The readings for this week discussed teaching reading strategies to aid comprehension. Several questions were answered. I will address the following: which students need strategy instruction? Do they need to be metacognitively aware of which strategies they are using? What does integration of strategies mean? How can teachers help students make the leap from guided practice to independence? What is inferring and when is it used?
Who needs strategy instruction? Having access to strategies that help make meaning from text is useful to every reader. However, this does not mean that all students will need the same instruction in using comprehension strategies. I, for example, do not remember hearing about 'strategies' as an elementary student, but I still developed a reading process system to help me decode texts that I find difficult. This is proof that students don't necessarily have to be metacognitively aware of what they're doing in order to be successful. In some cases, asking students to be metacognitively aware of their reading process system will only slow them down! But every reader will, at some point in their lives, encounter texts whose meaning will take effort to decode. The key is to provide students with texts that will push them to use explicit strategies in elementary school, rather than letting them coast until college. They should receive explicit strategy instruction until they no longer need it - this seems obvious, but in actuality requires close monitoring.
What does integration of strategies mean? This simply means that students can move between strategies with ease in order to make meaning. In certain circumstances, using context to decode a word is more useful than making a text to life connection,and visa versa. Students should be fluent in a multitude of strategies, have an instinct about which one to use in which scenario, and be able to move on to another strategy if their first choice did not work. They must also recognize when they need to use a strategy to make meaning from a text (self-monitoring) even if they do not need to recognize when they use strategies automatically.
How can teachers help students move from one guided instruction to independence? Again, this transition must be based on the students' progress. Some students will learn what they need to from modeling, and added instruction will only be boring and pedantic tot hem (the dangers of busy work!!). Other students will need help transitioning. This can take the form of shared demonstration, which is still mostly teacher -guided, or guided practice, which is student initiated with close teacher monitoring and guidance as needed. There is no hard and fast answer to this question. The student must dictate their own progress and the teacher must be ready to assist as needed. Fair does not always mean equal! One quote I found summed this up well: "the teacher's job is not delivering knowledge, but arranging for the problem to be manageable, sustaining the child's problem-solving attempts emphasizing flexibility" (Johnson and Keier, 137).
What is inferring? Inferring is a very broad strategy, which can cause confusion for teachers and students alike. One passage from this reading was particularly useful. "Students can learn to infer at the text level (...new or unusual vocabulary), the text level (predicting what might happen or inferring something about the setting, characters, or plot), and beyond the text level (theme, author's perspective, and so on). Inferring refers to the mulititude of strategies readers can use to "read between the lines"
I would like to conclude with a short anecdote about a student that I was very proud of in Thursday. She's a 6th grader who was reading The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, an old favorite of mine. I asked her where she was in the book and she told me that Edmund had sneaked away from the Beavers' house and Lucy had just noticed. This was the perfect place for a prediction, one of the. Strategies covered in this week'sreading from 'CatchingReaders Before They Fall'. Predicting is one of the inferring strategies. It allows the reader to take what they know about the characters! He setting, their knowledge of human nature, etc, to predict what will happen next, thereby engaging with the text. Part of the reason I was so happy with this particular experience was that I could see that working with me really helped. In this class, students are expected to write three responses to their Independant Reading per week. This could be any comprehension strategy that they have practiced so far. His girl had been having trouble getting her responses in, not because she was not engaging with the text but because she struggled with getting ideas to write, getting started, and staying on task with the writing component. By. Talking through her ideas with me first and with me helping her stay on task and remember all the points she made, she wrote not one, but 2 excellent predictions. The first was that Edmund would go the Witch's house, but she would be angry he hadn't brought his siblings and his siblings would have to brave her house to rescue him. The second was that he would go to Aslan and his siblings would join him. They would raise an army of animals and defeat the White Witch. Between the two, she predicted almost exactly what would happen! It was great! All she needed was a little extra guidance before moving on to he Independant stage.
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