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Activating
Comprehension: Non-Fiction in the Classroom
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In order to help develop automaticity, I like to create personal word
boxes, small file boxes of word cards, for my students.
Students give the definition of the word on the card and use
the word in a sentence five times in a row. If the student
can do this correctly, I put a checkmark on the card. When
the student gets five checkmarks in a row, I say that the word
is automatic, and itęs placed at the back of the file box in
an –automatic” section to be reviewed later on. My students
are very proud of their boxes and many of them donęt want to
discard their automatic words. They save them from year to
year as they become more and more fluent and better able to
comprehend and appreciate what they read.
Teachers need to make students active participants in the learning
process right from the beginning. The most effective way is by
personalizing the assignment, and one of the most effective methods
for achieving this, as reporting in Reading First, is
by engaging the studentsę prior knowledge. The K-W-L model developed
by Donna Ogle is an excellent strategy to use when reading nonfiction
texts. This three-step process asks the students:
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What
do you know? |
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What
do you want to know? |
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What
did you learn? |
Before students read a story, ask them what they know about
the subject. If you are reading about Jerry Yang, the founder
of Yahoo!, ask your students what they know about searching
the Internet. Next, ask them what they would like to know about
it. After you have read the story, ask them to recall what they
have just learned. These are crucial exercises to help engage
students in the subject matter, and modeling is extremely important
in K-W-L. Think aloud so your students can listen to your exact
thinking process. Provide questions for the students to consider.
In Claims to Fame and Einsteinęs Who, What,
and Where, I have provided some model questions for students
to ask themselves before they even begin reading. Before students
read the story about women during World War II, I ask –What have
you done to help your community or your country?” Before students
read about the transcontinental railroad, I ask –Why is it important
for a country to have a good transportation system?” Before they
read a passage about the battle to end segregation, I ask –When
you see something unfair happening, what do you do?” Activating
prior knowledge of the subject not only makes students think
about what they are about to read, but also helps teachers understand
and appreciate what each child brings to the reading experience.
You can use the K-W-L strategy before, during, and after reading.
You might want to ask some children to read their answers aloud.
Demonstrate how you would answer such questions and verbalize
your thought processes. Once your students have learned this
strategy through modeling and practice, you can have them work
in small groups, in pairs, or individually, and apply it to all
kinds of texts.
Remember that text comprehension is both purposeful and active.
With high-interest nonfiction texts and strategies such as K-W-L,
we give students a purpose for reading and learning. We also
must encourage our students to be active readers in order to
achieve their purpose, to get the very most from a text, and
we can do this by teaching them specific strategies proven to
increase comprehension (Armbruster et al., 2000; Snow, 2000).
The National Reading Panel (2000) outlines the most important
of these scientifically-proven strategies, including:
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comprehension
monitoring |
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summarizing |
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question
answering |
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question
generating |
Monitoring oneęs own comprehension is a difficult task
because it involves metacognition, or thinking about oneęs thought
process. This strategy involves all the stages of reading, from
thinking about what you already know about the subject, to adjusting
your reading speed of the text, to –fixing-up” any problems that
you encounter as you try to understand what you have read. One
monitoring approach that has worked well with my students is coding.
Encourage students to mark-up their texts: put a check next to
parts they find interesting and a question mark next to something
they donęt understand. Students can put a star beside important
ideas and write in the margin about why the ideas are important.
Modeling is a very important step in teaching the skill of active
reading. I suggest you read aloud from a transparency text and
think-aloud as your students follow in their books. As you read,
model how to monitor your comprehension and interact with the
text by coding it.
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