Teaching Reading Comprehension

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Teaching Reading Comprehension

• Timothy Shanahan
• University of Illinois at Chicago
• shanahan_at_uic.edu
• www.shanahanonliteracy.com

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• Most state and district accountability efforts
  are based on reading comprehension performance
• Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in reading is
  determined by reading comprehension tests
• So where do we stand?

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• National Assessment of Educational Progress
  (NAEP), 2005
• 27 of American 8th graders below basic level

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• National Assessment of Educational Progress
  (NAEP), 2005
• 49 of African-American 8th graders below basic
  level

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• National Assessment of Educational Progress
  (NAEP), 2005
• 45 of Hispanic 8th graders below basic

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• Program for International Student Assessment
  (PISA), 2003
• U.S. 15 year-olds comprehended significantly
  worse than those from Finland, Korea, Canada,
  Australia, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Ireland,
  Sweden, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Belgium

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• Impetus to improvement
• Changing role of literacy in the workplace, in
  civic life, and in social relations
• Technological revolution
• Internationalization n

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The Problem with Reading Comprehension

• Reading is a collection of linguistic and
  cognitive skills that are embedded and
  hierarchical in nature.

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Is it a reading comprehension problem?

• Or is it a decoding problem?

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Is it a reading comprehension problem?

• Or is it a word meaning problem?

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Is it a reading comprehension problem?

• Or is it a fluency problem?

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Is it a reading comprehension problem?

• Is it a thinking about text problem?

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Reading Comprehension Skills

• Cause and effect
• Classify and categorize
• Compare and contrast
• Draw conclusions
• Fact and opinion
• Main idea
• Important details
• Inferences
• Sequence
• Bias and propaganda

• Problem and solution
• Identify theme
• Literal recall
• Tone
• Mood
• Etc., etc., etc.

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Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Summarizing (18)
• Questioning (27)
• Story mapping (17)
• Monitoring (22)
• Question answering (17)
• Graphic organizers (11)
• Mental imagery (7)
• Prior knowledge (14)
• Multiple strategies (38)

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Strategies vs. Skills

• Strategies
• Intentional
• Metacognitive
• Reflective
• Complex/multi-step
• Probability of success
• Approximation
• Massed practice

• Skills
• Automatic
• Over-learning
• Immediate
• Simple/single step
• Certainty of success
• Accuracy
• Interval training

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How to meld skills and strategies?

• Teach any and all of them, but teach them all as
  strategies
• Recognize that all strategies refer to reader
  actions and many skills refer to types of
  information
• Organize the skills within the strategies

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What does it mean to teach a Reading
Comprehension strategy?

• Gradual release of control
• I do it.
• We do it.
• You do it.

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What does it mean to teach a Reading
Comprehension strategy?

• Modeling matters.

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What does it mean to teach a Reading
Comprehension strategy?

• Clear explanations are important.

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What does it mean to teach a Reading
Comprehension strategy?

• Students need to learn the
• what,
• when,
• how,
• why
• of strategies.

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What does it mean to teach a Reading
Comprehension strategy?

• Combination of strategies is best.

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What does it mean to teach a Reading
Comprehension strategy?

• Massed and intensive practice leads to greater
  learning.

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What does it mean to teach a Reading
Comprehension strategy?

• Practice in a rich variety of con(texts).

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What does it mean to teach a Reading
Comprehension strategy?

• A culture focused on making
• meaningdont lose sight of
• the text.

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But what about the texts?

• Different texts make different demands on the
  readers in terms of rhetorical purpose,
  vocabulary, organizational structure, etc.

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But what about the texts?

• High quality text is not enough
• There may be a need for grand conversations
  that provide coherent envisionments of the
  text.

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Character Change Chart


Crisis Given this character change, what do
you think the author wanted you to learn?
________ _________________________________________
_______________________________ __________________
__________________________________________________
____
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Chemistry Note-taking
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History Events Chart
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Thank you very much!!!
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Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Timothy Shanahan
• University of Illinois at Chicago
• shanahan_at_uic.edu
• www.shanahanonliteracy.com