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.  

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2013/04/investigating-nonfiction-part-2-digging-deeper-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.