Reading comprehension is personal and eclectic.

How do you explain how to understand? How can you make sense of how to make sense? When it comes to teaching reading comprehension, these are things you must be able to talk about and demonstrate. There is no master plan for this because different students have different needs. Some students learn to comprehend what they read without ever having a discussion about it, while some require demonstration and guided practice. We can model how we use strategies, allow students to converse about these demonstrations, and guide them into working independently.

Last semester I observed a multiage classroom, grades 1-2-3, and in the beginning I wondered how it was possible to teach a wide range of students reading and writing skills when they are all at such different levels. It wasn’t long until I was continually amazed at how the teacher’s lessons and demonstrations could be interpreted by students age six to ten. The class would come together for directions before starting their writer’s workshop or independent reading time, and during that time she would read part of a story or go over a piece of her writing with the whole class. The focus would range from persuasive writing to following a character’s emotions in the story to understand how he or she is feeling. She would always think-out-loud, and share with the class what strategies helped her become a better reader and writer.

One great example of a shared demonstration was when this teacher was going to read aloud a book about one of the class’s favorite characters—Poppleton. The focus of the mini-lesson was to pay attention to the characters feelings and how they change throughout the story. They knew Poppleton well, so it was a great book for this. They made a list on large chart paper of the character’s traits, which stay the same, and the character’s feelings, which change as you read. The students contributed what they knew about Poppleton; he is “calm, patient, kind, and quieter.” As she read, everyone paid close attention to his feelings, and raised their hands when his emotions changed. They wrote the feelings on post-it notes and stuck them on the pages. He started out happy, then became annoyed, then felt awful, and then happy again. She explained how thinking about Poppleton’s feelings helped her understand the story better, because she knew how the character was feeling because of what was happening. Then they went off to practice this on their own, putting post-it notes with emotions in the books they were reading.

I came to realize that this worked so well was because she was modeling strategies that work for her, and explaining how students could use it when they are reading. Every student must figure out what works best for them, and eventually develop their own system of reading for meaning. For some students maybe this strategy really helped, and perhaps some students were already there. Pat Johnson’s example of reading a newspaper article to answer her questions in Catching Readers Before They Fall reminded me of this example.

The bottom line is that reading comprehension is personal and unique to every student. Despite what the authorities are telling teachers to teach when it comes to reading, I am coming to find that the best teachers know to follow the students. Check in with them, monitor their progress, have little conferences, and really get to know them and their abilities. Only then will you know what they really need to work on, and what strategies may help them get where they are going—in a way that makes sense to them.

Don't you read what you want to read?

I have been observing elementary classrooms for the past few months. There have been aspects of the daily classroom agenda that I have witnessed, even helped out with, but not understood the logic behind. One example of this is leveled reading, which I have helped out with, usually in 15 to 20 minute increments. Naturally, different groups of children have responded to their leveled-guided reading groups in different ways. I have seen eight-year-olds partner up and read about rivers and glaciers enthusiastically, and I have also seen students who cannot approach this as an authentic reading experience because the text is something they could care less about.

After reading Let’s Start Leveling about Leveling by Glasswell & Ford, I have come to realize that reading is a very powerful and complex process that should not be simplified down to numbers and levels. More than anything, students need interesting text; they need to be engaged with what they are reading. Even if a book is above a student’s level, if they are intrigued by it, as teachers and parents we should celebrate this. Glasswell & Ford (2011) say, “Books are just books in the end. And while it’s easy to be critical of certain materials, they are usually neither inherently bad nor good. What matters more is the way they are used; it is this that determines the potential impact they can have.”

We need to keep in mind how these systems are created, who our children are, and what reading is about. These systems are designed mathematically, using criteria like number of words, number of pages, skills like “word identification accuracy,” and then assigns a letter to represent their ability on a ladder which children are expected to steadily climb. Children, on the other hand, are young people. They are human beings with imaginations, personal interests, and exponential learning capacities. I can’t help but think that if I was eight years old (or six years old, or ten years old), and I finally had the power to read, that I would want to use that power to find out about what I am interested in. Readers have the right to enjoy reading. After all, it is a language created for humans to communicate. And that is personal.

In the end, the judgment of the teacher—who knows their students’ interests and abilities—is more valuable than what a system of leveled books suggests. I plan to collect a library of children’s books on a wide range of subjects, fiction and non-fiction, to engage a wide range of readers. I think that students should get to choose books that interest them, and that they should be provided large amounts of time to read independently for enjoyment during the school day.

