Comprehension Strategies

It is important for teachers to explicitly teach students how to achieve mastery in the seven areas of comprehension. To do this we need students to be active participants in the process. Too often we introduce students to a text by telling them something about it. In this model student participation is passive. For students to gain access to critical information in the text, we must teach them strategies.

The next few blog posts will be a series on strategies to help students comprehend within all the areas of comprehension. This post will cover; “create mental images” and “use background knowledge.” (See last week’s blog post to review the seven areas of comprehension.)

Area of Comprehension: Create mental images- Proficient readers don’t just visualize, but also hear, see, smell and feel what is described in the text.

Strategy: Sketch to Stretch

            Have you ever heard a student say “I just don’t see what the text means,” or “I wish there was a picture.” These comments are clues that creating mental images is a problem in the student’s comprehension of the text. In these cases Sketch to Stretch is a strategy that will help students visualize during and after reading. There are 3 steps for students to use in this strategy:

1. Underline the specific parts of the text causing the confusion.
2. Reread those parts and, while rereading, try to draw in the margin what the author was describing.
3. Label the drawing with terms the author used in the text.

This strategy gives students the confidence to figure out their confusions on their own.

Area of Comprehension: Use background knowledge- Proficient readers make connections to a text before, during, and after they read.

Strategy: Possible Sentences

            Possible sentences is a before reading strategy. The teacher chooses between eight and fourteen words for the text, that they believe students will know. Students then write five “possible sentences” that might appear in the text, using three to five of the given words in each sentence. This strategy reverses the norm of the teacher providing the background knowledge and forces the student to actively engage with vocabulary they will see in the text along with activating their prior knowledge in order to make predictions about the text. After reading students will correct the sentences they wrote, forcing them to go back into the text.

Strategies from: Reading Nonfiction: Notice&Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst