In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation. A 2 page worksheet focusing on the reading comprehension strategy of monitoring. Use this worksheet when teaching your students about the reading comprehension strategy of monitoring. Students read the text The Great Discovery. As they are reading, they must annotate the text with the monitoring comprehension symbols listed at the top of the worksheet. On the second page of the worksheet, the students must then explain when and why they used each symbol.
Australian Curriculum Categories New South Wales Curriculum
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Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension. Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:
Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing" any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read. Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies:
Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or using diagrams. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters. Regardless of the label, graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read and understand textbooks and picture books. Graphic organizers can:
Here are some examples of graphic organizers:
Questions can be effective because they:
The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Students are asked to indicate whether the information they used to answer questions about the text was textually explicit information (information that was directly stated in the text), textually implicit information (information that was implied in the text), or information entirely from the student's own background knowledge. There are four different types of questions:
By generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions and if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to combine information from different segments of text. For example, students can be taught to ask main idea questions that relate to important information in a text.
In story structure instruction, students learn to identify the categories of content (characters, setting, events, problem, resolution). Often, students learn to recognize story structure through the use of story maps. Instruction in story structure improves students' comprehension.
Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. In explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling ("thinking aloud"), guided practice, and application. Effective comprehension strategy instruction can be accomplished through cooperative learning, which involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks. Cooperative learning instruction has been used successfully to teach comprehension strategies. Students work together to understand texts, helping each other learn and apply comprehension strategies. Teachers help students learn to work in groups. Teachers also provide modeling of the comprehension strategies. Monitoring
The narrator explains what monitoring your reading as you read. She goes through how to prepare oneself to monitor their personal reading: prepare, track, and apply strategies to improve. Then she explains why monitoring is beneficial, it helps the reader understand the meaning of the text. She explains that the more you read, the better you will be at monitoring your reading. She then explains common mistakes. Then she explains that when students are focused on other events in their life, it is hard to monitor their reading. Next, the narrator goes through how to monitor ones own reading with examples and key questions. The teacher discusses what good readers do. She explains that good readers are thinking as they are reading. She asks short questions to her students and waits for their responses. Then she explains how that is an example of monitoring their comprehension of the reading. The students are highly engaged, listening carefully. The students are writing on post-its as the entire class goes through the book. The teacher stops and has students share what they wrote on their post-it. At the end, they do through some of the questions that the teacher went through at the beginning of the story. Lastly, she goes through feelings the resonate from the book about the author. Example questions/statements ! I fixed it up myself Read, Cover, Remember, Retell Bookmark Technique During reading, students will make decisions and record specific information on each bookmark including the page and paragraph where the information is located. Use completed bookmarks to romote discussion about the text. Bookmarks could include a sketch on the most interesting part, a chart, a unknown word etc. Patterned Partner Reading Students work in pairs and select a text to read. During reading students choose a pattern to use as they engage in reading. Read-Pause-Ask Questions, Predict-Read-Discuss, or Read-Pause-Retell. Writing and Monitoring The teacher can plan lessons around the student's abilities and push them to achieve more. The teacher can also organize an immediate intervention when needed for each student. Teaching Standards A focus on results rather than means By emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers, and states to determine how those goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed. Thus, the Standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning. Teachers are thus free to provide students with whatever tools and knowledge their professional judgment and experience identify as most helpful for meeting the goals set out in the Standards.References Moore, D. (n.d.). Reading Comprehension Strategies. Best Practices in Secondary Education, 1(1), 1-4. Pennell, D. (2002). Explicit Instruction for Implicit Meaning: Strategies for Teaching Inferential Reading Comprehension. Inferential Comprehension, 16-16. Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read by Armbruster, Lehr, and Osborn, published in September 2001 by the Partnership for Reading. Reading Comprehension: Strategies That Work. (2001). In Reading Comprehension: Strategies That Work (Vol. 1, pp. 421-483). Duke and Pearson. Teaching comprehension strategies. (2010). New South Wales: NSW Department of Education and Training. |