Comprehension is definitely the most complicated of the cognitive processes that we try to develop in school
I try to think of it like building a structure and researchers
Sometimes call it a text model
And that really helps me because I feel like it helps me conceptualize that we have
Building materials that we have to organize and that it's very complicated
Actually some of the materials come from the text from the author's words
And in children's picture books from the wonderful illustrations that are provided to guide the text model
but a lot of the rest of the building blocks come from the child's mind their
background knowledge about the world their specific knowledge about the word meanings that the author has chosen for the text and
their knowledge of strategies to
To actually make all those things work together to build the text model
Comprehension is a really active
interactive process where the child's creating a
Coherent version of the text in his or her mind
I used to not be able to think of it that way I used to think comprehension was finding answers in the text
But that's really not true
Well, where do the breakdowns occur I think it can occur in any one of those processes?
so it could be that the breakdown occurs because the
Child's knowledge of the world is inconsistent with the world knowledge that the author expected the child to bring. That's one way
Could be at the level of the words. Maybe the child's word
The child's vocabulary knowledge is inconsistent with the choices that the author made in constructing the text it could be general language knowledge
I mean English syntax is complex and sometimes children don't have the syntactic knowledge to understand
Could be that they don't have enough strategies to make all of those processes work together
Any one of those could be a potential breakdown?
And I don't think we don't have a developmental model to really guide thinking about comprehension
We have to think of it much more interactively well it is complex. What does research tell us about teaching comprehension
Each of those processes can be taught that the good news is each of those
Particular Potential Breakdown area can be developed you can teach kids word meanings
Before and they read and that will help them comprehend you can teach them text structures
That help them sort of make sense of all of these different
Components for example you could teach them how stories work you could teach them how different kinds of information texts tend to work
What are the sort of rules of a story?
You could teach kids to make inferences and to really be more active when they read and you can teach some comprehension strategies
specific procedures that they can use
Before during and after reading to make that text model a little bit more coherent
That's a lot for a child and a teacher to do when should teachers start working on comprehension
I mean should kindergarten teachers be doing it. I really think kindergarten teachers should be doing it. I worked with some really fantastic
School staffs that have really organized the whole reading program around comprehension strategies
And we came up with an interesting little way to remember him
at Johnson School in Charlottesville
Virginia teachers helped construct an acronym
Picture to identify what cognitive strategies we want kids to use and to remind teachers to teach them and to remind children to use them
And we made bookmarks and posters and all kinds of things to infuse that notion into the school life and and here. They are
When people will call them slightly different names
But I think we would find them very consistent the p in picture stands for predict take
information from the text and
Information from background knowledge to make a reasonable guess at what might happen next especially in a story
Second one was IMagine or visualize
you know really take background knowledge to create a
Coherent mental image to bring to bear background knowledge to fill in what the author has left out in the text
Clarify that's I think I think this one's the hardest
but actually
Makes it make sure you're making sense
You know stop and make sure that the building that you're building is standing up be metacognitive and reflective
teeth
T stands for try in our acronym, and it was try to ask yourself how and questions to keep that
Inference building going you is use what you know and it seems odd?
But children sometimes don't know especially young children or novice comprehend errs that you're allowed to use background knowledge
Because they might answer a question and say it doesn't say the book doesn't say when in fact
The answer was right there in their heads
Review summarized during and after reading good readers stop and summarize and check and make sure that
What they're making in their head makes sense, and then evaluate to what extent to this text actually meet my reading purposes
How is it connected to other texts?
How can I talk about it with other readers so all of those things actually can be begun in Kindergarten, so we should remember picture?
What are the characteristics of a classroom where the teacher is doing a good job teaching comprehension?
Can you paint a picture of such a classroom for us they're filled with language you can't teach comprehension quietly
Teachers are talking children are talking there's wonderful books being read that are complex contexts for comprehension
You can't teach comprehension in a in a very very simple book you have to have something that actually has some meat to it
Teachers are actually modeling thinking which is the hardest thing about teaching comprehension making that thinking?
verbal and
Accessible to the kids and the kids are asking questions of the teacher of the text and of one another so there are noisy places
Well should comprehension instruction be connected across grade levels
Is there a school you've worked with that? Where you found that happened? Well yeah that
at Johnson Elementary school, and then at Jackson Vea Elementary School
I was lucky enough to work with teachers who are willing to say okay? We'll try it. We'll try it k through five
we'll try it in read aloud's and in reading instruction and
They use that acronym picture to organize their work, but there's many other ways to do that. I think
Core program materials often have a set of a simple set of strategies that they ask teachers to use across the elementary grades
Why do we see drop-off and comprehension skills as kids go into the fourth and fifth grades?
