By: Laura Robb

“Comprehension” is a word that teachers use all the time: Jake’s comprehension is weak; Talia can’t comprehend nonfiction; David comprehends everything he reads.  Comprehension refers to what readers understand in a text while comprehending is the process readers use to develop comprehension.  It’s helpful to confer with students to discover their comprehending process and feelings toward reading.  Analyzing students’ writing about reading also provides teachers with a window into students’ thinking and level of understanding.

        There are many levels to assessing students’ understanding of a text.  Proficient and advanced readers automatically do the following while reading.

•      Interact with the text by conversing with the author: raising questions, predicting, and commenting.
•      Connect parts of the text to their experiences and background knowledge.
•      Connect information and narrative elements within a text.
•      Use context clues to figure out the meaning of difficult words.
•      Transfer what they learned and understood to other learning situations.

Recall of Information

A common sense belief I always share with teachers is that it’s pointless to ask students to read and reread a text at their frustration level.  Recall implies that the learner is able to decode the text, understand, and then remember the information. That will happen when the student has enough background knowledge and the text is close to his or her instructional reading level.  Valentina’s story illustrates how frustration reading affects students.

Conferring: A Snapshot of Valentina

Before administering an Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) to Valentina, a sixth grader, we spent time chatting about her interests.  Valentina loved playing basketball, texting friends, and hanging out with them.  When I asked her how she felt about reading, she volunteered this statement: “I hate reading. I suck at it.” Her reasons were candid, logical, and on point.  Reading three years below grade level, her ELA and content teachers required Valentina to read and reread grade-level texts.  Her words reveal her feelings about these tasks: “If I have to read again and again and can’t understand it, what’s the point?” She shrugged and added, “ They [her teachers] get mad when I write nothing about reading. I can’t write if I get nothing [from the reading].”

After completing and analyzing Valentina’s IRI, I suggested two actions that could improve her reading:

1. Have her read and learn from material at her instructional reading level—preferably books she chose.  Then involve her in meaningful book discussions with a partner or small group who discuss questions they compose.
2.  Accelerate her reading stamina and achievement by teaching her how to self-select books for independent reading because often students like Valentina select difficult books to save face with peers.

Volume Matters

Researchers agree that volume in reading matters.  First, volume can develop a student’s personal reading life which means he or she chooses to read at home.  In addition, volume can enlarge a student’s vocabulary and background knowledge, build fluency, and develop a deep and lasting love of reading.

There are school districts that require students read grade-level texts even if they can’t comprehend them.  Often these students listen to a book on tape or the teacher reads the book aloud to the class.  The problem here is that students aren’t reading and that’s why they slide backward.  Continuing on this trajectory will not support the Valentina’s of this world and will increase the number of students who don’t read and dislike reading.

Reflecting on Valentina’s Story

Fortunately for Valentina, her ELA teacher, received permission from the principal to abandon the district requirement of every student in a grade level, complex text.  Valentina could choose from alternate books her teacher suggested for each unit of study.  She began to self-select books for independent reading and read them.  In the past, Valentina was an ace at fake reading during free choice independent reading time.  Adjustments in her ELA class are definitely a positive step toward supporting Valentina’s reading life, but many questions remain:

•      Would her content teachers find materials she could read and learn from?
•      Were enlarging classroom libraries a top priority?
•      What kind of feedback did Valentina receive from her teachers to increase her efficacy and self-confidence?
•      How often did teachers confer with students like Valentina to continue to monitor, support, and celebrate her progress?
•      What kinds of direct instruction in all classes did Valentina (and other students) need to practice and internalize what good readers do?

Closing Thoughts

We all want our students to love reading.  Alas, roadblocks such as limited or no class libraries and a lack of alternative texts and materials for striving readers derail our wants. Yes, it’s heartening to observe ELA teachers and school administrators adjust instruction.  However, until teachers in all subjects have access to books and materials that meet the instructional needs of their students, progress will remain slow.  We need to bring common sense back to our teaching practices and ensure that we reach every reader in our classrooms and support them on their journey to developing a personal reading life.

