Comprehension Within Disciplinary Literacy
Students face many challenges
throughout their academic career and for many students reading comprehension is
a major obstacle they must overcome. I think Carol Lee and Anika Spratley said
it best as, “Struggling adolescent readers in our schools face more complex and
pervasive challenges. Supporting these readers as they grapple with the highly
specific demands of texts written for different content-areas will help prepare
them for citizenship, encourage personal growth and life-satisfaction on many
levels, and open up opportunities for future education and employment.” As
teachers we must prepare our students to be college and career ready. We can
achieve this by teaching them to be experts in each content area. Students need
exposure to a variety of texts and taught strategies to use in order to
comprehend the information. Exposing students to the different reading
strategies will help them to be strong, independent readers.
In all content areas students
need to be literate. However, within each content area being literate takes on
new meaning. Every content area students have throughout their day means reading
different text types. The teacher’s role is to educate their students on how
they can be successful readers within their class. Even when a student is not
in a ‘reading’ class they should still be learning and using reading strategies
that will help them comprehend the information. Through the information
presented or assigned to students they should be able to dig deeper at the
author’s true purpose and underlying meaning of the text. Dr. Manderino pointed
out that research shows students build comprehension when they have explicit
teaching of the reading strategies. Depending on the text being read students
can use a variety of strategies such as, summarizing, questioning, connecting,
visualizing, and making inferences. As the students grow in the knowledge of
the strategies they need to be taught and given time to practice these
strategies strategically. This means students need to be aware of when it’s
appropriate to use each strategy.
I found this image from Jade
Jones where she outlines the strategies that teachers should use in the classroom
as it relates to disciplinary literacy. I found it interesting how she outlined
what strategies the students can/should be using before, during, and after
reading.
However, students should not
only use and rely on reading strategies. I really enjoyed watching the short
video clip made by Professor Daniel Willingham where he explained that the key
to the students’ comprehension is prior knowledge. We need to teach our
students content and supply them with plenty of opportunities to read about the
topics being taught.
As Dr. Sunday Cummins
explained we can help with students comprehension by ‘close reading’. Through this students can navigate a complex
nonfiction text to gain a deeper understanding of the information. The students, along with modeling from the
teacher and scaffolding instruction, can break a particular writing piece into
words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs to get the main ideas that the author
is trying to convey. After watching this video on Dr. Sunday Cummins, I did
some additional research and found this website on Scholastic that answered
several of my questions I still had about close reading.
This article is written by an
elementary teacher that shows posters she has used, along with detailed instruction
in how she incorporates close reading in her classroom.