Reading (and other kinds of) comprehension

There are several readings for Thursday, including one that may not be on your paper syllabus. Here's a map to help you in setting a purpose for your reading: I suggest you read them in this order. As you read keep track of the strategies you use. We will be discussing them in class.

The first two readings provide a theory of reading comprehension.

1. Snow & Sweet. This is a brief overview of the psychology of reading comprehension. The authors present reading comprehension as an interaction among the Reader, the Text, and the Activity. Many of the ideas presented here apply to any kind of comprehension, not just reading.

In the "washing clothes" activity in class, the extent to which you understood the passage was an interaction among (a) your schema or prior knowledge [the Reader], (b) a difficult Text [the passage I read aloud], and (c) the Activity of trying to listen and remember for a "test." If you were in the group who saw me write "Washing Clothes" on the board, you knew to use your prior knowledge of doing laundry to understand the passage. This enabled you to fill in the missing information in the passage. If you were in the group who did not see the topic, you probably had the laundry schema but did not know you were supposed to use it. So when you heard the difficult passage, you could not "repair" your understanding by filling in the missing parts from your memory of washing clothes. The fact that you were doing this in class on the first day, with a group of relative strangers (the Activity), may have influenced your concentration or willingness to try. So your understanding and your performance on the test were not just influenced by you or the passage, or even the activity: It was a combination of interacting factors. This is true of any kind of learning or comprehension.

2. Alvermann & Eakle. This chapter describes the teacher's role in helping adolescent students comprehend better. As you read, think about what struggling readers, including those who are English learners, bring to the task of reading. On page 20, they show a quote from a student who reminds us, "We're not stupid. Most of us are really smart." In the washing clothes exercise, you all had prior knowledge of doing laundry that could help you understand the passage, but half of you did not know you needed to use it. In the same way, many students who struggle with reading have prior knowledge that would help them, but they don't know to use it. Part of your job is to help them make those connections, and to help them gain the knowledge they may not have. Think about how this relates to Bob Moses's work in the Algebra Project.

3. Flores-Dueñas. This is an example. Flores-Dueñas describes 4 Latina/o students reading different narrative texts (stories), writing down what they remember (like you did with Washing Clothes), and then discussing the readings with the other children. Compare their writing and their talk for the different stories. After you read what they wrote and said about the first story, how capable did you think they were? What if you had read their writing about the last story first? Use the theory of reading comprehension from Snow & Sweet to explain the performance differences you saw. How were the students using prior knowledge (schemata)? Look at the quality of their writing when recalling the different stories. What does this tell you about how schemata influence writing as well as reading? You may want to go back to Alvermann & Eakle and re-read the section on English learners.

Do you have any schemata that help you understand these four readers? Have you been in a similar situation? Can you think of things that helped or hindered your comprehension and expression (writing or speaking)?

4. Gallegher. This is a set of teaching strategies for helping adolescents learn to comprehend and remember what they've read. It is written by a high school Language Arts teacher, but the strategies apply to any subject that involves reading. As you look these over, think about ways you might use some of the strategies (or variations of them) in teaching your subject area. Think about the idea of "first draft" versus "second draft" reading. Do you use this yourself as you are reading for class? If you returned to Alvermann & Eakle after reading Flores-Dueñas, did your comprehension of A & E's chapter improve?