Comprehension

Comprehension is a key factor in successful and meaningful reading, but is a complex skill that is often overlooked when teaching. Comprehension is primarily comprised of overall interest, background knowledge, and strategies of the reader, the style, organization, difficulty, and concepts of the text, and the situation or purpose of the reading. All of these focuses make up the Comprehension Matrix which illustrate effective comprehension in reading. As I stated, the three major factors of comprehension are the reader, the text, and the situation. Good readers are known to adjust their reading in different situations, for different purposes. The comprehension matrix focuses on pre reading, reading and post reading.

Some questions, from a teacher's perspective, that may help guide a student's comprehensive reading are

• What do my students know about this topic?
• How can I get my students interested in this topic?
• What strategies do my students need to learn?
• How can I help my students understand the vocabulary and contexts of this text?

It is important for teachers to preview texts and think about questions like this to help them determine what they want their students to get out of each reading assignment. 

Some strategies found to help students with comprehension strategies are Visualization and Mind Movies, Questioning and "I Wonders", Schema of background knowledge, and Inferring. Questioning and "I Wonders" promote students constantly questioning the text. This technique promotes a creative mind and thinking outside of just the text on the page, they are coming up with their own ideas and scenarios, based on what they have read. 

Working on comprehension at an early age is necessary to help provide students with groundwork to build on when working on more challenging reading situations. A short story is much easier to comprehend compared to a textbook. A student should start young so that they get into the habit of breaking down the text and really understanding it. This habit and formula will help them as they get into more complex reading and will provide the basics of comprehension strategies to help them. 

Word Study

It is a frequent phenomenon for kids learning how to read and write, to make up their own spelling of words. They write exactly what they hear, and because of the complex English language, their spelling generally makes no sense compared to the correct spelling of those words. While some may see this as children being careless or unintelligent, it is proven to be quite the opposite. In Patricia and James Cunningham's text Making Words: Enhancing the invented spelling-decoding invention, it is said that "In general, as children improve in their phonetic sophistication of their invented spellings, their later success in learning to read words becomes much more likely." After doing research, it is seen that children attempting to spell words increases their ability to read those words. Invented spelling seems to trigger something in the brain to recognize the words later and make sense of their phonetics, which will help children understand unfamiliar words in a challenging sentence. Instead of seeing children's invented spelling as simple playfulness and naive, we should recognize this as a step in their learning to become more sophisticated readers and writers. Invented spell in is a beneficial and healthy thing.

Knowing a word, really knowing a word, can be a difficult and thorough process. To fully know a words, in the eyes of Beck and McKeown, "requires a long process that involves multiple exposures in may contexts." There are some words that we know the definition, spelling, usage, etc., while other words we have simply heard here and there and recognize them when we hear them in familiar context. However, those words are not included in the words that we actually know. One extremely useful way to help children discover and learn new vocabulary is the "Ten Important Words" in which a student selects 10 important from a reading. This helps students connect words with a topic, and they then discuss and define the words to determine their meaning. Other beneficial strategies to learn new words are identifying where you might hear a word, listing synonyms and antonyms, draw pictures that depict the meaning, create a semantic map, act out the word, or find other sentences using the same word to figure out the meaning. Each of these strategies gives students exposure to new words, with alternative ways to remember the meaning. It is important to get students to engage with the text and not simply skim over words they are unfamiliar with, but rather, define and explore new words to broaden their vocabulary.

Poetry Performance

Purpose: To have students learn the importance of varying the pitch, rate and volume of their voices. Emphasizing different words will alter the meaning of the poem that the students are reading.

Exercise #1:

1. Use the following poem by Bruce Lansky for this exercise.

My Baby Sister

My baby sister’s
really swell.
I love her smile,
but not her smell.

(Note: All poems used in this study guide are copyright by Bruce Lansky.)

2. Have students take turns reading the poem emphasizing one word over the others. For example the first student reads it emphasizing "My" and the second student reads the poem emphasizing "baby," and so on until the last student has read the poem emphasizing the last word "smell."

3. Reading the selected word with emphasis means to say it louder, slower and more dramatically than the other words in the poem. If you emphasize "My" it means my baby sister as opposed to yours. If you emphasize "baby" it may mean your baby sister as opposed to your older sister.

4. Discuss how the meaning of the poem changes as different words are emphasized.

5. Teach your students that as they practice other poems to present in class that they can decide which words to emphasize. They can underline these words so that they can identify these words as they practice their poems.

http://www.poetryteachers.com/poetclass/performpoetry.htm

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/poetry-lesson-plan

Fluency

"Fluency i stye ability to read most words in context quickly and accurately and with appropriate expression", as defined by Cunningham and Allington in Classrooms That Work. 

When a reader doesn't have fluency they might experience:

• Lack of important information, because of lack of comprehension
• A headache because it is so difficult to concentrate on following the words
• Etc.

It is easier to read something with familiar text and/or content. When you are reading on an unfamiliar topic, you may have to look up or decode words and phrases, which slows down reading and fluency. Fluency is not reading one word at a time (i.e. hes--si--ta--ting), but rather putting words together with a "normal" expression, as if you were speaking the words. Fluent reading can be achieved by everyone, it is something that can be practiced time and time again, helped to improve each time. 

One indicator of fluency is reading rate, which is the average words per minute a person can read. Average reading rates increase throughout grade levels. Grade 1 = 60-90 wpm, eventually leading Adults = 250-300 wpm. 

Choral reading is one way to model expressive oral reading with fluency. To do so, you assign groups of students to different roles and let them read the parts of the different characters. Reassign the groups parts and read the story several times. This helps students get comfortable with reading words aloud, and is not as intimidating because they are reading in groups. They have heard these words or passages before, they are just repeating them again and again. 

As described by Rasinski's Educational Leadership, "Students need to hear what fluent reading sounds like and how fluent readers interpret text with their voices." which is who instructional efforts like assisted readings and repeated readings have proven to be especially effective. Fluency requires practice, and it will be hard to do correctly if the student has no idea what the words mean, therefore when a student first hears someone else say it and they repeat it, it is much easier and more effective for the student. Fluency is something that readers are always improving on, into high school and even beyond. It is an important skill in reading and comprehension that needs a big emphasis when instructed, because it affects the way a reader processes information and works through the words. 

Scholastic has 5 listed strategies to improve reading fluency, all of which I agree are effective and beneficial for students, especially in the early years of schooling:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/5-surefire-strategies-developing-reading-fluency