When reading the chapter on reading comprehension, it reminds me of a student I had last year who was reading disabled. This child was on an early first grade reading level in third grade. He was an intelligent child, who did well in other subjects (as long as material was read aloud to him). During guided reading, we used many different strategies to work on his reading fluency and comprehension. This student relied on decoding far too much and often made up fictional words while reading. Our question for the whole year was, does this make sense? By using questioning strategies, this students slowly began to make progress. He began to think about what he was reading and use context clues to figure out words he didn't know. I would often have the student read a passage and create his own questions to ask other students in our guided reading group. He loved playing the role of the teacher and it forced him to read the passage critically, asking himself questions as he read.
Looking back, I wish I had used lots of other strategies with this child. He would have benefitted greatly from using the self-regulation strategy. I often modeled self-regulation with my guided reading groups, but I did not give the students enough practice and guidance in using the strategies themselves. The ultimate goal is for students to be able to recognize that they are not understanding what they are reading and stop and use different comprehension strategies to help them. I simply helped the child understand he was not comprehending and told him which strategy to use to help him. He needed to be pushed to selecting the tools himself and applying them.
Getting third graders to self-regulate their reading is definitely a challenge. Many of the low readers lack the maturity to even recognize that they are not understanding what they are reading. They think saying the word correctly is understanding. I will continue to model how to use questioning and background experience to understand what you are reading, but allow more opportunities for the students to use the strategies and model back to me what they are thinking as they read. With enough practice, hopefully my students will use self-regulation to better comprehend reading material.
Teaching at the secondary level in "college prep" classes, I very rarely come in contact with a student who struggles beyond one or maybe two years in their reading level. I found your first paragraph to be very interesting in role playing with the student. It is something I often try to do with my students as well. In following steps in math, students always complain that they can work problems with me but not on their own. I try to get them to ask the same questions I would ask.
ReplyDeleteI can understand the maturity level being a barrier for some of your students. I feel all grade levels struggle with this, but I know how important it is to make those connections at such a young age. Good luck in working with your students on comprehending reading passages!