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Several years ago I was working in a school district in southern Virginia and one experience still replays in my mind.  I collaborated with a special education teacher engaging seven students in guided reading.  Her materials were eight or sixteen-page books she downloaded and put together—poorly written and illustrated texts that bored students.  The district had put all their money into a basal program with downloadable texts for guided and independent reading; there was no extra money for real books—beautifully written and illustrated books.

Here’s the question to ponder: Why do school districts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for basal reading programs?  When scores on state tests are low, it’s tempting for districts to turn to programs making seductive promises such as: faithfully implement all parts of this program and test scores will rise.  Grade level programs can’t help children reading three or more years below a specific grade.  Moreover, they also don’t support students reading above grade level improve because in the program these students read at their independent level.  Unfortunately, when students’ reading performance on annual high stakes tests define a school district’s and a state’s success, the quest for the magic bullet begins.

Charlotte Huck, a champion of using the finest children’s literature for reading said: ”We don’t achieve literacy and then give children literature; we achieve literacy through literature.”  Not only do children learn to read with outstanding books, but such books are often their first introduction to art and visual literacy—incredible illustrations and photographs.  Children deserve books that help them make sense of their world, that show them how others have struggled as they struggle now, that use stories to transmit diverse heritages and cultures from one generation to the next, that invite children to reread beloved parts and share these with friends.

Fifteen Reasons Why Children Deserve the Best Books     

By offering students outstanding literature, you can:

1. Nurture their hearts and minds and bond them to books that compel them to reread and share with others.
2. Change their thinking on a topic a culture, and different lifestyles by using story to construct understanding.
3. Boost imagination and creativity using beautifully written books that enable readers to visualize.
4. Expand experiences and knowledge about the world providing books on a wide-range of topics.
5. Take us into the past, present, and future so we can better understand past and present worlds and imagine the future.
6. Build visual literacy so students can make meaning from an illustration, photograph, or diagram.
7. Stir meaningful student-led discussions encouraging readers to raise their own questions and move beyond literal to inferred meanings.
8. Tell the stories of diverse cultures and enable students to develop tolerance and compassion.
9. Enlarge vocabulary, for the more students read, the more they see and understand words used in diverse contexts. Vocabulary is comprehension!
10. Introduce and develop a knowledge of literary language so students can understand complex sentences and appreciate figurative language.
11. Improve stamina and concentration through sustained silent reading of self-selected books.
12. Develop emotional intelligence and empathy through the ability to walk in a character’s shoes and understand life as he or she lives it.
13. Offer readers hope because even the darkest books hold out hope and stimulate a desire to solve challenging problems in the world.
14. Develop literary tastes because students, not programs or teachers, choose books.
15. Show students books are excellent entertainment by reading aloud adding entertaining books to class libraries.

Reminders

Remember, letting students self-select books invests them in the reading.  Remember, volume of reading matters, and enlarging classroom libraries means students have, as one of my eighth  graders stated, “books at their fingertips.”  Remember, your responsibility is to teach every child to read well and cultivate each child’s personal reading life.  You can engage and motivate students to read, read, read when you provide the opportunity and the finest books!

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Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D. 

For many of you, the title of this blog entry may sound a bit nonsensical — Why teach something and then not use it?  But let me ask you to think a bit more deeply about phonics.  If you are reading this you are likely a proficient reader.  When reading how often do you have to stop and analyze or “sound out” individual words?  My guess is that more than 99.9% of the words you encounter in reading are not analyzed or “sounded.”   Most words we encounter as proficient readers are sight words – they are recognized instantly and near effortlessly.  Phonics is hardly used at all when proficient readers read.

We need phonics and other word analysis skills in order to get words into our heads.  But after a few encounters with analyzing specific words, those words become “imprinted” in our brains as sight words.  We need phonics to get words into our internal lexicons.  But once those words are automatized or made into sight words phonics is no longer needed.

