1. Elkhart Community Schools
Check Your
Understanding
Strategy 9
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2. Elkhart Community Schools
Proficient Readers
and Writers . . .
Problem solve
Repair reading
and writing
when meaning breaks down
It’s important to think about what kind of skills proficient readers use while reading. In order for readers and writers to repair meaning, they must possess a number of critical “fix-up” strategies.
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3. Elkhart Community Schools
Proficient readers monitor for meaning by…
knowing when the text they are reading makes sense and when it doesn’t.
identifying the degree to which they understand the text.
realizing the purpose for which they are reading.
~ Continued
Allow time for participants to read slide.
Good readers are extremely active as they read, using a variety of comprehension strategies.
Continued on the next slide.
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4. Elkhart Community Schools
Proficient readers monitor for meaning by…
flexibly using strategies.
thinking aloud about their reading process.
identifying confusing ideas, themes, or text structures.
reflecting on their understanding with other readers.
Allow time for participants to read slide.
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5. Elkhart Community Schools
Readers can solve meaning problems by . . .
using the systems
of language
asking themselves
“Does it make sense?”
selecting the most appropriate “fix up
strategies” from one of the systems of
language to restore meaningful reading
In the first example, Using the systems of language, we are referring to pragmatics, semantics, syntax, and graphophonics to solve reading problems.
In the next example, Asking questions, the students could also ask questions like –
“Does it sound like language?”
“Do the letters/sounds match?”
“Does it fit with the overall context/purpose?”
In the third example, Selecting the most appropriate fix-up Strategy, these strategies could include -
making predictions based on content
making an analogy
Later in the presentation we will discuss additional strategies.
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6. Elkhart Community Schools
“In Vygotskian terms,
the internalization of comprehension strategies involves long-term practice with the strategies, including opportunities to reflect on strategies used with others.”
~ Farstrup and Samuels
Read slide to participants.
According to Alan E. Farstrup and S. Jay Samuels in their book What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, “Metacognition, which is needed to use comprehension strategies well, can begin during direct teacher explanation and modeling of strategies, but develops most completely when students practice using comprehension strategies as they read.”
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7. Elkhart Community Schools
“An effective way to teach students how to make sense of text is to demonstrate it yourself as you read.”
~ (Davey, 1983; Pitts, 1983)
As the teacher, you have frequent opportunities to read aloud to students – stories, excerpts from textbooks, newspaper articles, and so on. As you do so, think aloud about how you are processing text – how you construct meaning, how you decide what’s important to know, how you relate information across sentences and paragraphs, how you deal with difficulties in making sense of the text, and so on.
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8. Six signs that you are stuck in the mud of not comprehending
The pictures inside your mind stop forming or moving.
Your questions and inferences are not getting answered.
Your mind wanders from the text; you read it but are thinking about something else.
~ Continued
Jeff Zwiers, in his book, Building Reading Comprehension Habits in Grades 6-12, provides a checklist to help students notice when they are not comprehending. Take a moment and read through these.
Click ahead to the next slide for numbers 4-6.
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9. Six signs that you are stuck in the mud of not comprehending
The current page has nothing to do with what you thought the big picture or author’s purpose was for the text.
You cannot summarize the last few paragraphs or pages.
Characters appear and you cannot remember who they are.
It is especially important when teachers are modeling the process of reading that they include opportunities to demonstrate when they are “in the mud of not comprehending” and how they fix it.
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“Fix Up” Strategies
Rereading
Reading ahead
Making predictions
Drawing inferences
Raising new questions
Figuring out unknown words
Seeking help from outside sources
Strickland, Ganske, & Monroe
Dorothy Strickland, in her book Supporting Struggling Readers and Writers, states, “Very few of us who read easily would continue reading in confusion. Instead, we would identify the part of the text where comprehension initially broke down and then use strategies to regain our understanding before we continue to read.”
The strategies listed on the screen are some of the first we would want to share with students.
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11. Elkhart Community Schools
Resources ~
Strategies That Work ~ Harvey and Goudvis
Mosaic of Thought ~ Keene and Zimmermann
Supporting Struggling Reading and Writers ~ Strickland, Ganske, and Monroe
I Read It, But I Don’t Get It! ~ Cris Tovani
Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? ~ Cris Tovani
On Solid Ground ~ Sharon Taberski
What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction ~ Farstrup and Samuels
There are many resources we can use when we work with students. The Reading Strategies Notebooks, in our professional library, have a great deal of information.
The professional resources listed on the screen will assist as you work with your students to add “fix up” strategies to their repertoire of reading skills.
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