Effective Comprehension Instruction

 

The core of reading comprehension:

Readers build a coherent representation of the text; they understand what they read.

 

As these Ògood comprehendersÓ move through text, they:

á  Attend to information

á  Make decisions about what is important

á  Connect the information to related text information or what they already know

á  Pull it all together to develop meaning

á  Are actively engaged.

 

To promote active reading, or engaged readers, we should:

Teach students explicit strategies or routines for dealing with texts that can be generalized across texts. Our goal is to promote independent, self-regulated readers and writers.

 

Reading Strategies:

á  Previewing/Predicting

á  Summarizing

á  Inferring

á  Generating Questions

á  Clarifying-Rereading

á  Monitoring Comprehension

á  Visualizing

 

 

Questioning the Author (QTA) an instructional approach or routine that helps students build a deeper understanding of texts by learning to Query the author.

á  This approach encourages discussion in which students engage with ideas to construct meaning;

á  Is prompted by general teacher-posed Queries such as

o   What is the author trying to say or tell you?

o   Why is the author telling you that?

o   Does the author say it clearly?

o   How could the author have said things more clearly?

o   What would you say instead?