Getting words to the point of automatization is critical to proficient reading.  The problem in reading is that all of us have a limited or finite amount of attention or cognitive energy.  Analyzing words, as is done in phonics, uses up a lot of that cognitive energy.  And that energy that is applied to word analysis cannot be applied to the more important part of reading – comprehension.  So what often happens are readers who can read all the words correctly, but because they are spending their precious cognitive resources on word analysis their comprehension falters.

Carol Chomsky noted this phenomenon in her 1976 classic article entitled “After decoding: What?”  Working with struggling readers, she taught them to decode words. However, despite the fact that they were able to decode words accurately, “albeit slowly and painfully (p. 288),” they continued to struggle with reading comprehension and general proficiency in reading.  The answer to her question of “What?” was helping students develop automaticity or fluency in their reading.  She did this by having students read interesting and challenging materials while simultaneously listening to an audio-recorded version of the text.  In a 15 week intervention period (less than four months), her students made approximately 8 months progress in reading!

Phonics is important, no question about it.  It is a tool that readers use to get words into their internal lexicons.  However, proficiency in phonics should not be the goal. Rather the goal should be to get students to the point where most of the words they encounter are automatically recognized so that their attention can be devoted to making meaning.    

The way to get young readers to the point of automatic word recognition is the same way a person develops automaticity in any activity – practice.  However, the practice needs to be the kind that allows children to move to proficient reading.  Two of the best ways of providing proficient practice is through assisted reading and repeated reading.

Assisted reading is what Carol Chomsky used with her students.  Students read texts while simultaneously listening to a fluent reading of the text.  This can occur by reading with a more proficient partner, reading with a group of others, or reading while listening to a recorded version of the text.  In all of these situations, the assist of another reader provides students with a scaffold that allows them to approach fluent reading on their own.

Repeated reading simply involves reading a text multiple times until a student can read it at a level that approaches proficiency.  When students who struggle in reading read a text, the initial reading is not proficient.  However, when they read it a second, third, and perhaps even a fourth time their proficiency improves until they are able to read it much like a proficient reader.  The “magic” behind both assisted and repeated reading is that the improvement that comes from reading one text with assistance and/or repeatedly transfers to new texts that students have not previously read.  In essence, students begin to pull their reading up by their bootstraps.   

While I don’t want to get overly technical in this blog, I do want to mention that, in this age of scientifically based reading instruction, a good deal of research supports both assisted and repeated reading, especially with students who find reading difficult.  In a recent review of research related to fluency interventions Stevens, Walker, and Vaughn (2017) conclude that “Results showed repeated reading,… and assisted reading with audiobooks produced gains in reading fluency and comprehension” (p. 576). My own research on the Fluency Development Lesson (Rasinski, 2010), a lesson that integrates assisted and repeated reading consistently results in improved performance in word recognition automaticity and comprehension.    

While it is critical that we provide students with solid instruction in phonics or word decoding, it is equally important that we keep in mind that we need to take students to that next level word reading—fluent, automatic, and proficient reading.  

References

Chomsky, C. (1976). After decoding: What? Language Arts, 53, 288-296.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010).  The fluent reader:  Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2nd edition).  New York: Scholastic.

Stevens, E., Walker, M., & Vaughn, S.  (2017). The effects of fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with learning disabilities:  A Synthesis of the research from 2001-2014. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50, 576-590.

You can find resources for teaching accurate and automatic word recognition (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

Daily Word Ladders by Timothy Rasinski

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Educators and departments of education often believe that’s what’s new in learning will bring about significant change. I remember when filmstrip and film loop devices, as well as cassette players, were going to change education. In learning centers, my fifth-grade students watched filmstrips about history, science, or math; they listened to tapes of authors discussing their books.  For several years, classrooms had a television monitor, and part of the curriculum was students watching science experiments and listening to current events. In those moments, we believed this was cutting edge learning! WRONG!

Today, most classrooms have several computers and tablets and soon all students will have a laptop and/or a tablet.  Beware of using technology to continue practices that need to go: completing worksheets, answering questions at the end of each chapter of a book, or looking up a list of words on an online dictionary. Technology, used well can enhance learning and the digital natives you teach will appreciate Padlet, which allows them to respond to a discussion or story in real time, Storybird for digital storytelling, and an app to create digital portfolios.

