Benefits of comprehension in the primary grades

¶ … Reading Comprehension

There is an assortment of well-validated ways to increase comprehension skills in students through instruction. Some of these are explored in this paper. While many believe there is a general lack of comprehension instruction occurring in schools, much is known that would enable such teaching to be done with confidence. There is growing promise that teaching comprehension strategies throughout a student's education, beginning in the primary grades, will greatly benefit academic achievement.

Benefits of Reading Comprehension in the Primary Grades

All across the country many children struggle with learning to read. Armbruster and Osborn (2001) assert reading failure has a detrimental long-term consequence for children's development of self-confidence and motivation to learn, as well as enabling a negative attitude toward education that may affect subsequent school performance.

During the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's Reutzel and Cooter (2005) report reading comprehension was largely taught by asking students pertinent questions about content after reading, or by assigning worksheets to assess reading comprehension skills such as getting the main idea, determining the sequence, following directions, noting details, and cause and effect relationships.

In 1978, Dolores Durkin reported findings from reading comprehension studies conducted in public school classrooms. After observing an assortment of teachers engaged in reading instruction in both reading and social studies classrooms, Durkin concluded that these teachers spent very little time actually teaching children how to understand texts. In fact after observing some 4,000 minutes of classroom instruction, she found just 11 minutes devoted to lessons in comprehension. This represents less than 1% of the total time spent on the teaching of reading devoted to reading comprehension instruction.

Durkin reported teachers do not teach comprehension skills, but only mention or question. She defined a teacher who mentions as one who says just enough about a topic to allow for a written assignment to be given. Additionally, she found time devoted to new vocabulary words was often insufficient. She reported teacher's manuals in reading were usually consulted for only two purposes, to ascertain new vocabulary words, and to retrieve comprehension questions following the reading of a selection. Worksheets were the predominated method of measuring student achievement in reading comprehension.

Durkin conducted a second study in 1981 of five nationally published basal reading series to determine their methodology of comprehension instruction. Her findings in this study basically supported her earlier study. Like teachers, publishers failed to grasp the distinction between teaching and testing reading comprehension. Instruction manuals offered teachers little or no guidance on how to educate children in comprehension. She found the main resources available to teachers were reading comprehension worksheets posing as instruction. Durkin concluded that teachers and publishers often have trouble differentiating between teaching and testing when it comes to reading comprehension.

Durkin suggests that effective comprehension instruction includes helping, assisting, defining, demonstrating, modeling, describing, explaining, providing feedback, thinking aloud, and guiding students through learning activities. Only requiring students to respond to a worksheet or answer a set of comprehension questions does little to develop new comprehension skills. Sadly, many researchers have concluded that the circumstances in schools today have not improved significantly over the years.

Nation and Snowling (1998) did a study that dramatically illustrates the significance of a reader's ability to use comprehension strategies to facilitate understanding even at a young age. They studied ninety-two 7 to 10-year-old children, comparing the performance of dyslexics with that of reading-age matched children with poor comprehension skills and normal readers. The children with dyslexia showed greater contextual facilitation than normal readers who, in turn, showed more contextual facilitation than children with poor comprehension skills. The results show that dyslexic children use context to compensate for poor decoding skills, whereas children with poor reading comprehension fail to benefit from context clues as much as normal readers.

Armbruster and Osborn (2001) describe the skill sets necessary to become a proficient reader as follows. 1) Phonemic awareness - the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds, phonemes, in spoken words. This is important because it improves children's word reading, reading comprehension and helps children learn to spell. Phonemic awareness can be developed through instruction identifying phonemes, categorizing phonemes, blending phonemes to form words, segmenting words into phonemes, deleting or adding phonemes to form new words, and substituting phonemes to make new words. 2) Phonics instruction -- This helps children learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language. It leads to an understanding of the alphabetic principle, the systematic and predictable relationship between written letters and the sounds they represent. 3) Fluency - This is the ability to read a text accurately and quickly. It is important because it frees students to understand what they read. 4) Vocabulary -- This refers to the words we must know to communicate effectively. Oral vocabulary refers to the words that we use in speaking or recognize in listening. Reading vocabulary refers to the words we recognize or use in print. This is important because beginning readers use oral vocabulary to make sense of the words they see in print. Readers must know what most of the words mean before they can understand what they are reading. 5) Comprehension -- This is important because it is the point of reading and can be developed through teaching comprehension strategies.

Pressley (2001) reports it is normal practice for teachers to view the primary grades as the time to hone word-recognition skills, believing comprehension will be developed in the later grades. More and more, this view is being revisited, with evidence mounting that interventions aimed at improving comprehension during the primary years contribute to enhanced achievement in reading performance. Research has shown that reading comprehension improves when teachers provide explicit comprehension strategy instruction and when they provide instructional activities that support students' understanding of what they read.

Comprehension is the reason for reading. If a student can read the words but does not understand what they are reading, they are not really reading. Two things that all people who read well have in common are that they are both purposeful and active. They read for a variety of reasons, such as to learn how to do something, learn how something is done, increase their knowledge about a specific subject or area, or simply for entertainment or pleasure. People who read well also think actively as they read. In order to make sense of what they read they engage in a complicated process, using their experiences and knowledge of the world, their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure, and their knowledge of reading strategies to make sense of the text. They also know when they have problems with understanding and how to resolve these problems as they occur.

