If We

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If Were Not Teaching Comprehension, What Are We
Doing?

• Assessing Comprehension
• Most of the instructional time in adolescent
  classrooms is spent asking questions to see if
  students understood what they read.

• Telling
• Most instruction that occurs in secondary
  classrooms is teacher telling, literally telling
  children what we want them to learn, rather than
  teaching them how to learn it.
• (Alvermann, Dillon, OBrien, Smith, 1985
  Davey, 1988, Menke Davey, 1994 Murden
  Gillespe, 1997 Ratekin et al., 1985, Roe, 1994)

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So no wonder they dont comprehend.

• Most observations indicate that teachers do not
  use questioning or telling to teach students HOW
  to understand. There is no teaching of process,
  only evaluation.

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Does it make a difference if teachers teach
comprehension strategies?

• The National Reading Panel indicates that there
  are large statistical differences in performance
  between students who are supported in their
  comprehension development by instruction and
  those who are not.
• Teachers can be taught to teach comprehension
  strategies effectively after such instruction,
  their proficiency is greater, and this leads to
  improved performance on the part of their
  students on awareness and use of the strategies,
  to improved performance on commonly used
  comprehension measures, and sometimes, to higher
  scores on standardized reading tests. (Williams,
  2002, p. 255)

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What Good Reading Teachers Do(Ash Hagood, 1998)

• explicitly discuss the expanded things good
  readers do
• provide teacher-directed frameworks to supplement
  self-directed strategy use
• model the self-directed strategies that good
  readers use
• expect their students to use these self-directed
  strategies first with a teachers guidance, then
  on their own

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Teacher-Directed Frameworks

• K-W-L
• Reciprocal Teaching (RT)
• Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE)
• Questioning the Author (QtA)
• Teaching the Text Backwards
• I-Charts

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Strategic Learning
Declarative Knowledge
Procedural Knowledge
Conditional Knowledge
Ash, 2000, adapted from Garner, 1990
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Strategic Instruction
Declarative Knowledge
Teacher Modeling and Explicit
Explanation
Procedural Knowledge
Directed Student Strategy Use with Guided
Feedback Student
Reflection on Strategy Use
Conditional Knowledge
Ash, 2000, adapted from Garner, 1990
Independent Student Strategy Use with Guided
Feedback Student
Reflection on Strategy Use
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Questioning the Author (QtA)(McKeown, Beck,
Worthy, 1993)

• Purpose QtA attempts to enhance student
  engagement with both narrative and expository
  text, particularly text that is difficult and not
  friendly to the reader.
• Rationale QtA is grounded in the constructivist
  view of reading that sees the reader as an active
  participant in the reading process. By asking
  students to view the text with a reviewers eye,
  they become more critical and active readers of
  the text.

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QtA Procedures

• Planning
• Identifying major understandings/potential
  problems
• Segmenting the text
• Developing Queries

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Initiating Queries

• Purpose to draw attention to main ideas and
  make clear that they are produced by the author.
• What is the author trying to say here?
• What is the authors message?
• What is the author talking about?

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Follow-up Queries

• Purpose to help students consider the ideas and
  thoughts behind the authors words
• What does the author mean here?
• Does the author explain this clearly?
• Purpose to help the students connect ideas
  intra- and intertextually
• Does this make sense with what the author told us
  before?
• How does this connect to what the author told us
  here?

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Follow-up Queries (cont.)

• Purpose to help students figure out why authors
  included particular aspects of the text (or left
  particular aspects out)
• Does the author tell us why he/she said that?
• Why do you think the author tells us this now?

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Narrative Queries

• Purpose to assist students in thinking about
  characters and their motivations
• How do things look for this character now?
• Given what the author has already told us about
  this character, what do you think hes/shes up
  to?
• Purpose to focus students on the authors
  crafting of the plot
• How does the author let you know that something
  has changed?
• How does the author settle this for us?

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Implementing

• Classroom Organization
• Introducing the Concept of Author Fallibility
• Think Aloud of QtA
• Discussion

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Discussion Techniques

• Marking drawing attention to a significant
  comment made by a student.
• Turning back turning students attention back
  to the test for further clarification or turning
  responsibility for figuring out ideas back to the
  students.
• Revoicing helping student rephrase ideas they
  are having difficulty enunciating.

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Discussion (cont.)

• Annotating Modeling helping demonstrate to the
  students how they might interrogate a phrase, if
  they are having difficulty doing so.
• filling in the gaps in the text for the
  students when they are unable to.
• Recapping - summarizing and synthesizing
  information as a model for the students and to
  help them put together the major ideas they have
  constructed up to that point.

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• QUESTIONING THE AUTHOR
• Questions to think about
• What is the author trying to tell you?
• Why is the author telling you that?
• Does the author say it clearly?
• How could the author have said things more
  clearly?
• What would you like to say instead?

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References

• McKeown, M. G., Beck, I. L., Worthy, J.
  (1993). Grappling with text Questioning the
  author. The Reading Teacher, 46, 560-566.
• Beck , I. L., McKeown, M. G., Hamilton, R. L.,
  Kucan, L. (1997). Questioning the author An
  approach for enhancing student engagement with
  text. Newark, DE IRA.