Reading skill strategy

Strategies for Reading Comprehension :: Read Naturally, Inc.

Comprehension: The Goal of Reading

Comprehension, or extracting meaning from what you read, is the ultimate goal of reading. Experienced readers take this for granted and may not appreciate the reading comprehension skills required. The process of comprehension is both interactive and strategic. Rather than passively reading text, readers must analyze it, internalize it and make it their own.

In order to read with comprehension, developing readers must be able to read with some proficiency and then receive explicit instruction in reading comprehension strategies (Tierney, 1982).

​ Strategies for reading comprehension in Read Naturally programs

​General Strategies for Reading Comprehension

The process of comprehending text begins before children can read, when someone reads a picture book to them. They listen to the words, see the pictures in the book, and may start to associate the words on the page with the words they are hearing and the ideas they represent.

In order to learn comprehension strategies, students need modeling, practice, and feedback. The key comprehension strategies are described below.

Using Prior Knowledge/Previewing

When students preview text, they tap into what they already know that will help them to understand the text they are about to read. This provides a framework for any new information they read.

Predicting

When students make predictions about the text they are about to read, it sets up expectations based on their prior knowledge about similar topics. As they read, they may mentally revise their prediction as they gain more information.

Identifying the Main Idea and Summarization

Identifying the main idea and summarizing requires that students determine what is important and then put it in their own words. Implicit in this process is trying to understand the author’s purpose in writing the text.

Questioning

Asking and answering questions about text is another strategy that helps students focus on the meaning of text. Teachers can help by modeling both the process of asking good questions and strategies for finding the answers in the text.

Making Inferences

In order to make inferences about something that is not explicitly stated in the text, students must learn to draw on prior knowledge and recognize clues in the text itself.

Visualizing

Studies have shown that students who visualize while reading have better recall than those who do not (Pressley, 1977). Readers can take advantage of illustrations that are embedded in the text or create their own mental images or drawings when reading text without illustrations.

Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Narrative Text

Narrative text tells a story, either a true story or a fictional story. There are a number of strategies that will help students understand narrative text.

Story Maps

Teachers can have students diagram the story grammar of the text to raise their awareness of the elements the author uses to construct the story. Story grammar includes:

• Setting: When and where the story takes place (which can change over the course of the story).
• Characters: The people or animals in the story, including the protagonist (main character), whose motivations and actions drive the story.
• Plot: The story line, which typically includes one or more problems or conflicts that the protagonist must address and ultimately resolve.
• Theme: The overriding lesson or main idea that the author wants readers to glean from the story. It could be explicitly stated as in Aesop’s Fables or inferred by the reader (more common).

​ Printable story map (blank)

Retelling

Asking students to retell a story in their own words forces them to analyze the content to determine what is important. Teachers can encourage students to go beyond literally recounting the story to drawing their own conclusions about it.

Prediction

Teachers can ask readers to make a prediction about a story based on the title and any other clues that are available, such as illustrations. Teachers can later ask students to find text that supports or contradicts their predictions.

Answering Comprehension Questions

Asking students different types of questions requires that they find the answers in different ways, for example, by finding literal answers in the text itself or by drawing on prior knowledge and then inferring answers based on clues in the text.

Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Expository Text

Expository text explains facts and concepts in order to inform, persuade, or explain.

The Structure of Expository Text

Expository text is typically structured with visual cues such as headings and subheadings that provide clear cues as to the structure of the information. The first sentence in a paragraph is also typically a topic sentence that clearly states what the paragraph is about.

Expository text also often uses one of five common text structures as an organizing principle:

• Cause and effect
• Problem and solution
• Compare and contrast
• Description
• Time order (sequence of events, actions, or steps)

Teaching these structures can help students recognize relationships between ideas and the overall intent of the text.

Main Idea/Summarization

A summary briefly captures the main idea of the text and the key details that support the main idea. Students must understand the text in order to write a good summary that is more than a repetition of the text itself.

​K-W-L

There are three steps in the K-W-L process (Ogle, 1986):

1. What I Know: Before students read the text, ask them as a group to identify what they already know about the topic. Students write this list in the “K” column of their K-W-L forms.
2. What I Want to Know: Ask students to write questions about what they want to learn from reading the text in the “W” column of their K-W-L forms. For example, students may wonder if some of the “facts” offered in the “K” column are true.
3. What I Learned: As they read the text, students should look for answers to the questions listed in the “W” column and write their answers in the “L” column along with anything else they learn.

After all of the students have read the text, the teacher leads a discussion of the questions and answers.