Pressley (2001) believes reading can be thought of as a hierarchy of skills, from the recognition of individual letters and their related sounds, to the recognition of individual words, to text-processing competencies. Good comprehension requires the ability to simultaneously integrate of all of these processes, beginning with the sounding out and recognition of individual words to the understanding of sentences in paragraphs as part of much longer texts. The content and skills necessary to achieve this goal can be broken down to decoding/fluency, vocabulary, world knowledge, active comprehension strategies, and monitoring. Instruction at all of these levels is needed to increase student understanding of what is read.

Decoding/Fluency

Students cannot understand texts if they cannot read the words. Before they can read the words, they have to be aware of the letters and the sounds represented by letters so that sounding out and blending of sounds can occur to pronounce words. Once pronounced, the good reader notices whether the word as recognized makes sense in the sentence and the text context being read and, if it does not, takes another look at the word to check if it might have been misread. Of course, reading educators have paid enormous attention to the development of children's word-recognition skills because they recognize that such skills are critical to the development of comprehension.

The ability to sound out a word does not assure that the word will be understood by the reader. Real mental effort is necessary when students begin learning to sound out words. The more effort required the less consciousness left over for other cognitive operations, including comprehension of the words being sounded out. Fluent word recognition consumes little cognitive capacity, freeing up the child's cognitive capacity for understanding what is read.

Vocabulary

Students with good comprehension skills usually have good vocabularies. However, simply teaching vocabulary will not guarantee an enhancement of students' comprehension. Nevertheless, research indicates that when vocabulary was taught comprehension improved as a function of vocabulary instruction. When Isabel Beck and her colleagues taught 4th grade children a set of 104 words over a 5-month period (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982), the children who received vocabulary instruction outperformed the children in the control group on comprehension tests. There is evidence that teaching vocabulary enhances the ability to comprehend what they read.

One counterargument to the practice of teaching vocabulary is that children learn the meanings of many words by experiencing those words in the actual world and in text without explicit instruction. Unfortunately, such incidental learning is filled with possible problems. The definitions learned range from richly contextualized and more than sufficient, to incomplete to wrong. Children do develop knowledge of vocabulary through incidental contact with new words they read. This is one of the many reasons to challenge students to read incessantly.

World Knowledge

There is considerable evidence that readers who possess prior knowledge about the topic of a reading often comprehend the reading better than classmates with no, or lower prior knowledge. Nevertheless, even when students have knowledge relevant to the information they are reading they do not always relate their world knowledge to the content of a text. Unless inferences are absolutely necessary to make sense of the content they are reading, students frequently don't make inferences based on prior knowledge. All the same, reading comprehension can be improved by developing students' prior knowledge. This is another reason to challenge students to read high-quality, information-rich texts.

When students read text containing new factual information, they do not necessarily relate that information to their prior knowledge even if they have a large reserve of knowledge that might be related at their disposal. Research shows that questioning techniques, such as asking students to explain something they read, or why something happened in the text, prompts them to access their prior knowledge and make sense of the content. These techniques produce a huge effect on retention of the information acquired in the texts.

Active Comprehension Strategies

Students who read well are extremely active as they read. Cordon and Day (1996) describe this phenomenon thusly, "Good readers are aware of why they are reading a text, gain an overview of the text before reading, make predictions about the upcoming text, read selectively based on their overview, associate ideas in text to what they already know, note whether their predictions and expectations about text content are being met, revise their prior knowledge when compelling new ideas conflicting with prior knowledge are encountered, figure out the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary based on context clues, underline and reread and make notes and paraphrase to remember important points, interpret the text, evaluate its quality, review important points as they conclude reading, and think about how ideas encountered in the text might be used in the future. Young and less skilled readers, in contrast, exhibit a lack of such activity."

Another trait of good readers is that they often form mental pictures, or images, as they read. There is value in guiding students to learn to form visual images of what they are reading, such as urging them to picture a setting, a character, or an event described in the text. Readers, especially younger readers, who visualize during reading understand and remember what they read better than readers who do not visualize.

Active reading can be stimulated by teaching students to use comprehension strategies. The following strategies are known to produce improved memory and comprehension of text in children: 1) generating questions about ideas in text while reading, 2) constructing mental images representing ideas in text, 3) summarizing, and 4) analyzing setting, characters, conflict, attempts at solution, successful resolution, and ending. Excellent readers do not employ these strategies one at a time, nor do they require the influence of strong instructional control. Teachers need to teach students to use these individual strategies simultaneously, employing them in a self-regulated fashion. These skills can be taught beginning with reciprocal teaching of the first strategy and continuing through more flexible approaches reinforced with extensive teacher explanation and modeling of individual strategies, followed by teacher-scaffold use of the strategies, and concluding with students employing self-regulated use of the strategies during regular reading.

Monitoring

Students who are successful readers are conscience of the times they need to exert more effort to make sense of a text. For instance, they know when to expend more effort decoding. These students are aware when they have sounded out a word but that word does not really make sense in the context. When that feeling occurs good readers will try rereading the word in question. It is sensible to teach young readers this skill. Current approaches to reading instruction incorporate a monitoring element, with readers taught to pay attention to whether the decoding makes sense and to try decoding again when the word as decoded fails to make sense in the given context.