The video of Professor Duke’s comprehension instruction illustrates clear ideas on strategies that can help all readers. To better understand the process, observations of good readers are described.
Professor Duke’s research shows that good readers talk aloud, read aloud, and are extremely active when reading. In other words, they make meaning as they go; they make connections to their own experience; ask questions; and preview the reading by looking at the text structure. Based on these findings, strategies can be taught to struggling readers to implement good reading behaviors.
Although teaching one strategy will help improve comprehension, having multiple strategies is even better. Students need to be able to choose a strategy or multiple strategies that will help them in different situations.
Accessing prior knowledge and building knowledge are very important for teachers to build upon to help students with comprehension. Students need to be exposed to many books, rich experiences, world knowledge, and hands on experiences to build knowledge in subject matters.
Improving students’ vocabulary is essential to improving comprehension. A dictionary can and should be used to help students understand vocabulary that is necessary to understand reading materials. Students should be taught how to break down words by identifying prefixes, suffixes, and compound words; look at context clues; re-read for meaning; re-read around words; look for author’s clues or message; stop and think; and ask for help. It is also beneficial to students if there are many opportunities to practice comprehension by listening to teacher read alouds. This will provide students with a model of fluent reading and opportunities for using strategies to comprehend. Students will then be able to use short-term memory to comprehend instead of decoding words.
Teachers should teach and model for students the awareness of text structures such as complex plot twist, graphics in informational text (charts, graphs, and tables), the significance of bold and italic print, or captions under a picture. This can be extremely helpful in subjects like science where print structures can give clues to students to determine what is important information. Teachers should also provoke good discussions by asking many open ended questions that require students to make inferences and connections, encourage writing, and motivate students with authentic activities.
Teachers can use these strategies to help students improve comprehension. Although it is probably best to coach one to one, it might not be possible with a large class. However, students need to learn to be aware of when they comprehend and what they can do when they do not comprehend.
The idea from this video that was most relevant to me for teaching comprehension was the rereading. I think it is very important for struggling and emergent readers to learn through repetition. In fact, I used that idea for my writing project with a struggling ELL student. I had the student reread a lower level book once a day for five days. I also had him answer one question everyday pertaining to the story. By the end of the last reading, there was an improvement in his reading and comprehension. His reading was not exactly as he would speak, but it was more fluent; he sounded less robotic during his last reading than his first. This revealed to me that he is developing automaticity with decoding. If he continues to reread the same book or uses this method with another book, the decoding and the comprehension will improve.
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