Teaching Comprehension Skills

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Teaching Comprehension Skills

• Learning Support Guidelines
• PCSP

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What is Comprehension?

• Comprehension is the act of constructing meaning
  with text
• The reader plays an active role filtering,
  organising, interpreting and generating
  relationships with incoming information
• Comprehension is an interaction between word
  identification, knowledge and comprehension
  skills
• (Johnson,
  A.P., 1998)

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Why teach comprehension skills?

• To increase students ability to create meaning
  with text independently
• This is best done by explicit teaching in the use
  of comprehension skills
• Not all students acquire these skills naturally

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Purpose of Reading

• Narrative Texts to enjoy the story
• Expository (Information) Texts Information/
  Explanation/ Persuasion
• Diagrammatic/ Representational Texts present or
  illustrate information

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What are comprehension skills?

• They are the strategies a reader uses to
  construct meaning and retrieve information from a
  text
• They are cognitive processes which can be broken
  into steps and taught explicitly

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Three types of comprehension skills

• Pre-reading
• During reading
• Post-reading

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Pre-reading Skills

• Pre-view/ Overview
• Web and Brainstorm
• KWL

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During Reading Comprehension Skills

• Paragraph Re-Read
• Read and Pause
• Note-taking

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Post Reading Comprehension Skills

• Summarise
• Article re-read
• Sequencing

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Teaching Comprehension Skills

• Direct instruction and modelling
• Identification of the procedural components
• Scaffolded Instruction
• Regular Practice
• Integration across the Curriculum

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Resources

• A.P. Johnson (1998) Teaching Comprehension
  Skills Reading 32298
• Drumcondra Primary Reading TestLevels 3 6
  Administration Manual pps.22 25
• Drumcondra English Profiles pps.108 116
• English Curriculum Handbook Teacher Guidelines
  pps.61 - 65