By Dr. Grant -GMU

1. COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES
R. Grant
-Why we read the word and the
world-

2. Basic Goals of Reading
To enable the learner to gain understanding
of the world and of themselves
To develop appreciations and interests
To help the learner to find solutions to their
personal and group problems
To develop strategies to support
independent understanding and thinking

3. Teachers’ Role
To support comprehension teachers need to:
 Activate students’ prior knowledge
 Guide students’ reading of a text
 Foster active and engaged reading
 Reinforce concepts gleaned from the text
reading
 Encourage careful/critical thinking
 Pursue inquiry on different topics

4. Approaches for constructing
meaning
Visualizing
Monitoring
Inferencing, including predicting
Identifying important information
Generating and answering questions
Synthesizing
Summarizing

5. More approaches for constructing
meaning
Tapping prior knowledge
Organizing ideas
Figuring out unknown words
Making connections
Comprehension monitoring
Applying fix-up strategies
Revising meaning
Playing with words

6. Guidelines for Skill and Strategy
Instruction
Teach mini-lessons
Differentiate between skills and strategies
Provide step-by-step explanations
Use modeling
Provide practice opportunities
Apply in content areas
Use reflection
Hang charts of skills and strategies

7. Modeling
The process of showing or demonstrating
for someone how to use or do something
s/he does not know how to do.
The process by which an expert shows
students (non-experts) how to perform a
task.
A component of scaffolding learning within
the constructivist framework.

8. Types of Modeling
Implicit modeling
Explicit modeling
 Talk-alouds
 Think-alouds

9. Where modeling takes place
During daily activities
Process writing
Literacy lessons
Mini-lessons

10. Guidelines for Effective Strategy
Instruction
Determine the need for instruction on the
basis of student performance
Introduce only 1 or 2 strategies at a time
Model and practice the strategy in the
meaningful context of a reading experience
Model each strategy at the point where it is
most useful

11. Guidelines – (cont’d)
Be sure that modeling and practicing are
interactive and collaborative activities
Gradually transfer modeling from yourself
to the students
Help students experience immediate success
Encourage the use of a strategy across the
curriculum
Guide students to become strategic readers

12. Mini-lesson
Introduction (includes telling why and when
strategy can be useful)
Teacher modeling
Student modeling and guided practice
Summarizing and reflecting

13. Follow-up to mini-lesson
Independent practice
Application
Reflection

14. Comprehension Strategies

15. Reciprocal Teaching(RT)
RT is an interactive process in which the teacher
and students take turns modeling 4 strategies after
reading a meaningful chunk of text
Strategies in RT
 Predict
 Question
 Clarify
 Summarize

16. Summarizing steps
Delete trivial information
Delete redundant information
Substitute superordinate terms for lists of
terms
Integrate a series of events with a
superordinate action term

17. K-W-L
Purpose: intended to help teachers become
more responsive to helping students access
appropriate knowledge when reading
Rationale: students need a mix of individual
and group activities and procedures to
scaffold their own ideas and interests
Audience: any age level with expository text

18. K-W-L Procedures
Step K- What I know
Step W- what do I want to learn
Step L- What I learned

19. K-W-L modifications
K-W-L Plus (incorporates mapping and
summarizing)
K-W-H-L (H stands for How do I intend to
learn; what resources, tools will be needed
K-W-L with paragraph frames (incorporates
writing)
K-W-L with focus questions

20. Anticipation Guides
Purpose: to activate student;s knowledge
about a topic before reading, and provide
purpose by serving as a guide for
subsequent reading
Rationale: prediction serves to activate prior
knowledge; controversy can be an effective
motivational device
Audience: any grade level

21. Anticipation Guides-procedure
Identify major concepts
Determine students’ knowledge of these
concepts
Create statements
Decide statement order and presentation
mode
Present guide

22. Anticipation Guides-procedure
(cont’d)
Discuss each statement briefly
Direct students to read the text
Conduct follow-up discussion

23. Text Preview
Purpose:
1) build students’ background knowledge
about a topic before reading
2) Motivate students to read
3) Provide an organizational framework for
comprehending a text

24. Text Preview
Rationale: comprehension is enhanced when
readers draw on their prior knowledge and
are interested in the topic
Audience: upper elementary through high
school

25. Text Preview-Procedure
Preparation and construction of text
previews
 An interest-building section
 A synopsis of the selection
 A section that includes a purpose-setting
question or directions for reading

26. Text Preview-Procedure
Presentation of text previews
 Tell students that you’re going to introduce a
new story
 Read the interest-building section of the
preview
 Give time for students to relate the information
to their prior knowledge and discuss it
 Read remainder of preview
 Direct students to read the selection

27. ReQuest Procedure
Purpose:
1) Formulate their own questions and
develop questioning behavior
2) Adopt an active, inquiring attitude to
reading
3) Acquire reasonable purposes for reading
4) Improve independent reading
comprehension skills

28. ReQuest Procedure
Rationale: it is important for students to
develop their own abilities to ask questions
and set their own purposes for reading
Audience: all levels and all ages

29. ReQuest Procedure
Procedures
 Preparation of material
 Development of readiness for the strategy
 Development of students questioning behaviors
 Development of students predictive behaviors
 Silent reading
 Follow-up activities

30. Question-Answer Relationships
Purpose: enhance students’ ability to answer
comprehension questions by giving them a
systematic means for analyzing task demands of
different question probes
Rationale: students become independent
comprehenders by learning how to respond to
different types of comprehension questions
Audience: grade four through eight

31. Question-Answer Relationships
Procedure
 Lesson 1: introduce students tot the task
demands of different questions, provide
practice at identifying task demands related to
answering questions
 Lesson 2: provide students with review and
further guided practice as they read slightly
longer passages
 Extend task to longer selection

32. Think-Alouds
Purpose: to help readers examine and develop
reading behaviors and strategies
Rationale: with teacher modeling students
will realize how and when to use effective
processing strategies for understanding
Audience: all levels

33. Think-Alouds: Procedures
Teacher modeling
 Make predictions or show students how to
develop hypotheses
 Describe your visual images
 Share an analogy or show how prior knowledge
applies
 Verbalize a confusing point or show how you
monitor developing understandings
 Demonstrate fix-up strategies

34. Think-Alouds: Procedures
Student partnerships for practice
Independent student practice using
checklists
Integrated use with other materials

35. More Effective Comprehension
Strategies
Dialogical-Thinking Reading Lesson
Inquiry Chart
Graphic Organizers (story maps, semantic web)
DRA and DR-TA
Inferential reading
SQ3R
Discussion
Reciprocal Teaching