Choice Words - Johnston Ch. 7 & Essential Elements of Fostering and Teaching Reading Comprehension Duke, Pearson, Strachan, Billman [10/27]
Essential Elements...
"If learning to read effectively is a journey toward ever-increasing ability to comprehend texts, then teachers are the tour guides, ensuring that students stay on course, pausing to make sure they appreciate the landscape of understanding, and encouraging the occasional diversion down an inviting and interesting cul-de-sac or byway." p. 51
10 Essential Elements of Effective Reading Comprehension Instruction
Build disciplinary and world knowledge: "The amount of related domain or world knowledge that a reader brings to a text significantly affects that reader's comprehension of that text..." p. 56
Provide exposure to a volume and range of texts: "It is widely accepted that effective and engaged comprehenders tend to read more that their struggling counterparts. Particularly, the volume of experiences students have interacting with texts both in and out of the classroom significantly correlates with their overall reading success." p. 58
Provide motivating texts and contexts for reading: "Motivated reading behavior is characterized by students valuing and engaging in the act of reading with expectations of success and with greater persistence and stamina when encountering difficulty; as such motivation is directly tied to personal interest and self-efficacy as well as achievement." p. 60
Teach strategies for comprehending: "Effective teachers of reading comprehension help their students develop into strategic, active readers, in part, by teaching them why, how, and when to apply certain strategies shown to be used by effective readers." p. 63 List of Strategies: setting purposes for reading, previewing and predicting, activating prior knowledge, monitoring, clarifying, and fixing, visualizing and creating visual representations, drawing inferences, self-questioning and thinking aloud, summarizing and retelling. Five Stages the Use of Strategy Gradually Transfers from the Teacher to the Student: 1. An explicit description of the strategy and when and how it should be used. 2. Teacher and/or student modeling of the strategy in action. 3. Collaborative use of the strategy in action. 4. Guided practice using the strategy with gradual release of responsibility. 5. Independent use of the strategy. p. 64-66
Teach text structures: "...the role that knowledge of text structure plays in recalling and comprehending text has been well established." p. 68
Engage students in discussion: "Recognizing that comprehension is an active and often collaborative process of making meaning, effective teachers of reading comprehension tend to employ classroom discussion to help readers work together to make meaning from the texts they encounter." p. 71
Build vocabulary and language knowledge: "The relationship of language and vocabulary to reading comprehension is well established." Several broad conclusions: vocabulary impacts comprehension, it is learned incidentally while reading and listening to books, repeated exposure (especially in different contexts) is the key to learning word meanings, pre-reading instruction of keywords can be helpful, computerized programs seem to increase vocabulary knowledge." p. 74
Integrate reading and writing: "...reading and writing usually reinforce one another and rely on some of the same cognitive processes." p. 76
Observe and assess: "There are many different ways to comprehend a text, and readers bring different strengths and weaknesses to the process." p. 79
Differentiate instruction: "Students have different strengths and weaknesses with respect to comprehension, suggesting the need for different foci for and kinds of instruction." p. 81
"These practices should be implemented within a gradual release of responsibility model, incrementally turning over responsibility for meaning-making practices from teacher to student, then cycling back through this release with increasingly complex texts, while simultaneously employing instructional approaches that include several essential elements of effective comprehension instruction." p. 52
Advantages of Skilled Readers:
greater facility with text processing
greater stores of knowledge
more readily able to integrate broader arrays of relevant elements
more motivated and engaged readers
Choice Words Ch. 7
"The social relationships within which they (children) learn are a part of their learning. Children, just like adults, learn better in a supportive environment in which they can risk trying out new strategies and concepts and stretching themselves intellectually." p. 65
"...use language to build caring and respectful learning communities, communities that are playful, but in which participants take each other's ideas seriously in the process of getting things done. A basic property of such communities is that they have some shared understanding of the situation and activity in which they are jointly engaged. This does not mean that they all agree, but they agree to try to understand each other to become mutually involved." p. 65-66
"We want communities that provide democratic and evolutionary intellectual environments." p. 66
Use language that:
helps students connect their feelings to effective group processes along the way helping ensure that they actually seek such processes at the same time placing themselves in potential learning situations. p. 66
leads to greater shared understanding and affiliation, and a sense of caring. p. 67
develop children's social imaginations in a way that also allows them to see that stories are told from a perspective and that other perspectives are not equally represented. p. 67
invites them to say positive things to about each other p. 68
draws students' attention to problems, reminds them of the reason they listen to each other and the respect that normally characterizes the community p. 68
initiates the experience of "thinking together" - intermental development zone p. 69
encourages students to seek and articulate warrants and logic for their positions and experiencing conceptual growth p. 69-70
encourages students to have personal conversations with their classmates p. 71
provides a narrative of democratic living p. 71
demonstrates a way in which others' contributions can be beneficial to one's own thinking --even if one is a teacher p. 72
"Democratic living is about social problem-solving." p. 73
"More of our problem-solving is social than individual...becoming more accomplished at individual problem-solving requires the ability to profit from and internalize collaborative problem-solving. As individuals we can evolve only within the limits of our social environment and the discursive tools it offers us." p. 73
"Strong democracy requires that we have a learning society." p. 74










