Synthesis:
We know that as students progress throughout school, the texts that they read become more difficult and complex. In order for students to be able to navigate these texts, we must explicitly teach skills and strategies to help them grow as independent readers. We need to teach our students the importance of these strategies, and model how to use them effectively while reading.
- Setting a purpose for reading can be the first step to increase student comprehension. If students don't know why or how the reading is useful to them, they will be less likely to pay attention or want to understand the text. Teachers must explain why the text is relevant before using it in a lesson.
- One factor that makes content-specific texts so difficult for students is the vocabulary. These texts use tier 2 and 3 vocabulary words that must be explicitly taught for students to be able to understand. We cannot expect our students to know these words walking into the classroom.
- Exposing students to various types of text is important to help build background knowledge. The students in our classroom may not have access to many books at home, so allowing our students to see and have experience with lots of books is vital. This includes balancing challenging texts with easier texts. Allowing students to have input and choice when it comes to text is important too, and can help with motivation and comprehension.
- Teaching students how to monitor their own comprehension can be hugely helpful for students while they are reading. Some students can just be tempted to skip parts of the text they don't understand to stop reading all together when they run into a challenging section. Students need to know how to break down vocabulary words into meaningful parts or how to use context clues to gain understanding.
Text to text:
The readings from this week reminded me of the chapters from the previous two weeks about teaching vocabulary and comprehension. We must teach specific strategies to students to allow them to be able to understand the text while reading independently.
Text to self:
It can definitely be frustrating to not have all the knowledge needed to understand a text. I have personally been affected by this in the past. Because I did not have the strategy knowledge, my motivation was reduced and I gave up trying to understand on my own.
Text to world:
I think this is a common occurrence among students. If we teach our students reading and comprehension strategies, hopefully this will help this problem and allow our students able to understand the content-area text.
Questions:
1. What are some effective strategies to use to motivate students to want to read content-area texts?
2. As a future reading specialist, what can I do to help content-area teachers learn how to effectively teach reading strategies?
I'm going to be a future reading specialist too. One thing I think I'd like to incorporate is monthly meetings. By this I mean have one day a month where the different content areas take the day off (or one person from that area comes, in a realistic world), then have the literacy meet with content area teachers, psychologies, reading specialist, gym, music, principal during that monthly meeting. This will allow for content integration. I think during the meetings we could focus on how to incorporate strategies in content areas and also how to teach content areas in literacy class. Hope that makes sense. It'd obviously have to be very thought out, but what an awesome way to integrate all the curriculum.
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ReplyDeleteYour questions are great! I am wondering about them myself. When I student taught the school district had a traveling reading specialist who modeled lessons for teachers-it was really fun to see. She also met with teachers and led a book study of a helpful teaching text.
ReplyDeleteIt can be difficult to motivate students but trying to make connections to their lives and explains explicitly why it is important can help.