So now we're gonna move on and talk about reading comprehension. So, as we mentioned in previous weeks, reading comprehension can be an issue because of various reasons. So firstly, the effort of decoding may just be that there's not kind of enough mental energy left to think about the bigger meaning of the text. Also, it could be that children who have struggled with decoding in the past, are still quite slow at reading. And so, just even the pacing means that it's harder to keep the information in their heads; they've got to keep it there for longer to understand a paragraph. So again, less energy to devote to meaning. And then also there's gonna be the instances where students have - they've experienced failure with texts. They don't really like texts, and so in a way they are not expecting to get enjoyment or meaning from it. So with these children the decoding fluency may or may not be okay, but it's actually more just they haven't developed strategies to deal with bigger text just because they expect failure, and so they've missed out on various learning opportunities. So, I'm gonna talk about some different strategies that you can employ, around different areas of reading comprehension. Now, these ... ... there's no one size fits all ... here. So definitely with students you're working with, either individually or in groups, try these things out and let it be a collaborative thing. Let the students tell you what's helpful, what's not helpful, and so actually kind of collaboratively build up a toolkit for the student for different situations. This is another thing with comprehension, there's lots of good comprehension strategies you can use that clearly text is not just one thing. You've got narratives, you've got newspaper columns, you've got recipes. And they may all need a slightly different strategy. So actually current research is showing that while strategies can be very effective, one of the edges of knowledge for us both as teachers and researchers is how to really help children generalize and know when to use certain strategies. But we'll get back to that in a minute. Lets get back to the basics first. So, also reflecting back on the simple view of reading which I mentioned a couple sessions ago: So if you remember distilling it down to its most basic elements (it) is a combination of word recognition and then language comprehension and those two things create reading comprehension. One thing we want to be doing is making sure that even if text reading in large chunks is an effort, that we're still encouraging language comprehension and growth of oral language skills, because these will these would be a bolster for reading comprehension, and also just help the child not get too far behind in other areas as well. And so, thinking about ways to do this is, just thinking a bit more strategically about times when the child is expected to kind of do text, as it were. So when children are reading easily, they can use text as a way to learn vocabulary, learn about different things, and the effort of the reading is not distracting from that. When reading is an effort we need to separate out when children are gonna get content and ideas whereas when they are working on text processing, in terms of opportunities to help the child absorb the ideas without the effort of decoding. Audio books are a great tool for this and becoming increasingly available to everyone. So things like having an audible account and in some countries, there are schemes where if you have dyslexia you can get actually get free access to audio books as well. So this is always worth pursuing in the country that you're living in. So audio books are great because students get the content the ideas, the juicy stuff, and they're not having to worry about the decoding. So that's one thing I think is always a really good recommendation for a student, but then also there's kind of intermediate steps. So for example, if school is encouraging you to read books at home, if you're a parent, rather than making the child take the whole load, you can do things where maybe you do one paragraph, you read one paragraph aloud, then your child reads one paragraph, or you can even do it line by line, depending on where your child is at. So, it's working out, 'when can I take a bit of the load off so that the child can devote some energy to the content?' And that really that's really critical in, both in early reading and also in later reading. So they're a few ideas. And I think also so just really making reading matter thinking about books and topics that the child is going to be really interested in or websites even. So that you are helping you are using motivation as a tool. Obviously, you can't do this all the time. For exams, there are certain things you just have to get through content-wise, but I think there is always the opportunity to be a bit more creative and individualistic about - working out what makes this child tick. And what's going to be something where they actually really want to decode this text and find out what it's saying. So that's kind of keeping language growing, but then, we do need to get back to text, we need to work on the text processing. And there's things you can do as a teacher or as a parent or as a student, yourself, to help with this process when you have a say in how text is presented, say you're creating worksheets or you're printing things out. We now know that certain fonts and certain presentation can help with comprehension. So using typically a 14 font on a computer and typically fonts that don't have kind of curves on the ends of the letters. So sans serif we might say, and so it's fonts like Arial. Ariel is probably the most classic. Nice straight lines. These can just help get rid of extraneous information, help access the content. And there is also emerging evidence that when you're struggling with reading, increasing the letter spacing can be a useful tool. And you can do this through the line pitch options within your Word processor. Also double lines, so spacing things out is always gonna be useful. Okay, so we've talked about ... we've talked about presentation. Now let's imagine we're presenting a student with a text that we're hoping that they can take away some useful information from. So what can we do even before the child tried to tackle the text, which they might have quite a lot of trepidation around. So we can scaffold this in a couple of ways. First of all, we can do some verbal talk around the topic. Again, kind of putting the text to the side just for a moment and activating the verbal knowledge. So, asking the child what they know about this topic, already, and also potentially pre-viewing some of the key words that may be in the text so they're not gonna struggle with them, they're not gonna be a barrier to comprehension when they're trying to read the whole thing. You can actually do some pre-viewing. And so that then when they see those words they recognize them. It may, it may be that you're helping the child note the meaning of those or maybe that they know the meaning so you're just helping them kind of access that already. So have a conversation. 'What are we expecting here?' There's also a framework that's really quite well known: the K W L framework. Where you start off by asking yourself with a K, what do I know in this area? The W is what do I want to learn? What am I hoping that this text is going to give me? So those are some pre reading strategies. And then at the end of reading you then do the L which is what actually have I learnt? So you can see with a strategy like this, it's really bringing, making explicit, what skilled readers are doing naturally is fairly unconscious level. But, if reading is a struggle, we have to make these strategies explicit because otherwise, they're not likely to be used and it just helps give it an extra tool. So, pre-reading, so we're going to kind of activate prior knowledge, we're going to help prepare and prime for certain words that might be coming up. So now the child can go into this text with a level of confidence, hopefully. So now, let's move into what do we do, the child is now in the text. They're reading, either silently or out loud. So now we might need a different group of strategies. So, as we've mentioned in this course - I know Vincent has been talking about self correction and definitely self monitoring - and self monitoring is really key in comprehension. And again, skilled readers are doing it automatically, without thinking. If you don't understand something, you might re-read the sentence, you might look back further, you might go to a dictionary and say, I don't know that word. If you're struggling to just get through the text, you may not be doing those things. So again we're just really making implicit strategies explicit. So work with a student to maybe come up with a interval maybe every paragraph, maybe every few sentences, where they stop and ask themselves, 'okay what did that just say?'. Sometimes they might want to orally summarize to you what the sentence has said, at least in the initial stages to get this strategy working. Also If identifying there was a word they didn't know, maybe getting help with that. Or just questions about what the text is really meaning or what someone is referring to. So get into a pattern of first with lots of modeling from yourself or another person who can do this. Make your own comprehension process explicit, and then help the student learn that too. At first it won't be automatic at all, but we're really aiming here for this to become something the student can kind of take on and use themselves with a variety of texts.
