Reading Comprehension Instruction in the Primary Grades

Introduction

There is an assortment of well-validated ways to increase comprehension skills in students through instruction. 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 that reading failure has a detrimental long-term consequence for children's development of self-confidence and motivation to learn, as well as fostering a negative attitude toward education that may affect subsequent school performance.

During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Reutzel and Cooter (2005) report that reading comprehension was largely taught by asking students pertinent questions about content after reading, or by assigning worksheets to assess comprehension skills such as identifying the main idea, determining the sequence, following directions, noting details, and understanding 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 approximately 4,000 minutes of classroom instruction, she found just 11 minutes devoted to lessons in comprehension — less than 1% of the total time spent on reading instruction.

Durkin reported that 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 a written assignment to be given. Additionally, she found that time devoted to new vocabulary words was often insufficient. She reported that teachers' manuals in reading were usually consulted for only two purposes: to identify new vocabulary words and to retrieve comprehension questions following the reading of a selection. Worksheets were the predominant 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 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) conducted 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 children aged 7 to 10, comparing the performance of dyslexic readers 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, or phonemes, in spoken words. This is important because it improves children's word reading and reading comprehension, and helps children learn to spell. Phonemic awareness can be developed through instruction in 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 words we use in speaking or recognize in listening; reading vocabulary refers to words we recognize or use in print. This is important because beginning readers use oral vocabulary to make sense of words they see in print, and readers must know what most words mean before they can understand what they are reading.

5) Comprehension — This is important because it is the ultimate point of reading, and it can be developed through explicit comprehension strategy instruction.

Pressley (2001) reports that it is common 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 truly reading. Two things that all proficient readers share are that they are both purposeful and active. They read for a variety of reasons — to learn how to do something, to learn how something is done, to increase their knowledge about a specific subject, or simply for entertainment. People who read well also think actively as they read. In order to make sense of what they read, they engage in a complex process, drawing on their experiences and knowledge of the world, their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure, and their knowledge of reading strategies. They also recognize when they encounter problems with understanding and know how to resolve those 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 all of these processes, beginning with sounding out and recognizing individual words and extending to understanding sentences in paragraphs as part of much longer texts. The content and skills necessary to achieve this goal can be broken down into decoding/fluency, vocabulary, world knowledge, active comprehension strategies, and monitoring. Instruction at all of these levels is needed to increase students' understanding of what is read.

Decoding and Fluency

Students cannot understand texts if they cannot read the words. Before they can read the words, they must be aware of the letters and the sounds those letters represent, so that sounding out and blending of sounds can occur to pronounce words. Once a word is pronounced, the proficient reader considers whether it makes sense in the sentence and the broader text context, and if it does not, revisits the word to check for misreading. 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.

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

Vocabulary

Students with good comprehension skills usually have good vocabularies. Simply teaching vocabulary will not guarantee improved comprehension; nevertheless, research indicates that when vocabulary is taught, comprehension improves as a function of that instruction. When Isabel Beck and her colleagues taught fourth-grade children a set of 104 words over a five-month period (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982), the children who received vocabulary instruction outperformed the control group on comprehension tests. There is clear evidence that teaching vocabulary enhances the ability to comprehend what is read.

One counterargument to the practice of teaching vocabulary is that children learn the meanings of many words by encountering them in the real world and in text without explicit instruction. Unfortunately, such incidental learning carries potential problems. The definitions acquired range from richly contextualized and accurate, to incomplete, to simply wrong. Children do develop knowledge of vocabulary through incidental contact with new words encountered during reading — which is one of many reasons to challenge students to read widely and frequently.

Conclusion

Teachers in the primary grades should begin to build the foundation for reading comprehension. Reading is a complex process that develops over time. Although the basics of reading — word recognition and fluency — can be learned within a few years, reading to learn subject matter does not occur automatically once students have learned to decode. Teachers should stress text comprehension from the beginning, rather than waiting until students have mastered the basics of reading. Instruction at all grade levels can benefit from showing students how reading is a process of making sense out of text, or constructing meaning. Beginning readers, as well as more advanced readers, must understand that the ultimate goal of reading is comprehension.

The starting point for the development of many comprehension skills is teacher modeling of those skills. Researchers have found that when primary-level students are taught to use comprehension strategies and monitoring, the children benefit greatly. There is clear interest in expanding comprehension instruction in the early elementary grades, with the expectation that such instruction will affect 5- to 8-year-olds dramatically in the short term and perhaps lead to development of better comprehension skills over the long term.

The case is very strong that teaching elementary, middle school, and high school students to use a collection of comprehension strategies increases their comprehension of text. Teachers should model and explain comprehension strategies, have their students practice using such strategies with teacher support, and make clear that students are expected to continue using the strategies when reading independently. For this instruction to be successful, it should occur across the school every day for as long as necessary to get all readers using the strategies independently. This means the teaching staff must be committed to including this training as a core element of the regular curriculum and instruction.