Jessica Barwick: November Blog

Chapter 8: Teach Comprehension

I skipped over chapters that I thought would be more "fun" to focus on this one because comprehension is where I struggle the most as a reading teacher.  I was curious to see what strategies Routman suggests and how to utilize them in the classroom.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the strategies she suggests are ones that I'm using in my classroom, but I can always do a better job of focusing on practicing them and helping kids to identify them when they are using them.

As teachers, we do tend to teach strategies in isolation, from reading to math to writing.  Like Routman states, though, "while it's useful to practice a strategy as students are learning it, make sure that most of your comprehension instruction uses strategies interactively."  Re-reading is not the only strategy I use when I read.  I make connections and predictions simultaneously as I monitor myself for comprehension.  I feel like I do this well during class read-alouds, but I don't want to overwhelm students with too many strategies to practice on their own during independent reading.  So, we focus on one at a time and try to build so that they are seamlessly using a variety of strategies without even realizing it.

While I do believe that re-reading is the most helpful strategy (for students and for me, personally, as a reader), I feel that even more important is self-monitoring for comprehension.  You don't know if you have to re-read unless you realize you aren't making sense of the text.  I try to focus on this in conferences with students.  I explain that even I find myself either reading the words while zoning out at the same time, or maybe there are too many words I don't know in a passage.  So, I have to stop myself from continuing to read and back up.  Sometimes, I have to look for clues in the text to help me figure out words and other times I have to stop and look up a word or a place mentioned in the text so that I can make meaning out of what I'm reading.  While reading this chapter, I really thought about what I do as a reader (even the process of reading this chapter itself!), and I realized that my first step is always recognizing that I don't understand something.  Then, I can utilize comprehension strategies.  I would like to put the three questions on p. 125 in my room to help focus students while they are reading:  Does this make sense?  Does this sound like language?  Do I know what is happening in the text?

I also found it interesting that students "should know 95 percent or more of the words they encounter" in a text in order to make meaning (p. 127).  I try to push my students to read higher level books, but maybe I am pushing them outside of their ability to comprehend independently.  I have found in working with small groups that vocabulary is the #1 thing that limits understanding and frustrates my fifth graders.  Because of the background of many of our students, they are not exposed to much language and reading at home.  Their vocabulary is limited, and I have found that many of my fifth graders don't know what some even basic words mean, such as "increase" or "native" or "conflict."  Teaching my students how to use context clues or infer meaning is the best way I know to combat these deficiencies.  Even then, they are at a disadvantage when it comes to reading tests that don't provide sentences to help explain what a word means (like on STAR).

I will continue to practice the strategies outlined in this chapter in my classroom, but I will pay more attention now to making sure they are integrated and that I explain more what I do as a reader with  think-alouds.