 Printable K-W-L chart (blank)

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers provide visual representations of the concepts in expository text. Representing ideas and relationships graphically can help students understand and remember them. Examples of graphic organizers are:

Tree diagrams that represent categories and hierarchies

Tables that compare and contrast data

Time-driven diagrams that represent the order of events

Flowcharts that represent the steps of a process​

​

Teaching students how to develop and construct graphic organizers will require some modeling, guidance, and feedback. Teachers should demonstrate the process with examples first before students practice doing it on their own with teacher guidance and eventually work independently.

Strategies for Reading Comprehension in Read Naturally Programs

Several Read Naturally programs include strategies that support comprehension:

Bibliography

Honig, B. , L. Diamond, and L. Gutlohn. (2013). Teaching reading sourcebook, 2nd ed. Novato, CA: Arena Press.

Ogle, D. M. (1986). K-W-L: A teaching model that develops active reading of expository text. The Reading Teacher 38(6), pp. 564–570.

Pressley, M. (1977). Imagery and children’s learning: Putting the picture in developmental perspective. Review of Educational Research 47, pp. 586–622.

Tierney, R. J. (1982). Essential considerations for developing basic reading comprehension skills. School Psychology Review 11(3), pp. 299–305.

Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension

1. Monitoring comprehension

Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.

Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:

• Be aware of what they do understand
• Identify what they do not understand
• Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension

2. Metacognition

Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing" any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.

Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies:

• Identify where the difficulty occurs

  "I don't understand the second paragraph on page 76."

• Identify what the difficulty is

  "I don't get what the author means when she says, 'Arriving in America was a milestone in my grandmother's life. '"

• Restate the difficult sentence or passage in their own words

  "Oh, so the author means that coming to America was a very important event in her grandmother's life."

• Look back through the text

  "The author talked about Mr. McBride in Chapter 2, but I don't remember much about him. Maybe if I reread that chapter, I can figure out why he's acting this way now."

• Look forward in the text for information that might help them to resolve the difficulty

  "The text says, 'The groundwater may form a stream or pond or create a wetland. People can also bring groundwater to the surface.' Hmm, I don't understand how people can do that… Oh, the next section is called 'Wells.' I'll read this section to see if it tells how they do it."

3. Graphic and semantic organizers

Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or using diagrams. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters.

Regardless of the label, graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read and understand textbooks and picture books.

Graphic organizers can:

• Help students focus on text structure differences between fiction and nonfiction as they read
• Provide students with tools they can use to examine and show relationships in a text
• Help students write well-organized summaries of a text

Here are some examples of graphic organizers:

4. Answering questions

Questions can be effective because they:

• Give students a purpose for reading
• Focus students' attention on what they are to learn
• Help students to think actively as they read
• Encourage students to monitor their comprehension
• Help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know

The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Students are asked to indicate whether the information they used to answer questions about the text was textually explicit information (information that was directly stated in the text), textually implicit information (information that was implied in the text), or information entirely from the student's own background knowledge.

There are four different types of questions:

• "Right There"

  Questions found right in the text that ask students to find the one right answer located in one place as a word or a sentence in the passage.

  Example: Who is Frog's friend? Answer: Toad

• "Think and Search"

  Questions based on the recall of facts that can be found directly in the text. Answers are typically found in more than one place, thus requiring students to "think" and "search" through the passage to find the answer.

  Example: Why was Frog sad? Answer: His friend was leaving.

• "Author and You"

  Questions require students to use what they already know, with what they have learned from reading the text. Students must understand the text and relate it to their prior knowledge before answering the question.

  Example: How do think Frog felt when he found Toad? Answer: I think that Frog felt happy because he had not seen Toad in a long time. I feel happy when I get to see my friend who lives far away.

• "On Your Own"

  Questions are answered based on a student's prior knowledge and experiences. Reading the text may not be helpful to them when answering this type of question.

  Example: How would you feel if your best friend moved away? Answer: I would feel very sad if my best friend moved away because I would miss her.

5. Generating questions

By generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions and if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to combine information from different segments of text. For example, students can be taught to ask main idea questions that relate to important information in a text.

6. Recognizing story structure

In story structure instruction, students learn to identify the categories of content (characters, setting, events, problem, resolution). Often, students learn to recognize story structure through the use of story maps. Instruction in story structure improves students' comprehension.

7. Summarizing

Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:

• Identify or generate main ideas
• Connect the main or central ideas
• Eliminate unnecessary information
• Remember what they read

Effective comprehension strategy instruction is explicit

Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. In explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling ("thinking aloud"), guided practice, and application.

