comprehension

Katherine O’Shea & Chloe Poltonavage

What is reading
comprehension?
Reading comprehension involves four components:

1) The Reader - the one doing the comprehension

2) The Text - the reading material
3) The Activity - what kind of comprehension task, skill, strategy, or concept the reading
is attempting to perform
● ex) discovering the author’s main idea, understanding a sequence of events, or thinking about a character’s intent in
a story.
1) The Situational Context - can be thought of in two ways:

1) where the reading occurs (ex: at home, in a school classroom, the library, under a blanket at bedtime)

2) there is a social context associated with reading comprehension. This can be part of a vibrant social activity in which
people-teachers, parents, and and children-read a text together and jointly construct meaning through discussion

(Reutzel & Cooter, 259)

“Less is more”
Commercial reading programs used by most school districts are not very effective
in teaching reading comprehension Dewitz, Jones, and Leahy (2009)

The National Reading Panel (2000) recommends that teachers primarily focus
on seven strategies

Common core programs suggest that on average, 18-29 strategies per program
per year are being taught

(Reutzel & Cooter, 259- 260)

Five research-supported
strategies...
1) Activating Prior Knowledge
2) Questioning
3) Analyzing Text Structure
4) Creating Mental or Visual Images
5) Summarizing

Using multiple comprehension strategies improves children’s reading

achievement

(Kelly & Clausen-Grace, 2007, in press; Mills, 2009; Pressley, 2006; Reutzel
& Cooter, 263)
Stages of comprehension
development
Two-stage process:

1) “Lower processes” focused at the word level - such as word recognition

(phonics, sight words), fluency (rate, accuracy, and expression), and
vocabulary (word meanings)
2) “Higher order thinking” relating prior knowledge to text content and
consciously learning, selecting, and controlling the use of several cognitive
strategies for remembering and learning from text

(Reutzel & Cooter, 261)

Benchmark standards
Most important in terms of assessing each student’s level of comprehension
development

***See page 264-265 for Benchmark Standards for Reading Comprehension for
Grades K-3
Most effective ways to teach
reading comprehension
● Content approaches
○ Describe content approaches as focusing student attention on the content of the text through
open, meaning-based questions about the text
● Dialogic reading
○ Comprehension instruction focuses student attention on text content through similar types of
questions about the text

(Reutzel & Cooter, 274)

Most effective ways to teach reading
comprehension cont.
● The Reader
○ Activating students background knowledge; visualizing
● The Text
○ Text features and structure; scaffolding; teacher modeling
● The Activity
○ Asking questions at differing levels of thinking; higher-order thinking questions; QAR’s (question-answer
relationships)
● Comprehension Monitoring and Fix-Up Strategies
○ Planning, checking, monitoring, revising, and evaluating one’s unfolding of comprehension
● The Situational Context
○ From previous slide, the situational context can be taught in two ways: the setting in which one reads, and the
social context
● Multiple-Strategies Reading Comprehension Instruction
○ Teaching self-regulation and multiple comprehension strategies instruction; reciprocal teaching

(Reutzel & Cooter, 274-295)

In your classrooms...
Reutzel & Cooter offer two ideas to implement in your classrooms:

1) Internet Reciprocal Teaching

2) Three for the Road Program

(Reutzel & Cooter, 302-303)

Text talk in our classroom
6 components:

1. Selection of texts
2. Initial questions
3. Follow- up questions
4. Pictures
5. Background knowledge
6. Vocabulary
Oreo activity
http://whoswhoandnew.blogspot.com/2014/12/close-reading-with-oreos.html
Our text talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRuOdTqxBPU
Visualizing to build
comprehension
Ask students to close their eyes and imagine different things: ice cream cones,
snow, etc, while paying attention to their five senses (What does it
taste/sound/feel/smell/look like?