Why are reading comprehension strategies important enough for me to blog about? They are too often overlooked or under-taught. According to the Reading Next report, "Very few older struggling readers (between fourth and twelfth grade) need help to read the words on a page; their most common problem is that they are not able to comprehend what they read (Biancarosa and Snow, 2004)." Students leaving middle school need to have reading comprehension strategies because the material they are expected to read in high school is increasingly difficult, and their inability to understand it affects their educational career (Anderson, 2006). I will be teaching at the secondary level one day; I will either be responsible for making sure middle school students are taught effective reading comprehension strategies, or I will be a high school teacher wishing someone had taught them before they made it to me.
If I was taught the strategies of making connections, visualizing, asking questions, inferring, determining importance, and synthesizing (Scholastic, 2005), I don't recall the explicit instruction. I was always adept at comprehending what I was reading; I think I took these steps or used these strategies naturally. When I started working as a para, the classrooms I worked in covered these, but did not emphasize them the way they have started to in the last two years or so. This school now has a non-credit class called Reading Strategies that all sixth through eighth graders take. I have seen students use technology to activate prior knowledge, to build background knowledge, to visualize, and to summarize information. Students can use the internet to look up unknown words using dictionary.com or Word Hippo; to make graphic organizers; to organize the events into a timeline using Popplet or Dippity; to visualize the settings or characters; or to build background knowledge by searching for keywords or the subject of the story/article/book. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg; there are many other websites that can be used to help with reading comprehension. I have been very impressed with the strategies I have seen taught and used firsthand, and with the websites available to help both teachers and students. I will delve deeper into websites used to test and develop reading comprehension skills - tools I plan to use in my own classroom - in my next blog post.
Anderson, D., (2006). In or Out: Surprises in Reading Comprehension Instruction. Intervention in School and Clinic, 41(3), p. 175-180.
Biancarosa, G., and Snow, C.E. (2004). Reading Next – A Vision for Action and Research in Middle and High School Literacy: A Report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.
Scholastic (2005). Retrieved May 24, 2014 from http://teacher.scholastic.com/LessonPlans/pdf/oct_nov05/9SixComprehension.pdf