• Direct explanation

  The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.

• Modeling

  The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking aloud" while reading the text that the students are using.

• Guided practice

  The teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy.

• Application

  The teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently.

Effective comprehension strategy instruction can be accomplished through cooperative learning, which involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks. Cooperative learning instruction has been used successfully to teach comprehension strategies. Students work together to understand texts, helping each other learn and apply comprehension strategies. Teachers help students learn to work in groups. Teachers also provide modeling of the comprehension strategies.

Tactics and strategies in the formation of reading skills in literature lessons | Article on the Russian language (grade 5) on the topic:

Dvurechenskaya Natalya Viktorovna,

deputy director of the UVR,

teacher of Russian language and literature,

MBOU secondary school 35, Nizhny Novgorod,

[email protected] 9002

8-903-609-58-16

Tactics and strategies in the formation of

reading skills in literature lessons

In connection with the transition to a new format of exams in Russian language and literature, a modern teacher faces a difficult task: based on "strict time limits ”and the volume of the program, it is expedient and competent to use textual material in literature classes. Therefore, great importance is attached to working with such a type of receptive activity as reading. The teacher needs to systematically and consistently form reading skills throughout the entire period of study, both in the junior and senior levels of the school.

Since reading includes two mastering plans - technical and semantic, the process of learning to read should be accompanied by the development of technical and semantic skills. The technical development plan ensures the perception of graphic signs, their correlation with a certain meaning. Self-semantic helps to establish semantic connections in the text, to understand its content. Another significant condition for learning to read is the presence of a communicative task that allows you to control the attention and regulate the train of thought of the reader. If the communicative task is understood by the reader, then this allows him to save time for reading and, at the same time, increase its efficiency.

Based on psychological and pedagogical goals, the teacher can set a number of tasks for the student: searching for the necessary information, analyzing and critically comprehending text data, understanding information in general, etc. Depending on the task and the process of reading will have a different character: viewing, introductory and studying.

While viewing reading, the student gets acquainted with the general understanding of the content. As a rule, this type of reading is effective when referring to newspaper genres, which do not require deep reading, rather a superficial, "fluent" review of information. When creating exercises for this type of reading, it is necessary to refer to the structure of the work. For example, "Highlight the key words of the text, read only them and, based on this, determine the theme of the work", "Underline the words in the text that can be omitted without compromising the understanding of the text."

Introductory reading assimilates the entire content as a whole. This requires a more detailed comprehension of the meaning and awareness of the ideological and thematic plan. Therefore, questions that develop introductory reading skills should contain the following wording: “find answers to questions in the text, words with meaning, a phrase that conveys such content . ..”

Study reading is accompanied by a detailed analysis of all components of the text content. Exercises accompanying this type of text may contain such components as: “Confirm or refute such statements”, “Break the text into parts”. Undoubtedly, the last type of reading is the most difficult for school students, but skills of this kind are needed most often in text examination materials. Therefore, when referring to this type of reading, it is very important to correctly formulate communicative tasks.

It should be noted that the solution of such problems may be accompanied by access to oral and written speech. So, the presence of post-text communicative tasks such as: “explain to a groupmate what information you found in the text” or “write an annotation to the text” - allows you to use such types of speech activity as writing and speaking. However, when forming a list of tasks accompanying a literary text, one must understand that they must be complex in nature and their implementation must be carried out systematically, and not from case to case, as is often the case in practice.

To successfully master the technique of reading, it is necessary to be able to transform and compress the text. “Collapsing” the text into several phrases, highlighting supporting sentences and key words helps to understand the logic of the narrative, keeping the object of speech within one judgment. For example, compressing the text into several sentences helps the student to highlight the main and additional meaning of the statement. By transforming the text from a monologue into a dialogue, retelling the text in the third person or on behalf of the author, the student masters the skills of transformation, which contributes to the development of speech variability.

In addition, the process of learning to read may be accompanied by a number of "social" difficulties. First of all, it is connected with the lexicon of a work of art. Many lexemes used in the texts of the great classics are often not known and, therefore, not understandable to the modern student. This factor is important to take into account and, if possible, focus on it. For example, in A.S. Pushkin’s fairy tale “About the dead princess and the seven heroes” there are lines about Chernavka: And the queen flew / On Chernavka: “How dare you / Deceive me? / And what! ..” / She confessed everything /:Anyway/. The Evil Queen /, threatening her with a slingshot, /
Or not to live /, Or to destroy the princess /. What kind of blackhead are we talking about and “who” or “what” is a “slingshot”? Appeal to such details will make it possible to interest the student and include them in the search work.

