STRATEGIC AND ENGAGED READERS
The why and how of reading comprehension are tackled, respectively, through engagement and strategy on the part of the reader. While there are certainly external forces that can affect a reader’s ability to comprehend a text, engagement and the ability to implement strategies (whether consciously or not) while reading are central to reading success.
Reading comprehension success depends on a lot that happens even before the reader begins the process of decoding the text. An engaged reader is interested, motivated and prepared, reads with a sense of purpose, and actively creates meaning from the text.
An engaged reader is interested because s/he can make connections, most often to their personal life or to prior knowledge. It might be content knowledge gained through other reading, through conversations or direct learning experience, or it might be personal experience (perhaps a book has a family or emotional situation with a character that the reader can identify with). More challenging are abstract connections, like picking up on the style of writing that’s similar to another piece, or reading about life in another country and understanding how certain practices are part of broader cultural expressions. Students who come to a piece of writing without background knowledge that allows them to make some sort of connections will struggle to make sense of the text.
Creating connections is what makes meaning out of the text for the reader, but those connections are also what can help make the reading process purposeful. A reader who sees no relevance to his or her life or goals (either short-term or long-term) will have difficulty engaging with the text. For some students, the purpose of getting a grade could be motivation, for others it’s their own curiosity, or it might be content that relates to an activity they want to do, like directions for something to build or an event they want to attend.
Even if a reader is engaged, if they are not actively employing at least one, and better several, strategies, they will find difficulty in getting the most from a text. Some of the most powerful strategies are best done in advance of reading -- things like activating prior knowledge, previewing the text structure, and predicting what sort of information or events are to be contained in the piece. Others are done during the process, where the reader is checking for understanding and re-reading, deciding what to skim and what to read more slowly and carefully, visualizing elements from the text, and continually making inferences and and posing questions to oneself. At the end, the strategic reader reviews the information and knits more of the meaning and connections together. All of this may be done fairly automatically by a skilled reader.
A strategic reader is an experienced reader. The range of skills that one might activate while reading is high, and it’s difficult to give proper attention to the content when one is focused on practicing a specific skill. As with playing an instrument, as the reader can become more automatic with decoding and comprehension skills, it is easier to focus the mind on creating meaning.
CONNECTIONS
All of our texts put a lot of emphasis on what happens before the reader begins a book or article. I have had many discussions with reading teachers in my school about how much they need to build up students’ background knowledge, and there are always conversations with teachers across the school about what our middle schoolers don’t know. But I don’t think I had really understood its central importance in literacy. One teacher told me yesterday that she asked a student to tell her how bees and wasps are similar. The student couldn’t answer something like, “They’re both insects that sting,” because she didn’t know what a wasp was (or a hornet as it turned out). This is the sort of information that a child from a family with parents who read to them and have robust everyday conversations, who have the good fortune of experiences out of the house and interactions with many people, would likely be able to easily answer the question.
The importance of posing questions while one is reading, of visualizing and making inferences - those are all habits of a strong reader that every article mentioned. Because all that cognitive work happens so invisibly and automatically in a proficient reader, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it’s effortless. It’s not that it happens without effort, it’s that the practiced reader can self-monitor and do these activities almost unconsciously. It’s important to unpack all of this for our students so that the less skilled readers can see that it is more about the work, and not all about some inborn level of talent. We have to make visible the act of reading comprehension, to show it as an act of creation and not a passive activity.
There is a lot of talk of creating scaffolds for students in schools, but the readings had many examples that showed how to begin with more modeling and structure and gradually release control to the students. I fear that the scaffolds we provide are supports that they become dependent upon, while the focus of the strategies discussed in our readings was to create a path where the student is able to become more independent over time. The need for scaffolds can feel like a sign of weakness, while the use of strategies is one of strength.
IMPLICATIONS/QUESTIONS/CRITIQUES
One common thread in the readings that I found but that I felt did not receive sufficient attention is that of time spent reading. Buehl talks about “what proficient readers do as a matter of habit,” and Duke & Pearson mention that good comprehension instruction “includes both explicit instruction in specific comprehension strategies and a great deal of time and opportunity for actual reading, writing, and discussion of text.” The Common Core standards ask that students “habitually perform the critical reading necessary.” No one expects to be proficient at a sport or playing an instrument without a lot of practice. Certain aspects of reading must become automatic and habitual, you must be able to offload decoding and basic strategic activities to background brain activities so the hard work of creating understanding can happen. I fear that many of our students, even (perhaps especially some of our brightest) spend nowhere near enough time reading. In the past there were far fewer choices of entertainment and children had many fewer demands on their time. We need to model reading, to make time in the school day and in family time, and to give reading importance in our daily lives, and also recognize the reading that we don’t think of as “real” reading. We need to help students see how all reading is not the same -- not that some is less valuable than others, but that different genres and contexts require different skills and approaches.
What is the solution to issues around background knowledge? Some programs push early literacy with parents, encouraging them to read or just talk to their children more. Some, like author Natalie Wexler, argue that the curriculum in our schools is too focused on skills and not enough on content -- that we need to better embed the skills across our curriculum and spend more time teaching content. Field trips and arts/enrichment programs and elective courses take on greater importance when we understand that a life with rich experiences allows one to make much deeper intellectual connections. I would like to know more about connections between lack of background knowledge as it impacts reading ability and socio-economic backgrounds. What are the implications for what our neediest students should get in school? Probably a lot fewer pull-outs for skills lessons and more content with the skills embedded and more interactions with their peers.
Engaging students with text that is authentic to their needs and their lives is critical. I want to know more about how they can see themselves as part of a community of readers, both inside what they are reading and in the real-world community where they live their lives and share ideas. If reading is to help them achieve their goals, we need to understand what those goals are and how reading connects to them -- and help them to see those connections.
Finally, I am curious to know more about reading comprehension research and strategies across the globe. How do they differ across cultures and languages?
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