Comprehension: Part 3: Background Information

According to Put Reading First, comprehension is the reason for reading. If readers can read the words but do not understand what they are reading, they are not really reading. As they read, good readers are both purposeful and active.

Good readers are purposeful. Good readers have a purpose for reading. They may read to find out how to use a food processor, read a guidebook to gather information about national parks, read a textbook to satisfy the requirements of a course, read a magazine for entertainment, or read a classic novel to experience the pleasures of great literature.
Good readers are active. Good readers think actively as they read. To make sense of what they read, good readers engage in a complicated process. Using their experiences and knowledge of the world, their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure, and their knowledge of reading strategies (or plans), good readers make sense of the text and know how to get the most out of it. They know when they have problems with understanding and how to resolve these problems as they occur.
Research over 30 years has shown that instruction in comprehension can help students understand what they read, remember what they read, and communicate with others about what they read.
What does scientifically-based research tell us about effective text comprehension instruction?
The scientific research on text comprehension instruction reveals important information about what students should be taught about text comprehension and how it should be taught. The following key findings are of particular interest and value to classroom teachers.
Text comprehension can be improved by instruction that helps readers use specific comprehension strategies.
Comprehension strategies are conscious plans—sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension.
The following six strategies appear to have a firm scientific basis for improving text comprehension:
• Monitoring comprehension
• Using graphic and semantic organizers
• Answering questions
• Generating questions
• Recognizing story structure
• Summarizing

Monitoring Comprehension:
Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix up" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.
Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to
• be aware of what they do understand,
• identify what they do not understand, and
• use appropriate "fix-up" strategies to resolve problems in comprehension.

Metacognition:
Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing up" any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.
Comprehension monitoring, a critical part of metacognition, has received a great deal of attention in the reading research.
Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies.
1. Identify where the difficulty occurs ("I don't understand the second paragraph on page 76.").
2. Identify what the difficulty is ("I don't get what the author means when she says, 'Arriving in America was a milestone in my grandmother's life.'").
3. Restate the difficult sentence or passage in their own words ("Oh, so the author means that coming to America was a very important event in her grandmother's life.").
4. Look back through the text ("The author talked about Mr. McBride in Chapter 2, but I don't remember much about him. Maybe if I reread that chapter, I can figure out why he's acting this way now.").
5. Look forward in the text for information that might help them to resolve the difficulty. ("The text says, 'The groundwater may form a stream or pond or create a wetland. People can also bring groundwater to the surface.' Hmm, I don't understand how people can do that . . . Oh, the next section is called 'Wells.' I'll read this section to see if it tells how they do it.").

Using Graphic and Semantic Organizers:
Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and interrelationships among concepts in a text, using diagrams or other pictorial devices. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters. Semantic organizers (also called semantic maps or semantic webs) are graphic organizers that look somewhat like a spider web. In a semantic organizer, lines connect a central concept to a variety of related ideas and events.
Regardless of the label, graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read to learn from informational text in the content areas, such as science and social studies textbooks and trade books. Used with informational text, graphic organizers can help students see how concepts fit common text structures. Graphic organizers are also used with narrative text, or stories, as story maps.
Graphic organizers can:
• help students focus on text structure as they read;
• provide students with tools they can use to examine and visually represent relationships in a text; and
• help students write well-organized summaries of a text.

Answering Questions:
Teachers have long used questions to guide and monitor students' learning. Research shows that teacher questioning strongly supports and advances students' learning from reading. Questions appear to be effective for improving learning from reading because they:
• give students a purpose for reading;
• focus students' attention on what they are to learn;
• help students to think actively as they read;
• encourage students to monitor their comprehension; and
• help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know.

Question-answering instruction encourages students to learn to answer questions better and, therefore, to learn more as they read. One type of question-answering instruction simply teaches students to look back in the text to find answers to questions that they cannot answer after the initial reading. Another type helps students understand question-answer relationships—the relationships between questions and where the answers to those questions are found. In this instruction, readers learn to answer questions that require an understanding of information that is:
• text explicit (stated explicitly in a single sentence);
• text implicit (implied by information presented in two or more sentences); or
• scriptal (not found in the text at all, but part of the reader's prior knowledge or experience).

Generating Questions:
Teaching students to ask their own questions improves their active processing of text and their comprehension. By generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions and if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to integrate information from different segments of text. For example, students can be taught to ask main idea questions that relate to important information in a text.
Examples of question-answer relationships
Text: (from The Skirt, by Gary Soto)
After stepping off the bus, Miata Ramirez turned around and gasped, "Ay!" The school bus lurched, coughed a puff of stinky exhaust, and made a wide turn at the corner. The driver strained as he worked the steering wheel like the horns of a bull.
Miata yelled for the driver to stop. She started running after the bus. Her hair whipped against her shoulders. A large book bag tugged at her arm with each running step, and bead earrings jingled as they banged against her neck.
"My skirt!" she cried loudly. "Stop!"
Question: Did Miata try to get the driver to stop?
Answer: Yes.
Question-Answer Relationship (Text explicit, because the information is given in one sentence):
"Miata yelled for the driver to stop."
Question: Why did Miata want the driver to stop?
Answer: She suddenly remembered that she had left a skirt on the bus.
Question-Answer Relationship (Text implicit, because the information must be inferred from different parts of the text):
Miata is crying "My skirt!" as she is trying to get the driver to stop.
Question: Was the skirt important to Miata?
Answer: Yes.
Question-Answer Relationship (Scriptal, because the information is not contained in the text, but must be drawn from the reader's prior knowledge): She probably would not have tried so hard to get the driver to stop if the skirt were not important to her.
Recognizing Story Structure
Story structure refers to the way the content and events of a story are organized into a plot. Students who can recognize story structure have greater appreciation, understanding, and memory for stories. In story structure instruction, students learn to identify the categories of content (setting, initiating events, internal reactions, goals, attempts, and outcomes) and how this content is organized into a plot. Often, students learn to recognize story structure through the use of story maps. Story maps, a type of graphic organizer, show the sequence of events in simple stories. Instruction in the content and organization of stories improves students' comprehension and memory of stories.
Summarizing
A summary is a synthesis of the important ideas in a text. Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading, to condense this information, and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
• identify or generate main ideas;
• connect the main or central ideas;
• eliminate redundant and unnecessary information; and
• remember what they read.

Summing up:
1. Text comprehension is important because comprehension is the reason for reading.
2. Text comprehension is purposeful and active.
3. Text comprehension can be developed by teaching comprehension strategies.
4. Text comprehension strategies can be taught through explicit instruction, through cooperative learning, and by helping readers use strategies flexibly and in combination.

-from Put Reading First http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/reading_first1text.html