Comprehension

The article “The Comprehension Matrix”, by Sharon Gill, is dedicated to understanding what comprehension is and how teachers can teach it.  It begins by pointing out that the idea of teaching comprehension can be overwhelming for teachers.  The article introduces the Comprehension Matrix which is an organizational tool that can help teachers understand and plan comprehension instruction.   The Comprehension matrix is composed of the three factors that affect comprehension: the reader, the text, and the situation.  According to the author, teachers need to understand how comprehension happens, which can be explained through schema theory, transactional theory, and constructivist theory.  Comprehension is also a process that starts before we begin reading, takes place while we are reading, and continues after we stop reading.  Most research on comprehension has focused on identifying the strategies used by good readers and then teaching students to use those strategies.  The Comprehension Matrix can help teachers develop activities for use during pre-reading, reading, and post-reading to help comprehension and the use of comprehension strategies.  Teachers must ask themselves several questions as they preview any text to determine what their students already know and what they need to know, and then they can use the matrix to develop appropriate instruction.  Laura Pardo’s article discusses what comprehension means and how teachers can help their students develop good comprehension.  The author presents a model of comprehension and then discusses each part and the teacher’s role.  The first part is the reader who engages with the text and teachers support readers by teaching decoding skills, building fluency, building and activating prior knowledge, motivating students, and engaging students in personal responses to texts.  The second part is the text; teachers support texts by teaching text structures, modeling good text selection, and providing independent reading time.  Another component to the comprehension model is the sociocultural context, which can be affected through environments that value reading, contain a variety of texts, and provide time for reading both aloud and independently.  The transaction part of the model is where comprehension takes place.  Teachers support transaction through explicit instruction of comprehension strategies, teaching students to monitor and repair, teaching multiple strategy approaches, providing scaffolding support, and by making reading and writing connections visible.  The author concludes by stating that comprehension instruction is crucial and should begin in kindergarten, and that teachers need to use the knowledge they have on how one learns to comprehend in order to plan classroom activities that will help readers develop the abilities to comprehend texts.  In “Kindergartners can do it too!” Gregory and Cahill use the example of Mrs. Hope’s kindergarten class to demonstrate that young children can learn comprehension just as older children can.  Young children are able to interact with text while using schemas, making connections, visualizing, asking questions, and making inferences.  The article pointed out that comprehension instruction certainly looks different for younger children as it is much more active and visible, but that young children are able to use these comprehension strategies in a manner similar to older children, with the result that they are better able to understand what they are reading.  The first point that Cunningham and Allington make in chapter seven of “Classrooms that Work” is that some children do not think while they read because they don’t know they should, and that when teachers over-emphasize accurate word pronunciation and give only beginning reading materials they may create readers who do not understand the purpose of reading and who do not comprehend the story.  According to the authors, in order to think while you read you have to be able to quickly identify the words, have sufficient background knowledge, be familiar with the text and how it is organized, and know that reading is thinking and how to apply that thinking through comprehension strategies.  Cunningham and Allington also suggest that teachers provide lots of modeling during initial comprehension strategy lessons, and then the responsibility should shift from teacher-as-model, to joint responsibility, to independent practice by the learner.  The authors conclude by sharing several, varied examples of comprehension lessons that they divide into four categories: literate conversations, think-alouds, informational text lessons, and story text lessons.

 

I found the article on the Comprehension Matrix very interesting.  Before reading this article, if someone asked me how I plan on teaching comprehension as a teacher, I would have told them I have no idea.  I agree with the idea that it seems teachers have always tested comprehension but never taught it; I know that was my experience in school.  Reading is so second nature that I have never really thought about the different factors you experience that might affect how you read, but having them listed in this article I realize how changing these factors in different ways may change how I read and how well I comprehend.  The Comprehension Matrix will definitely be a useful tool once I am in the classroom to help me come up with activities to use in a lesson focused on comprehension.  Pardo’s article was very similar in concept to the Comprehension Matrix article, but I like how this article provides a graphic model to represent how all the components of comprehension interact.  This article also gives a little more detail on how teachers can help foster the development of comprehension in their classrooms.  All the suggestions for how to teach comprehension include combinations of all the topics we have discussed in class up to this point including decoding strategies, fluency, and vocabulary.  I also really like how Pardo includes motivation as a key to helping students learn to comprehend.  We have been discussing all along how making activities fun and interesting helps students learn a variety of skills, therefore it makes sense that teaching comprehension is no different.  By motivating students to read through high-interest material and by giving purpose to the reading, teachers can really affect how much their students read, and thereby directly affect how well they learn to comprehend.  The article also points out how important independent reading time is, an idea we have seen in other articles; the common theme seems to be that practice makes perfect when it comes to the skills involved in reading.  “Kindergarteners can do it Too!” was a great article for me since I was beginning to wonder when reading the other articles how comprehension instruction would look for younger children.  I’m glad to know that the suggestions for teaching comprehension to older students can be altered for working with younger children.  It does make sense when you think about it; young children are very inquisitive and often able to pick up on new ideas very quickly if presented in the right way.  I’m sure this article will be very useful once I am in the classroom.  I really like how the chapter stresses the point that all types of text require different ways of thinking and comprehending since this is something I hadn’t really considered, my original thought was that if you can comprehend text well, you should be able to comprehend any text.  I also hadn’t really thought about the idea that children are better at comprehending stories than informational text; this will be important for me to remember as I become a teacher in the lower grades and it means I may have to spend more time teaching my students how to comprehend informational texts than stories.  The chapter offered lots of detailed examples for teaching a variety of comprehension strategies which I’m sure will come in very handy for my own classroom.  Like the Gill article, Cunningham and Allington point out that comprehension teaching occurs in very few classrooms and that you usually only see comprehension assessments given to students after they read something.  At the end of the chapter the authors point out that there is plenty of great information on ways to teach comprehension and that most of it is very similar in nature, so I think it’s good to know that there are numerous resources out there for teachers to call upon if they want/need to know more about how to teach comprehension in the classroom.