When working with a literary text, pre-text, pre-text tasks, as well as post-text structural exercises can be of great help to the teacher. The first type of tasks, as a rule, is aimed at a linguistic guess. It is built according to the type: “Based on the title of the work, guess what the text will be about?”, “What role does the epigraph play?” etc. In pre-text tasks, questions of the "truth or false" type can be used to find true and false information. For example: “Rodion Raskolnikov’s meeting with Sonechka Marmeladova took place in a tavern” (yes or no) or “Evgeny Bazarov fell in love with Anna Odintsova” (yes or no). When formulating questions of such a plan, it is necessary to include in the list one or two questions that “provoke an error”, that is, a question that requires visual attention and memory: “In N.V. Gogol’s poem, Chichikov visited 5 landowners (is it so or not) . Restore the order in which these characters appear in the text of the work. Post-text assignments can be addressed to the language plan of the work. For example, “try to recover phrases from M. Bulgakov’s work “The Master and Margarita”:

1. When Margarita woke up, she didn't cry, as…often, because…with a premonition that today, finally…will happen.

2. Most of all… the procurator hated… rose oil, and everything now foreshadowed something bad… because this smell… haunted the procurator since dawn.

3. While the secretary…the meeting, the procurator in…from the sun with dark curtains in the room had…. with some man...who was half-hooded.

Post-text assignments can be not only linguistic, but also communicative in nature. For example, when studying texts with an "open" ending ("Crime and Punishment" by F. Dostoevsky). The task is to predict the possible outcome of the situation, based on the content of the text and its genre nature.

In the process of developing reading skills in literature lessons, the teacher needs to use a whole range of exercises: language, technical, assignments for the formation of the student's vocabulary, etc. Being limited by the format genre of the article, we list the most representative types of such tasks. So, a fairly effective type of exercise for the development of reading skills are tasks for understanding logical connections in a text or in separate phrases. They can be built according to the type: "Collect a phrase from individual words", "Restore the text (or passage) from phrases in a logical sequence." Special attention should be paid to tasks that form the ability to work with a dictionary: “Find the meaning of these words in the dictionary”, “Indicate the foreign vocabulary in the text of the work”. Exercises to remove lexical and grammatical difficulties allow you to activate knowledge of the Russian language and contribute to the interactivity of the subject. For example, the task of replacing sentences of a simple structural type with a complex one, or the selection of synonymous constructions. Separate attention, in our opinion, deserves exercises that provide access to oral and written speech, as well as exercises that develop reading technique, which cause increased interest among schoolchildren, since they are of a creative nature. Such exercises can be built according to the type: “Transmit the information obtained from the text in two or three sentences”, “Transform the monologue into a dialogue”, “Describe the character”, “Play out the plot of the story you read ...”, etc. Reading technique exercises can be aimed at expanding the "field of vision", at suppressing articulation when reading "to oneself", at training attention and memory.

Thus, the effectiveness of the formation of reading skills is achieved through the use of a wide range of exercises, tasks of an interactive type, the presence of a communicative task, and an integrated approach to mastering this type of receptive activity. Of course, the range of strategies and tactics we have described that are used in the course of teaching the reading process is not exhaustive, however, taking into account even a certain number of tactics and strategies when planning a lesson helps to increase students' motivation in mastering reading skills and abilities.

Strategies for developing reading skills - NovaInfo 112

Abstract

Inevitably, reading skill is an interactive process in which students build meaningful representations of text using appropriate reading strategies for themselves. This article defines the term "reading and reading comprehension", explains the types of reading, declares models of the process of reading, sets out theories of reading comprehension, discusses effective strategies for reading comprehension, and mentions the results of students' reading strategies and their reading comprehension.

Keywords

STRATEGIES, THEORIES, MODELS, TYPES, READING UNDERSTANDING

Research paper

Reading comprehension requires the successful expansion and organization of a multitude of lower and higher level processes and skills. Accordingly, there are many sources of possible impairment of comprehension, and these sources differ depending on the skill level and age of the readers. There are several types of reading that should be known to improve students' reading comprehension. First there are two different types of reading. They are extensive reading and intensive reading. There are different definitions for extensive reading. Hedge (2003) describes this as skimming and scanning, while Hafiz and Tudor (1989) expressed the view that exposing students to a large amount of meaningful and engaging material would have a significant impact on students' second language proficiency.

