Comprehension: is a creative, multifaceted thinking process in which students engaged with the text. The comprehension process begins during prereading as students activate their background knowledge and preview the text, and it continues to develop as students reading, respond, explore and apply their reading.
Text Complexity: text complexity is a new way of examining comprehension to determine the cognitive demands of book, or more specifically, how well readers can complete an assigned task with a particular text.
For students to comprehend a text, they must have adequate background knowledge, understand most words in a text, and be able to read fluently.
Background Knowledge: Having both world knowledge and literary knowledge is a prerequisite because they provide a bridge to a new text. Teachers use prereading activities to build students’ background knowledge-both their understanding of the topic and their familiarity with the genre. Involving students in authentic experiences such as taking field trips, participating in dramatizations, and examining artifacts is the best way to build background knowledge.
Vocabulary: Students knowledge of words play a tremendous role in comprehension because it’s difficult to comprehend a text that’s loaded with unknown words. Teachers preteach key words when they’re building background knowledge using KWL charts, anticipation guides, and other prereading activities.
Fluency: fluent readers read quickly and efficiently. Because they recognize most words automatically, their cognitive resources aren’t depleted by decoding unfamiliar words, and they can devote their attention comprehension.
Inferences: Readers seem to “read between the lines” to draw inferences, but what they actually do is synthesize their background knowledge with the author’s clues to ask questions that point toward inferences. When readers draw inferences, they have “an opportunity to sense a meaning not explicit in the text, but which derives or flows from it.”
Teachers begin by explaining what inferences are, why they’re important, and how inferential thinking differs from literal thinking. Then they teach these four steps in drawing inferences:
- Activate background knowledge about topics related to the text.
- Look for the author’s clues as you read.
- Ask questions, tying together background knowledge and the author’s clues.
- Draw inferences by answering the questions.
Comprehension Skills:
How to create an expectation of comprehension:
Reciprocal teaching: is an instructional activity that takes form of a dialogue between students and teachers regarding segments of text for the purpose of constructing the meaning of text. This is a reading technique, which is thought to promote students’ reading comprehension.
Assessing Comprehension: Teachers use the integrated instruction-assessment cycle to ensure that students are growing in their ability to understand complex texts and to use increasingly more sophisticated strategies to deepen their understanding of grade level texts. They also use diagnostic tests with struggling readers.
Step 1: Planning
Step 2: Monitoring
Step 3:Evaluating
Step 4: Reflecting
Cloze Procedure: Teachers examine students’ understanding of a text using the cloze procedure, in which students supply the deleted words in a passage taken from a text they’ve read. Although filling in the blanks may seem like a simple activity, it isn’t because students need to consider the content of the passage, vocabulary words, and sentence structure to choose the exact word that was deleted.
Story Retellings: Teachers often have young children retell stories they’ve read or listened to read aloud to assess their literal comprehension. Students’ story retellings should be coherent and well organized and should include the big ideas and important details. Teachers often use checklists and rubrics to score students’ story retellings.
Classroom Application: Chapter 8 will be very useful for when I have my own classroom in the future. It is important for teachers to be knowledgable about what readers think about when reading. Comprehension is the goal of reading and it is our job as educators to make sure we read with our students and assess their reading. Effective teachers demonstrate their responsibility and commitment to facilitating their students’ comprehension when they address reader factors according to the information within this chapter. It is vital that we teach students to use comprehension strategies to direct their reading, monitor their understanding, and troubleshoot problems when they occur. It is also imperative that we teach students how to apply comprehension strategies to support their learning of texts. Lastly, within this chapter I learned how important it is to motivate to our students and to show them how much we care about their learning experience.
Brianne Brueggen Developing Literacy Blog 