Vocabulary, in systems

Over the weekend I listened to a podcast on Voice of Literacy, with Dr. Neuman of the University of Michigan. She traveled the country researching programs that concentrate on vocabulary in the very early elementary years. She found that teachers at middle school and high school levels assume vocabulary lessons are taught at the primary level, but they are not. Out of 55 different schools visited, there were no planned lessons in vocabulary. It appeared that explicit vocabulary instruction was missing from the curriculum.

Dr. Neuman tells teachers and parents, “Focus more explicitly on vocabulary development early on.” This is why she has launched “World of Words”—or “WOW” as it is called—encouraging young children to become word-conscious. Young children deserve to have a curriculum that can accelerate vocabulary knowledge so that they can go into the latter grades of elementary school prepared, knowing the appropriate words to talk about ideas in science, social studies, and math.

Children need to have a self-teaching mechanism to work from. Yes, children learn from their teachers and their modeling of strategies, but children also need to learn on their own. One way that this can be setup for children is to teach words in categories or groups. When there are categories of words (ex. apple, strawberry, mango, banana), the child will have the opportunity to recognize the word itself, as well as how it is connected to a particular group. Systems like these help children organize their ideas and connect new knowledge to what they already know, expanding their schema. Now when they hear, “A pear is a kind of fruit,” they can make connections to the other fruits they know, enhancing their conceptual development.

These somewhat abstract ideas and strategies can be illustrated to children with charts. In an article called Schema, Miller says that “Charting holds thinking—it makes our thinking public and permanent, and traces our works together.” Being able to see your thoughts mapped out is a great advantage, and children love seeing their thoughts too, up in front of the class. It shows them that they are an integral part of the lesson and that their thoughts are important.

Dr. Neuman says that the bottom line is “oral language comprehension is the foundation of early literacy development.” She encourages us to engage in responsive talking with kids, and work on their agenda. Listen to what they have to say, use intelligent language, and answer all of their questions—even if it’s nonstop. These children are learning from us, so it is important not to talk down to them, but to use interesting words like fatigue, as Dr. Neuman suggests. Hearing new words perks up children’s minds and gets them thinking in new ways. Providing systems for them to organize and remember these words—even better.

Plateau? "Sound it out."

I specifically remember a time when I mispronounced a word in fourth grade. We were in geography class, popcorn reading our textbook, and it was my turn. I was a very proficient reader and usually loved reading out loud to show off my skills. However, on this particular day, in this particular unit, there was a new word for me—one that I had heard before, but had never seen in writing—one I could not sound out letter by letter. The word was “plateau.” I was reading loud and proud and tried to keep my cool when approaching the word. I tried to maintain my rhythm of confident reading as I frantically sounded it out in my head. Out of my mouth came the word “plat-TAY-yoo” and even before any of the other nine and ten year olds in my class started laughing, I knew that it didn’t sound right.

Popcorn reading is belittling for this reason. If I had been reading this on my own, I could have tried it a few different ways without the pressure of an audience. If I had thought about the context, or looked at the landscape diagram in the picture I could have figured it out. There is no way to sound out “plateau” in English, yet there are other avenues I could have gone to figure it out.

Whether or not you grew up using “sound it out” as your reading strategy for difficult words, you are probably familiar with it. You make the sound of each letter in a tricky word, blend the sounds together, and are able to say the word. Right? As it turns out, you cannot effectively “sound out” 40 to 50 percent of the English language. It really makes you wonder why the National Reading Panel Report and No Child Left Behind advocate systematic synthetic phonics (Compton-Lilly, 2005).

What children, parents, and teachers need to know is that there are other strategies for figuring out tricky words that are much more helpful. There are visual and structural cues to pick up on, as well as thinking about the meaning of what the words say together. Readers can ask themselves, “Does it look right?” along with, “Does it sound right?” and of course, “Does it make sense?” As fluent speakers, children have a great understanding of their language in spoken form—they can use this to their benefit when it comes to written language.

When helping a child learn to read, it is crucial to not only model different strategies for figuring out words, but to call those strategies what they are. It may sound obvious, but if you are demonstrating how to look at the structure of the sentence to check to see if a word looks right, you would not call this “sounding it out” because that is not what you are doing. Similarly, if you are breaking the word into chunks that you know and saying the sounds together, explain that you are doing that. If you are looking at the picture or the rest of the words for clues as to what a certain word is, then explain that. If children hear adults repeatedly tell them to “sound it out” when they mean something else, then the child is at a loss of what to do.

 

As Johnson and Keier (2010) say in their book, Catching Readers Before They Fall,

“If we expect children to predict, search for, and gather information from the various sources of information; reread; and check and confirm predictions, then we need to model how to do those things” (p. 67).