Initially used texts tend to be relatively simple so that students can grasp the meaning of unknown words. This is very important because it means that longer texts can be used than would be the case in most classroom environments. Another feature is that the extensive should be an enjoyable experience, as students are free to choose texts on topics they find intriguing. Comprehension checks tend to be kept to a minimum because the process of reading is seen as more important than understanding specific details, and because such checks can cause anxiety and reduce the enjoyment of reading. Extensive reading should be an enjoyable experience, as students are free to choose texts on topics that interest them.

Hedge mentioned enhanced reading as follows: students can master the language, improve their reading skills, become more independent in their learning, learn cultural knowledge, and increase confidence and incentive to continue their learning. (Hedge, 2003). The definition for intensive reading is usually given as the emphasis is on details that support the main points chosen at the skimming level. When the level of comprehension is to be qualitative, reading for memorization or accuracy is done through the structure of the survey and the phrases for reading. This reading includes repeated reading and note-taking, very often followed by a summary. Preparing for the exam requires accurate interpretation of the text, requiring intensive reading skills. Intensive reading includes several types of reading tasks. Comparison - graphs, tables, diagrams with explanations to them. Defining - scientific texts from the genre point of view. Recognition is the relationship between concepts, the relationship between ideas. Since intensive reading is mainly for a scientific text, they are characterized by brevity with concepts related, sometimes dependent on each other. Understanding academic texts is easier if students are familiar with text development techniques, such as cause and effect relationships, examples, definitions, comparisons, and connectors associated with some of them. Science textbooks are heavily illustrated. These visual forms of communication replace verbal communication and must be carefully read and understood.

There are three types of reading comprehension theories. These are mental representations, content literacy and cognitive processes. Mental Representations - Van Oostendorp and Goldman (1998) expressed that when a reader reads a text, they can create a mental representation of the text that explains how the reader understands the text. Many studies have confirmed that many levels of representation are involved in the construction of meaning. When a reader reads a text, three different levels of mental representation are created. This is a surface component, a text base and a situation model. When words and phrases, and not the meaning of the words and phrases, are encoded in the mental representation, this is defined as the surface component of the mental representation. The text base indicates the meaning of the text and consists of those parts and relationships that have arisen from the text itself without increasing anything that is not clearly defined in the text. A text base can be made without remembering the exact words or phrases from the text. In a pure text base, the reader applies previous knowledge to create a more refined and coherent mental representation. A situational model is a structure that combines a text base and related features of the reader's knowledge. To create a text base, some previous knowledge is required, but this knowledge is more general, which is necessary for decoding texts in general, while previous knowledge in the formation of a situation model is more specific regarding the content of the text.

Setting reading targets before starting any unknown text forces students to be punctual while reading. Each student sets their own reading goals. This can help them take action to develop reading skills and students will be more attentive to how they improve. If the text is too complex or long, it is useful to divide them into parts. Long, complex reading can be more easily digestible if broken down into sections. Short segments will help students retain information as the class discusses the materials. It can also help students gain confidence in understanding a complex subject. Each student has their own style of reading, they need to be given the opportunity to lead the reading. Students process reading materials and curriculum in completely different ways. As the teacher completes reading assignments to help your class learn difficult material, you will learn what works best for each individual student. By incorporating more reading activities into curricula, students will find improvements in vocabulary, writing skills, problem solving, concentration, and cognitive development to help build a solid foundation for future learning.

This article emphasizes the idea that many strategies influence processes of understanding. All of these strategies work together to create a meaningful process easily and effectively. Based on the results of this study, it is concluded that reading materials and tasks should be very attractive to students so that they can easily understand the text, and they should be related to the level of students' proficiency. Teachers have a great responsibility to motivate their students to read these materials, they must be very sensitive to their students' understanding difficulties and must help their students change their outlook on reading and have a positive attitude towards their reading activities so they can do better. understand different texts.

See also

References

1. McNamara, D.S., & Magliano, J. P. (2009). Towards a comprehensive model of understanding. In B. Rose (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (pp.297-384). New York, NY: Academic Press.
2. Duke, N. (2003). Comprehension instruction for informational text. Presentation at the annual meeting of the Michigan Reading Association, Grand Rapids, MI.
3. Hedge (2003) Reciprocal Teaching Strategies and Their Impacts on English Reading Comprehension. Theory and Practice in Language Studies
4. Hafiz and Tudor (1989) Intensive Reading English Teaching Professional, 28.

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