Reading Comprehension

I am repeatedly amazed at the way students are asked to read in class.

Secondary school students are presented with a text and are expected to be able to read. This goes back to primary school; students are taught to decode and get practice at reading aloud. They are asked questions to ascertain their level of comprehension. In my experience they are rarely taught how to 'attack' a text. They are rarely taught how to understand what they are reading.

I work with mainstream secondary school teachers to help them enable their students to access written work, encouraging them to teach the following four main strategies:

1. Identifying unknown words.
2. Working out what the unknown word means.
3. Inferencing.
4. Answering questions about the text.

These strategies are collated onto a bookmark made by each student. The student has therefore invested time and effort into writing the strategies down, and the bookmark serves as a reminder of the strategies which helps embed the strategies into everyday life.

Strategy 1 - identifying unknown words
I think this is the most important strategy that a student can employ. If you are not aware that you don't know what a word means, you will not work out what it means and you will probably not understand the text. Many teachers I work with are surprised by how many students are not able to underline or highlight or circle a word that they do not understand. If a student finds identifying an unknown word difficult, then the next strategy is less likely to be effective. So identifying a difficult word needs to be worked upon until a student can successfully find a word he doesn't know before moving to working out what it might mean.

Strategy 2 - working out what the unknown word means
Clearly this strategy is extremely important if a student is going to understand a text. There are several levels to the strategy:
i.) WORD LEVEL

• Read the word, say it 5 times
• Break it into parts (syllables)
• Look at the beginnings (pre-, dis-, un-, etc) and endings (-est, -less, -ful, etc)

ii.) SENTENCE LEVEL

• Read the whole sentence
• What type of word is it? - noun, adjective, verb etc
• Think of another word that means the same thing

iii.) WHOLE TEXT LEVEL

• Think about the whole text. Do the possible meanings you have thought of make sense?

iv.) LOOK IT UP AND LEARN IT

• Ask someone
• Look the word up in a dictionary or thesaurus or use www.dictionary.com

Strategy 3 - inferencing
This strategy helps students to read 'between the lines' It encourages students to read the text again and think about the literal meaning as well as the implied meanings. Like Strategy 2 there is a mnemonic covering the steps - KWL:

i.) what do I Know?

• Look at headlines
• Look at pictures
• What's the source?
• What world knowledge do I bring?

ii.) what do I Want to know?

• What is the text about?
• Who are the characters?
• Why has the text been written?

iii.) what have I Learned?

• What do I know now that I didn't know before?

Inferencing is a difficult thing to teach as it requires students to have some level of world knowledge as well as some detailed vocabulary, e.g. knowledge that 'bill' has more than one meaning. It is worth teaching students that things are not always as they seem; even if they don't understand what is implied, as long as they can grasp that not all texts should be taken literally, it will stand them in good stead for future and may provide additional motivation to improve their vocabulary.

Strategy 4 - answering questions about the text
This strategy uses a mnemonic to help students to 'attack' a text: C.H.U.C.K.
C - circle the question number with a coloured pen.
H - highlight the important words in the sentence e.g. the wh- question (what/why etc) and any other main words
U - underline relevant words in the text in the same colour used to circle the question number. Some of the words may match the important question words; they'll probably be in order of the questions, e.g. relevant words for question 1 will be near the start of the text, then the relevant words for question 2 etc.
C - create your answer. Students can use the words they have highlighted in the question, and underlined in the text to 'build' their answer. The idea is that the students, by studying the text in more detail than they would normally due to carrying out these steps, will understand the text better, so are more likely to be able to answer questions.
K - now you know. This one is a bit of a cheat, and is just to finish the word!

Once the students have invested the time and effort into making their own bookmarks detailing these strategies, I find they are familiar with them and are willing to use them. I ensure that teachers keep hold of the bookmarks and give them out when they are required as in my experience students consistently lose them! I know of students who have left my sessions and have taught their peers how to use these strategies: surely the best endorsement I could hope for.

I hope that readers of this blog use these strategies: they work and help students to access texts that they have not been able to read. The most important thing is to provide a framework whereby students can 'attack' a text rather than taking a quick look and rejecting it immediately.

If you need further guidance, tweet me: @johncaneslt