Developing Reading Comprehension
Reading
Planning to support students
Unfamiliar texts
The problem
As teachers, we know how to support students to read texts that they would find difficult to comprehend on their own.
It is more difficult to prepare them to independently read complex texts and solve problems when we (or other kind-hearted adults) are not around.
Recommended reading
Deepening reading comprehension in Aotearoa, New Zealand
by Aaron Wilson
Literacy Forum NZ, Vol.37, No.2, 2022
12 Key principles
- Deepen students’ theoretical understandings of what readingcomprehension is.
- Use a range of assessment information to identify sources of readingcomprehension difficulties and plan next learning steps.
- Foster students’ motivation to read and learn about reading.
- Ensure that students have opportunities to read and learn aboutreading using a wide variety of valued types of texts.
- Prioritise the use of connected texts.
- Provide opportunities for students to read a balance of mirror andwindow texts.
- Design open-ended tasks that integrate learning about the differentlanguage modes and give students’ space to develop, share, and justify theirown interpretations of texts.
- Build students’ world and word knowledge for reading and throughreading.
- Enhance students’ knowledge of text structures and languagefeatures – and how to use that knowledge to comprehend texts in deepways.
- Develop students’ knowledge of disciplinary literacy, includingknowledge of disciplinary English.
- Cultivate critical literacy.
- Integrate opportunities for students to learn about strategies that theyand others use to make meaning from texts.
Purposeful Reading
- Effective reading comprehension is closely related to reading motivation (bi-directional).
- Having an authentic purpose is a key factor in reading motivation.
- When you are setting students up for a reading task they have to do independently (e.g. recreational reading, reading for research, reading for an assessment) discuss the purposes they have for reading in order to make the task meaningful.
Close Reading
- Through all the units, students have been learning to “close read”.
- This means not just reading an extract once!
- When an item asks about a specific part of the text (e.g. a word meaning or the meaning of a sentence) they need to re-read (and re-re-read and maybe re-re-re-read the relevant section again.
Local Inferences
Two particular challenges are
- Knowing what pronouns refer to E.g. “Ritesh was hungry. He prepared a sandwich. It was delicious. He ate it all up””
- Filling the gapsE.g.the connective “so” is missing between sentence
Strategy: (Mentally or on paper) replacing pronouns with referents and filling the gaps with the missing word can help make the text more comprehensible.
“RITESH was hungry SO he prepared a sandwich. THE SANDWICH was delicious SO he ate it all up”
Casual Relationships
To find causal relationships and to “put in their own words” (e.g., if a question asked, “Why did Ritesh eat the sandwich so fast?) students could (mentally or on paper) reverse the order of the sentences and add in the missing words (e.g., “Ritesh ate the sandwich BECAUSE he was hungry and it was delicious.”)
Planning to support students:
Text structure
Surveying organisational features of text before reading helps students:
- Get the gist
- Make predictions
- Make links to their prior knowledge
- Identify how the text is structured and where key information is located.
Organisational features of text
Clues about the organisation and hierarchy of ideas in a text include:
Headings, sub-headings, topic sentences, connectives, words in bold, visuals, captions, figure and table headings, axis labels, column and row headers, captions, boxes and frames, use of colour, size and style of lettering, footnotes, and 1) numbering.
Getting the gist (and using it)
- Start from the edges and work your way in.
- Start with what you DO know, not what you DON’T.
- Start with getting the broadest understanding – worry about filling in the details later.
- Test hypotheses about what something MIGHT mean (when you’re unsure) against what you DO know.
- Use the “gist” to test your hypotheses about the meaning of specific details.
Activity:
What might a poem with this title be about?
“For Albert Wendt (On his Birthday)”
- Think about denotations and connotations.
- Think about mood and atmosphere.
- Think about patterns.
Put these words into four groups and name each group
Fish, coral reefs, understanding, poems, tales, rainbows, hurricanes, thunder, hear, relish, laughter, lightning, tree, frangipani, grace, sentences, needle, skin, pen, blood, genealogies/whakapapa, lines, bodies.
“For Albert Wendt (On his Birthday)” by Karlo Mila
Say what?
you dare to fish
beyond the coral reefs
of our understanding
Using the gist: mood & atmosphere
Through Unit 1 students developed deeper understandings of mood and atmosphere.
A “getting the gist” question students can ask of themselves is, “What kind of mood does this text evoke?”
At the broadest level this might be very general: happy, sad, negative, positive
Although general, having that level of knowledge is potentially powerful!
Using knowledge of character to get the gist
Through Unit 2 students developed deeper understandings of character and characterisation
A “getting the gist” question students can ask of themselves is, “What is this character/person like?”, “What does the author want me to think about them?”
At the broadest level this might be very general: antagonist, protagonist, negative, positive
Although general, having that level of knowledge is potentially powerful!
Weighing the Evidence
There will always be parts of the text where more than one interpretation is possible, or you are just not sure.
- In these cases, make your best-informed guess!
- Rule out the least likely interpretations (those that don’t fit) then guess between the remaining options.
The important thing is to keep going – focus on what you do know, don’t get bogged down with what you don’t know.
Vocabulary
- Students have been given tools to be more systematic in their responses about/to words
- Encourage students to look at words in context e.g. if a question asks “What does the author mean by her use of the word “energetically” it is likely that in that context it means something different/more specific than it’s general meaning (e.g. she actually means “naughty”)
Common types of Purpose
|
Purposes |
Typical question |
Possible clues to look for in the text |
|
Identifying the MAIN idea |
What is the main/most important/most significant ……. Summarise/sum up …… |
What idea is repeated the most? What idea is presented at the top of the hierarchical structure (e.g. titles, topic sentences)? If you had to tell someone just ONE idea about this, what would it be? |
|
Inferring author’s attitude |
What does the author thinks/feel about…. What does the author want the reader to think/feel about…. |
Words with strong connotations |
|
Explain causes and reasons |
Why did x happen? Why did character x do action y? |
Look for explicit connectives like “because” or “so” – and gaps where these are implied |
|
Work out the sequence or order of events |
What did x do before/after ….. Put these events in order/sequence/chronological order |
Look for explicit indicators like “then”, secondly” or “previously” – and gaps where these are implied (e.g. by order of events) |
|
Explain metaphorical language |
Why did the author compare the salesperson to a shark? |
Identify the source and target, visualise the similarities between them |
|
Questions about HOW ideas are shown |
How does the author show that x is pleasant/unpleasant? |
Everything we’ve learnt this year! |
Strategies for revisiting ‘hard questions’
- Pen + paper for recording re-visit questions
- Not submitting as soon as they are done
- Instead, taking time to re-visit / re-think questions that may have been harder to understand