You know I don't think of it that way is drop up. I think we have to remember that the tasks
We're asking children to complete and 4th and 5th grade are different
Oftentimes we're asking them to read much more dense information
Text and we're asking them to read in areas for which they have no background knowledge
They're reading in order to build background knowledge
So of course there it could be that they have word recognition problems. It could be that they have
fluency problems
But it also could be that the task is just much more difficult and and sometimes we're not providing enough
support for them before during and after reading to really help
well since we know this challenging period Might come what can teachers do to help kids make it through this period
Well teachers in the elementary grades can do a really
Careful job making sure children know how to decode easily and well they can give them
Enough practice reading that they're reading sounds like oral language what we call fluent reading
And then we can provide support we can build
vocabulary and
ConcePt knowledge we can teach children comprehension strategies
And we can help them to apply them many many many times in many many texts and flexible ways
And we can give them lots of chances to interact with teachers and texts and with one another
Dr.. Beck
you've listened to all this you've taught all this you've
experienced all this what are some good ways the teacher can assess a child's level of comprehension a
Very simple way by asking the child to tell them to tell her or him
but was that all about and when you get to a part that
your the teachers not sure whether the child
Understood it or not by saying
Can you tell me more about?
when Charlie had a headache and
So what you do is ask the child to tell you what they understood from the text and you can
Certainly learn a great deal about whether their or their comprehending it or not it's my favorite way, it's your favorite movie
Just ask them don't make it complicated. That's a simple instruction hard to carry up for some teachers, maybe
Nancy what should a teacher who's assessing a child with dyslexia for comprehension skills expect to see in that child?
Typically what we do is
look at
language processing as a spectrum, so we would see students who are
possibly
dyslexic
that would be on this side of the
Spectrum that were there having decoding problems or we would see students on that spectrum that might be having difficulty with comprehension
For example if it's the dyslexic student that we're looking at and we're looking at their oral vocabulary
And their language oral language processing and their decoding their word attack skills
very often for those students
we see that they have high vocabulary or higher vocabulary than they're decoding ability and they
Frequently Have higher comprehension
Ability than they're decoding ability
and so we're looking at a range of
Skills that would let us see the whole child. Thank you nancy, and thank you everyone
Now let's take a look at comprehension instruction in action here's 3rd. Grade teacher Robert vitesse and his class in Harlem
So you see people play checkers before a while at Community school 200 robert vitesse helps his third graders discuss
Complicated narratives he uses a program called the theme scheme designed for struggling readers
what I like most about the theme Scheme is the general map that it gives students to
Read a story with with comprehension programs like the theme scheme
I think what we're really trying to do is have children move up in their
Basic thinking skills because reading is in fact thinking we don't want children just to be able to read very
fluently off the printed page, but not understand what they're reading it kind of sounds good, but they're not really getting the point a
long Time ago in China
There was a boy named ping the theme scheme focuses not only on plot
But as its name implies on the underlying theme of a story
We've always chosen stories that have good clear accessible themes
it's very very important in instruction to
Really?
Show the children something that they can in fact get when ping received his seed from the emperor
He was the happiest child of all to find a successor the emperor gives seeds to many children
But only ping is honest enough to admit his seed won't grow
Who's Gonna be the new Emperor one two three?
Very good. Ping is gonna be the new emperor. Why is he gonna be the new one for a
mob late
mmm
Interesting we just don't teach stories. So that kids understand those stories
We want them to do a little more and go into another level of comprehension which is in fact theme comprehension
stories have messages for us they have
lessons sometimes
They relate to other stories and most important. They relate to real life now in the story
It was really hard for ping to be honest the theme scheme
challenges students to find echoes of the stories theme in their own lives
Has anybody ever had a time when it was hard to be honest in their lives
Elizabeth when I was washing the dishes and I was
drying oh it was a
Glass cup, and it just fell in it and the handle broke and it was hard to tell my grandmother
So when you look at reading and its complexity you're looking at this integration of a number of fairly
Complex cognitive and linguistic skills they gotta know sounds they got a link sounds two letters. They got a
rapidly apply all of this to a whole page of print and
Then as they're reading they have to
Structure themselves they've got to ask questions about what they're reading they've got to
Summarize as they go along they've got to predict what's coming next all of that goes into comprehension
That's all under she just told me to throw anything it met the theme scheme has made for Richer discussion in Mr.
vitesse is class and
Studies show that kids who use this program do better on comprehension tests
Comprehension is the end goal of all reading instruction, really?
And we train phonics we train phonemic awareness. We give children lots of practice. So they become very fluent in reading
But it's all in the pursuit of one goal to get the meaning off the printed page
Dr.. Beck, the word connections comes up a lot in your work
And we just saw kids making connections between a story in their own lives. What kind of connections
Do you hope children will make as they read I?
Think a major connection that they need to make it is
To connect parts of a text as they're going along
the
Sharon talked about the need to build a coherent
Representation of what one reads and that's exactly right?
You can't remember or understand a basket of facts or a basket of sentences?
What you need to do is be able to connect?
One sentence to an x one part to the next or part the jury d to what you read earlier for instance
if you're reading about someone
Who was yawning and rubbing his eyes in a peculiar situation where?
one shouldn't Rub
What shouldn't be tired then the teacher might say now how does this connect to what we read before?
And sure enough on the previous page he had not been able to sleep well
so that's an important connection to make and
Kids need to be encouraged to do that. How does this connect to?
To to how the mother felt about it
That's the way of building this connected
Representation so that what you remember is
Coherent rather than just a basket of fat well beyond encouraging how do you teach children to make these connections?
Well, I think I wouldn't underestimate
Encouraging I would say it
By saying you need to encourage them by asking them to do it time and time and time again
And I think what's particularly important is that kids and the teacher work through?
texts with kids they reads a part of it, and then they talk about it and
what they talk about ought to be
aspects of the text that connected up so that they
They bring it together
So how does that connect with what we read before does that connect with something we read in the earlier chapter?
I mean that's an important idea too, especially when you're into
Content area books, so you just keep asking them to do it