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Comprehension
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The following comprehension pages will include research-based strategies, teacher-friendly assessment tools, recommended teacher resources, and an annotated list of links for your reference and use. Comprehension is often misinterpreted as the recall and recitation of text. By definition, comprehension is the active process of constructing meaning that requires an intentional and thoughtful interaction between the reader and the text (adapted from the National Reading Panel). Research tells us that comprehension requires interaction, which is a a mental process that children must be taught in order for them to construct meaning. Simply answering questions about a text is not evidence that a child comprehends what he/she has read. In Unraveling the Seven Myths of Reading, Frank B. May suggests diagnostic and teaching strategies such as (1) collaborative miscue analysis, (2) collaborative examination of a student's literacy portfolio, (3) teaching a student to think aloud as he/she reads (teachers may want students to use a tape recorder for assessment purposes), (4) teacher observations on the student's ability to determine meaning, (5) observation of the student's ability to infer meaning, (6) observations (or recordings) of the student's ability to retell a story, and (7) observation of reader's theater type behaviors (can a student act out his/her part with proper emphasis and emotion). (May 2001) These types of activities would obviously take more planning and organization on the teacher's part, but would help diagnose a student's ability to comprehend a text far better than simply asking a few teacher-directed questions. May also suggests teaching students to use multiple cueing systems in order to be better comprehension readers. He has broken them into three categories: Schema Cues, Semantic and Syntactic Cues, and Phoneme and Grapheme Systems. (May 2001) A skillful reader will use all three categories in order to more fluently read (decode) and comprehend the author's message. May eloquently points out the importance of reading comprehension and its necessity by saying, "Reading comprehension is both a process and a product of communicating with another person, a person who has bothered to put what she or he has to say or tell in written form. The writer and reader, each at a different time and place, or course, must want to stop whatever else they are thinking about and communicate. The product side of "reading comprehension" requires a variety of highly flexible processes called "comprehension strategies." All strategies aim toward the solving of academic or personal needs and the gaining of self-power and self-confidence." Resource May, Frank B. (2001). Unraveling
the seven myths of reading. Needham
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