance engagement and develop science knowledge. … [students] were also taught the comprehension strategies of activating background knowledge, questioning, searching for information, summarizing, organizing graphically, and identifying story structure.
Pg 106
The principal lesson is that young children are capable of learning key strategies under the right instructional conditions. It is pointless, and risky as well, to put off teaching comprehension strategies until the upper elementary grades.
foundational TEACHER KNOWLEDGE
For comprehension instruction to be successful, teachers must adopt a gradual-release-of-responsibility model …. instruction begins with high levels of teacher control, moves to shared control, with teachers and students constructing meaning together and finally progresses to high levels of individual student control, with students independently applying comprehension skills and strategies to understand new text.
For each new skill or strategy, the gradual-release model may take months to be fully realized. This is because independent application of specific cognitive strategies in reading is very complex for young learners.
There are several secrets to modeling well. First, the teacher must have a clear notion of the cognitive procedures involved in implementing a specific strategy. Next the teacher must choose a time for modeling where that strategy is actually useful. Finally, the teacher must be able to explain the strategy in ways that are accessible to the students.
Pg 110
question CLUSTERS
Kintsch’s notion of question ‘levels’ actually has a long tradition.. and one of the important lessons for teachers is that they can alter the levels of the questions they ask in order to model a thinking process. The result is a cluster of questions that fits seamlessly into a small-group discussion.
Question clusters provide children with gentle modeling of how proficient readers process text. Over a period of time, the goal is to make this strategic processing habitual.
Pg 111
WHERE DO CLUSTERS COME FROM
The use of question clusters originated in the seminal volume Teaching reading Comprehension [Pearson & Johnson, 1978].
HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR QUESTION CLUSTERS?
Begin by carefully reading the selection introspecting about your own comprehension as you do so. As proficient readers, teachers are sometimes unconscious of their own thought processes, but question clustering requires that you attend to exactly how you comprehend the selection. Be particularly alert to places where explicit facts are sufficient to support inferences that are not mentioned by the author.
pg 113
HOW DO YOU IMPLEMENT QUESTION CLUSTER?
In read-aloud session, it is advisable to pause at a key point in order to ask the cluster of questions. This is because waiting until the end might make it difficult for children to recall the explicit facts.
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF QUESTION CLUSTERS ARE WORKING?
As children grow more comfortable with using explicitly stated facts to generate inferences, they will be able to explain how they arrived at them. …A second way of determining whether children are grasping the thinking process involved is simply by noting their success in answering the inferential questions..
pg 114
WHAT IS THE INSTRUCTIONAL FOCUS OF QAR
Question-answer relationships (QARs) … is a comprehension strategy; it will not build fluency, vocabulary, or word recognition.
Pg 115
How Do You Prepare for QAR?
When you are first teaching the strategy, you need to use a short text with several questions and answers of each type already prepared. That text is used to teach the concepts of the four types of questions. After that, preparing questions of each type before instruction ensures that the strategy can be employed quickly during needs-based instruction. We actually find it very difficult to construct questions of all types ” on the fly”, so it is advisable to write the questions in advance. Typically, if you begin with the inferences (the Think and Search questions) you know what to target in the other questions. If teachers are working together to implement QAR, then they can keep the questions constructed for specific books to shorten preparation time.
How Do You Know if QAR is Working?
You will know this strategy is working when children are able to categorize the four target relationships between questions and answers and when they are better able to recognize and use the relationships to answer or ask questions.
Story mapping
How Do You Implement Story Mapping?
One you have introduced the strategy, each day:
- Review the story map, reminding students that good readers use story maps to help them focus on and remember the most important parts of stories.
- Have students whisper, read, or listen to the day’s story, paying attention to the story map features. If students need to build fluency, ask them to read it repeatedly or provide as assisted fluency support.
- Ask students to read until the first story element is revealed.
- Model or provide guided practice on identifying that element and writing it on the map.
- Continue until the story is completed.
How Do you know if story mapping is working?
After several sessions of story mapping with teacher support for fluency and comprehension, ask students to read or listen to a new story and comprehend its story structure independently.
Pg 118
Text Structure Instruction
Just as story maps provide children with a blueprint to help them interpret fiction, similar strategies have been developed for nonfiction. One of the best-researched approaches targets expository texts and compare or contrast concepts. It has proved to be especially effective with students in grades 2 and 3.
Pg 119
What is the instructional focus of text structure instruciton?
… recognition of compare-contrast structures in expository text…
… you will need to locate texts of appropriate difficulty that have compare-contrast structures. .. it is helpful to have a chart of compare-contrast questions. What two things is this text about? How are they the same? How are they different?
How do you prepare for text structure instruction?
Plan a brief prior knowledge and vocabulary lesson so that the students have background knowledge on each of the two concepts covered in the text. Be sure that the focus on the lesson is how to understand a text that compares and contrasts two concepts rather than on the initial learning of each concept.
Direct Explanation
There are two schools of thought regarding the best way to foster comprehension strategies in young readers. The indirect approach involves modeling and reminding, embedding such instruction in the context of read-alouds and discussion. An example is question clustering. The direct approach makes comprehension strategies the focus of carefully planned explicit teaching, during which the teacher presents and “explains” each strategy directly, following by opportunities to apply it.
What is the instructional focus of Direct Explanation?
The focus of direct explanation is making clear the procedural (how-to) knowledge that underlies the application of strategy. The teacher uses a clear lesson introduction and then a think-aloud during reading to make the cognitive processes that good readers use transparent to novice or struggling readers.
pg 121
you will need a clear definition of the strategy you will explain, including the procedures it entails. … beware of teaching children to apply a specific strategy in a particular text that is not a good match – strategy instruction, if it is to be successful, demands that students see that the work required in implement a particular strategy is worthwhile in that it yields improved comprehension.
How do you implement direct explanation?
Before reading, tell students clearly and directly what strategy they will learn to use that day and how it will help them to understand the text. Then tell the students the steps that are used to employ the strategy. … think aloud as you apply the strategy… repeat the modeling process several times… provide students opportunities to share their thinking and use of the strategy.
Summarization
Teaching children to summarize has been identified by the NRP (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) as a well-validated instructional strategy.
… a good summary requires the reader to make key decisions about importance and to create a mental overview of what has been read. This is not an easy proficiency to instill, but effective techniques have been developed in the recent past.
What is the instructional focus of summarization?
The focus of this strategy is strictly on building comprehension by writing summaries. It will not improve fluency, vocabulary, or word recognition.
Pg 123
… you will need a chart of the summarization procedures … you will also need several short information texts that you can use in modeling the procedure.
How do you implement summarization?
Ask the students to read the text. Then model the use of this procedure, using a large chart that will remain in the room as a reference:
- make sure you understand the text
- reread to check your understanding, marking important parts
- rethink, making sure that you can say the main idea of each paragraph. Wire the main idea as a note to yourself
- write your summary, checking to make sure that you avoided lists, included or created topic sentences, got rid of unnecessary details, and combined paragraphs
- check your summary and edit it so that it sounds natural.
Recommended texts:
- Comprehension Instruction: Research-based best practices edited by Cathy Collins Block and Michael Pressley (2002)
- Rethinking Reading Comprehension, compiled by Anne Sweet and Catherine Snow (2003)
- RAND Reading Study Group report (2002) www.rand.org/multi/achievement/orall/reading