Changes in education are abundant and continually happen. However, if we look back, we can see some of these past needs—must-haves—have faded away.  I’d be hard-pressed to find a filmstrip, film loop viewer, television, or a cassette tape player in any classroom today.  So now, it’s time to state one truth: needs and wants in education change, but there’s one exception: books.

        Too many educators in administrative positions in school districts and in state departments of education believe books are a want and not a need.  Instead of investing in books and teachers, too many schools purchase expensive reading programs on computers, believing that technology will transform students reading far below grade level into readers. Reading short selections on a computer, working on skills in isolation, and answering a set of multiple-choice questions doesn’t improve students’ reading skill. Looking for technology to make a quick fix can’t work as interacting with a computer doesn’t develop students’ ability to read long, complex texts, discuss texts, become active listeners, develop stamina, and analyze details. I’m in favor of using technology to enhance learning, not to replace interactions between students and a highly skilled teacher. All readers, especially those in grades 4 to 8 reading at a primary level need a skilled teacher and books.  And here are ten reasons why.  #booksandteachersmatter

Ten Reasons Why Books and Skilled Teachers Are Needs     

1. Skilled teachers love to learn. To become a skilled reading teacher means keeping abreast of the newest research and best practices. Skilled teachers read professional books and articles and join Twitter to develop a PLN (Personal Learning Network) so they can make a difference in the reading lives of children.
2. Reading is social. In addition to students interacting with the book’s author, they benefit from interacting with peers during guided reading, student-led literature circles, and book clubs. A need to share emotions, fears, and predictions are part of reading. Conversations bond readers to books because talk can affect their hearts and minds. To share ideas with others—to talk about books in a group or conference—not only improves recall and understanding but also invites readers to organize their ideas so listeners understand them.
3. Teachers provide face-to-face positive feedback. Working with small groups enables teachers to notice and spotlight interactions that work. Building on positive behaviors—“I notice how you found evidence to support your inference.” or “I noticed how well you used picture clues to figure out that word’s meaning,”–develops the self-confidence students need to continue to work hard.
4. Teachers form relationships that motivate students.  It’s impossible to form a meaningful relationship with a computer. But when teachers and students interact with books, opportunities abound to develop trust and experience humor in a nurturing environment.
5. Teachers make decisions to support readers.  Computers can grade multiple choice tests and cite the number right and the type of questions a student missed such as factual, main idea, inferring. A skilled teacher offers helpful feedback in the moment and then uses what students say and do to make decisions about interventions and next steps.
6. Teachers cultivate critical thinking and inferring. Whether working with a small group or one-on-one, teachers can model the process of inferring or using context clues to determine a word’s meaning.  By thinking aloud and modeling, teachers build students’ mental model of how a process works.
7. Books by the finest writers should be read.  When students read beautifully written, engaging books, they also learn about excellent writing and how specific genres work.
8. Volume matters. The number of books students read with the guidance of a teacher and the amount of independent reading they complete matters.  The more students read and practice, the more they improve and move forward.
9. Picture books develop visual literacy. Instead of reproducible books, learning to “read and interpret” outstanding photos or illustrations is frequently students’ introduction to art and critical thinking.  
10. Poetry cultivates fluency and comprehension. Follow Tim Rasinski’s advice and research and have students select a poem a week, practice saying the poem to a partner, and performing the poems to develop fluency and improve vocabulary and comprehension in an authentic way.         

Closing Thoughts

Remember, no replacement exists for a highly skilled teacher, and every child deserves one. Immersing students in books, giving them choice, and allowing them the time to learn how to self-select a book they can read for independent reading can make a huge difference in their progress and desire to read at home and school.

Books and skilled teachers make a difference in learning to read and developing a rich, personal reading life. Malala Yousafzai understood the power of the book, the pen, and an educated child when she said: “One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first.” Malala Yousafzai  #booksandteachersmatter

Differentiating Reading Instruction By Laura Robb