You can do more active types of processing of the text. So if you're in a classroom situation and maybe your working your way through a class novel or some kind of text, you can really kind of take that text apart and ask very concrete questions of it. So, asking children to recall direct facts, and where they can find those. Or also, again if you take a multisensory approach, you can photocopy aspects, parts of the text, cut up chunks and see if this child can appropriately sequence those chunks. Did they understand it enough to know what the order was here? Another approach that's becoming quite common is getting the student to kind of take on the role of the teacher. So in this case, they read some text and then they come up with questions that they can ask you, or a peer. So this really does require comprehension because you could just ask a simple question, like what was going on, but typically we would want a student to ask something that's quite related to the text. And so it's probing their comprehension of the text but then also they're mental cognition in terms of kind of formulating a question that you might be able to answer. And again, it's kind of making them take ownership rather than you asking them a question, which then they answer in a monosyllable 'right - wrong', it's they're kind of they're taking a bit more ownership here. So I think what you can see with all of these things I'm mentioning is we want to get away from just kind of passive engagement with the text. And we really want to get the students feeling comfortable with understanding what’s going on in the sequence and really kind of navigating it for themselves, seeing where they can't understand something, and knowing what they will then do, either going to a dictionary, asking someone else. For different students, you can create cue cards that they can use when they're reading with the best strategies for them, so that they can refer to this. The thing with cue cards is often they can just get left by the wayside, so with any Kind of metacognitive strategy as well as teaching a strategy and practicing it. You then also have to encourage its use. because these things are effortful You're not, even though you might think well why would a student kind of just read something mindlessly when actually they could go through their prompts and read it comprehend it more. But if you've got a learned pattern, or you just know it is gonna take you more effort until it becomes more automatic, (and it may never be quite automatic). So these things do, they need encouraging to be able to see that payoff. Okay, so that's things you can do in the text. We’d also, at this point, really recommend some really rich online resources looking at reading strategies. A couple of American websites are actually worth a mention at this point. There’s the Reading Rockets website, so that's www.readingrockets.org. This site is a wealth of information for teachers, for parents. And it has some very concrete strategies for different parts of the reading process. So I'd recommend having a look around there. Also there's another website that was initially supported by the US Department of Education and is now hosted on the Beacon Education site and this is called Reading Educator. So it's www.readingeducator.com. And again, there's some freely available, very explicit reading strategies that they give you on those pages, and again, there's a lot there. So you're definitely gonna need to try things out that work for your pupils or students. And work with the text that you're trying to navigate. Another important thing to mention here is, that once students are getting older I mentioned that you're gonna need strategies for different types of text. And so with older students whereas with narrative, you could have a strategy as simple as asking a student to think about, who is involved, what are they doing? Where are they? And how does the story resolve? This doesn't work for non-fiction or expository text. And as children are going into their later stages of school, the amount of fiction becomes far less. And a lot of what they're grappling with is expository text. So this has a different structure. ... ... ... it can be useful to help them when they first see a text actually think, okay. What kind of text is this? Is this narrative? Is it expository? And if it's expository, How is it organized? Is it a history textbook where they've actually organized it chronologically, or actually is it history textbook but they've arranged it logically in terms of themes, so it's not actually chronological? Or is it a serial, so some kind of order? Maybe a science process where it's in a serial order, not necessarily chronological. So, it's useful again you think students, these kind of strategies which I don't think probably you would typically go to a piece of text and think to yourself mm-hm what's the organization here, but if you can get students to do this (at an) explicit level, then it's gonna help, 'cos if they haven't really thought about whether it's chronological or logical, they could get themselves into a big kind of comprehension problem, which could actually be very solvable. So, I think for yourself, as an educator, it's useful to actually start thinking about texts in this way. When you're reading the newspaper, if you're reading a report, think about how things are structured and actually kind of how you're navigating. It's likely that you're skimming certain bits, especially in reports. You may be putting a lot of attention in that first paragraph, skimming some subsequent bits, and so this is what we want all readers to get into the habit of. So, make your own strategies when you see yourself using them. And get your students to be detectives. Once they start to grapple with paragraphs, and actually do have the confidence to start reading things get them to really just always be reflecting on what am I doing here? What's the result of my comprehension, and how can I try and comprehend better? The last area of strategy that we'll move into is thinking about visualization and slightly connected things, which is mind maps. So for some students with dyslexia - not all - where the auditory processing of sounds is tricky. We can use visual processing and imagery as a boot-strapping mechanism. So this can be a stronger aspect of comprehension. So for some people with dyslexia if their is one of their strategies as they're reading, it can actually be useful for them to take some of those key elements, so the who, the where, the what, and actually really try and visualize them. And again, if you're first trying this out with a student, you want to really slow it down zoom into a very specific scene. And just see how that goes, is visualization a useful tool for this child. For some people it doesn't quite work, but others actually it's a really vivid way of making things stick. And it can help it can help with as well as a moment in time and it can help with a progression of events. So if this is something that works for a student you're working with, again, don't think that they've seen that its useful so they'll use it automatically. Definitely you need to keep encouraging it and helping them use it where is it useful. And this idea of using vision is related to the idea of mind maps. So a lot of books and a lot of text content is organized in a fairly linear fashion. It's assumed that we'll start at point one. There might then be a kind of subsection, the books traditionally are very kind of linear in their organization but we don't, not all situations in life are that linear. And we don't all think in such a linear way. And, for people with dyslexia there is, there can be a trend for things to be less linear because many of us may become quite linear because of books in a way. That trains us in how to expect information, but if you don't quite trust that route it might be that you don't have quite the same way of planning. You may not trust lines of text so much, so it may be that you brainstorm in a more non linear way. And one thing that's becoming quite prevalent in schools now, and you may well be using it, is the phenomenon of mind maps. So these can be used both as a comprehension tool so you can try and map the contents of a text. So taking the linear and making it branch out into a more intuitive structure for someone. You can always also use them in the planning stages of writing. So I will refer back to them briefly when we talk about writing and composition. So we're just gonna show you a couple of examples here. So you can see some of the ways that they can be used. And you can find lots more examples if you just google mind maps or if you go to Tony Buzan's website - he's a prominent thought leader. The use of mind maps. So, here are a couple. The one that you're looking at now is looking at the Science of Global Warming. So you can see here how you've got the key themes coming out from the center, the Greenhouse Effect, the industrial revolution, and then the greenhouse gases and CO2, and then each of these branches has different types of organizations. So, industrial revolution: we've got a kind of historical division here, before and after. With the greenhouse effect, we've got the different elements of the greenhouse effect. So you can see, this is less linear, but for, it can be a really helpful aid to the complexity of this issue. Another example here, slightly linked is energy saving climate change tips for your school. And then finally one that might be used for personal organization. So here we have one that shows all the different kind of planning stages you might want to go through if you're planning some kind of trip or holiday. So you can see these can be used in multiple ways, they can help consolidate information and also help students take information from the text and make it their own so that they can then use it in a productive way rather than just either losing it. Or kind of just be able to regurgitate it in a fairly kind of non-comprehending sense. So we hope a few of these strategies are going to be useful. Try it all out. And on the discussion boards do let us know specific strategies that you use that you've found to be successful. As I say it's a very individualized processes. We look forward to the discussion.
