Reading Comprehension

When working with young readers, it is important for teachers to remember that comprehension is the ultimate goal. The aim is not to drill into students a series of isolated comprehension strategies. We want young students to understand what they read, but we must remember that comprehension strategies are simply means to that end. As Johnson and Keier point out in Catching Readers Before They Fall, most readers develop effective reading comprehension skills without really being aware of any specific strategy that they are using. In fact, for proficient readers who have developed good comprehension skills on their own, a prolonged focus on naming and developing prescribed strategies can have the negative effect of slowing down their reading and draining their enjoyment from it. For all other young students who continue to struggle with comprehension, it is important to remember that a reader does not simply use one specific comprehension strategy at a time. A reader will not make much use of strategies such as questioning, visualizing, making connections, or searching for information if she is focusing on one strategy at a time. All of these strategies must work together in order for good comprehension to occur.

While it may be impossible or at least impractical to try to teach specific strategies one at a time, there are ways to integrate comprehension strategies into lessons. It is important to begin by modeling how an authentic comprehension strategy is used, then move through shared demonstrations and guided practice. The end goal is to have young readers be able to self-initiate these strategies. Throughout this process, it is necessary to monitor students' progress with tools such as miscue analysis.

Just as it is important to see comprehension strategies as part of an integrated whole, it is important to assess readers in a way that is not preoccupied with specific numbers. In order to keep our attention on the whole student, Dr. Wohlwend suggests the use of spider charts which give a more unified visual representation of a students strengths and opportunities for improvement. Using this type of chart, teachers are reminded that, like reading comprehension itself, students cannot be viewed as being made up of isolated parts.

Leveled Texts: A Level Playing Field?

As someone relatively new to the world of elementary education, I have only recently been exposed to the use of leveled books. On the surface, it seems like leveling systems should work. A student gets a book from  a particular basket, is given the corresponding mini-lesson, and is assessed with the appropriate test. It makes sense. But I am finding that the way actual children actually read does not easily fit into this kind of prescribed formula.

As Glasswell and Ford point out in Let's Start Leveling about Leveling, reading is a complex act that occurs at the intersection of numerous factors including the reader's motivation, subject knowledge, and vocabulary, the text's content, format, and author's purpose, and contextual factors such as physical setting and emotional climate. Leveling ignores these and many other factors, reducing these interactions to simply assessing oral reading, assigning a reading level, and giving the student a book from a basket. Is it the right book?

My most immediate concern is how leveling can actually exacerbate students' difficulties in reading, particularly those students who are assessed below their grade level and below the reading levels of their peers. As Glasswell and Ford note, if teachers follow the prescribed pacing guide for these students, they will fall increasing farther behind those students who are assessed as reading at or above grade level. While the more proficient readers benefit from the experience of reading  books with more complex language and larger word counts, the struggling readers receive less practice as they continue to read simpler and shorter books. Over time this gap widens. As I have seen, eventually these struggling students find themselves tasked with reading books that are well below there interest level. For these students, reading is no longer engaging or authentic. It becomes a chore they hope to avoid.

As Owocki and Goodman note in chapter 6 of Kidwatching, leveling can inhibit the development of effective reading strategies for students who are only given simplistic, single sentence per page books. Instead, these students may build confidence in taking risks with more complicated books beyond their reading level.

Ultimately, a teacher's judgement of what is appropriate for a particular student may be more useful than the criteria used for leveling. As Glasswell and Ford suggest, the time and effort spent assigning levels to books and students may be better spent on building rich and varied classroom libraries that can provide students with enjoyable and authentic reading experiences.

Use Real Language

To celebrate my son's 2nd birthday,we visited the Indianapolis Children's Museum this weekend. It is a tradition that we started last year and one that I hope to continue (unfortunately, now that he has reached the ripe old age of two I am henceforth required to pay for his admission). As we wandered the museum, I was immediately reminded of my experience during the recent "literacy dig" I took part in and wrote about on January 20th. A children's museum is a prime example of numerous forms of literacy, with a multitude of signs, posters, placards, and video kiosks around every corner. What I found most interesting was observing how language aimed at  younger museum patrons is constructed.

In many cases, the various exhibits were accompanied by text that used straightforward and fairly technical vocabulary. Words like "geologic," "habitat," and "buoyancy" were used without simplifying the language to use words like "rocks," "homes," or "float." Yet, in other instances I found that some language was "dumbed down" in a sense. For example, in the dinosaur exhibit the words "carnivore" and "herbivore" were accompanied by or interchanged with the words "meat-eater" and "plant-eater."

In a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Baker for Voice of Literacy, Dr. Susan Neuman discusses how simplifying or "dumbing down" vocabulary for young children is an all too common mistake. In fact, Dr. Neuman suggests that using interesting and unusual words is more effective when engaging young children as they tend to "perk up" when they hear these words.While we may often underestimate them, Dr. Neuman suggests that "kids can learn much more difficult words than we assume." In Reading with Meaning, Debbie Miller shares a similar view as she insists, "use real language and standard terminology when talking with children... what you say and how you say it becomes what they say and how they say it!"

This attitude toward vocabulary is one that I personally hold. I make a conscious effort to not "dumb down" the language I use with young children. My son is currently exploring a very active interest in trains (the origins of which are a complete mystery to me). While we were at the children's museum, we spent an great deal of time perusing the steam engine exhibit. He is unfamiliar with the term "choo-choo."

When "Sound It Out" Isn't Enough

When many of us were learning to read, we were often to "sound out" words we were unfamiliar with. This would entail looking at each letter in a word and putting the sounds together. This method works fine for words like "cat" or "dog", but is less effective for words like "rhyme" or "cough". In practice, only about half of all words in the English language can be sounded out. Yet we often still find ourselves relying on this method as we tell young students to "sound out" words as they read.

You can probably read a sentence like, "Arocdnicg to rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are... " and you can probably read a sentence with a _____ in it. This is because you are not simply sounding out the words. You are using a number of strategies that rely on context, familiarity with the English language, and visual clues. In Catching Readers Before They Fall, Johnson and Keier describe these strategies as-

• Meaning: Using background knowledge, information from pictures, and context of the sentence or story. What makes sense.
• Structure: Using familiarity with the spoken English language. What sounds right.
• Visual: Using knowledge about letter/sound correspondence. What looks right.

You are not alone in using these strategies; even very early readers go beyond simply sounding out the words they read. Observe a young student reading aloud and you will see evidence of these strategies at work. The student may substitute words based on the context of the story or elements of the illustrations. "Dick and Jane go to the store" may be read as "Dick and Jane go to the mall." While these substitutions may be incorrect, they will probably make sense and sound right within the text. When the student relies solely on sounding words out, mistakes may result in the text no longer making sense. "Dick and Jane go to the store" may be read as "Dick and Jane go to the stop," which alters the sentence considerably.

The goal is to have students use all of the strategies simultaneously in order to read accurately. They should be able to make predictions based on what makes sense and what sounds right and then correct these predictions based on what looks right. Those of us who are fluent readers do this so automatically that we forget they we are using these strategies as we read. We then tell young students to read by "sounding it out."

"Sounding out" is an unfortunate oversimplification of the actual reading process. We must make an effort to alter this approach for the sake of young readers. As Catherine Compton-Lily writes in "Sounding Out": A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading, "The greater challenges reside in addressing a dominant cultural model of reading that offers a simple solution to the complicated task of learning to read."