Hello—I’m a new reading teacher and I”m getting discouraged about how long it reaaly takes to remediate comprehension difficulties. I’m not talking about kids with decodnig difficulties, either—the progress is much clearer with them. These are kids with great speed and accuracy scores, and only one has a second langugage issue. There seem to be so many other underlying issues that can effect comprehension; there doesn’t seem to be a “ ‘phonemic awareness” or systematic, explicit instructional plan for comprehension. My kids do fine with me (I do lots of explicit instruction and practice in isolated and real texts, and a little Visualizing/verbalizing), but test poorly, and now I can’t sleep at night. Any advice from those who have been there? I don’t feel comfortable speaking w/teachers at my school.
Re: comp.instruction
Hi,
It’s helpful if you provide more information about your specific situation. Are you a Title teacher working with kids with comprehension issues, for instance, or a regular classroom teacher? What age kids?…etc…Rod
Re: comp.instruction
I work with kids chosen for reading remediation in grades 1-5 at a public elementary school. The decoding-word id issue kids are challenging, but the progress doesn’t seem quite so drawn out. The four kids I”m speaking about are kids who read at an age-appropriate WPM with greater than 98% word accuracy, and who score from the 72-85 percentile on word attack tests. I do a lot of metacognitive instruction, too, explaining when and why they shoudl uuse strategies along with how. One kid recently said, “I just do these things with you. I don’ t need to do them by myself.” They do okay wiht me and then bomb their classroom tests. UGH!
Re: comp.instruction
They do well with you and then bomb teir classroom tests — this is called habit, and it is crossed with low expectations. You have to take time and effort and drill and drill them in productive reading strategies. Also, back off on your support in your class until they are working independently.
Re: comp.instruction
Dear New Teacher, As you are aware most students with learning disabiliites are confronted with a host of uncertainties. New situations and persons contribute to this element in their learning environment.
I teach developmental delayed kindergarteners who at first were exhibiting similar results. However, I reviewed the testing prompts and addressed the questioning format. This allowed my students to understand exactly what they were being asked to do.
In short , a lot of the problems will stem from their not knowing what they are being asked to do . Teach, explain, illustrate, and interact the elements of testing vocabulary!
Best regards,
Sherion
I’ve put a lot of examples of the things we did on my website — go to http://www.resourceroom.net/Comprehension/index.asp and start with “vocabulary” and then “phrasing” and then perhaps the literature exercise examples. I don’t know if they’ll address your issues but there might be something useful there.
Joanne Carlisle’s Reasoning and Reading series has neat comprehension exercises — my guys needed *lots* more practice than the page or two of each kind of exercise, but they were great models so I made up my own similar stuff. (Attainable from EPS books www.epsbooks.com and pretty cheap).
(But, for most of the kids accuracy was the limiting factor to the comprehension — and some kiddos who seemed to be reading fluently were really missing just enough words to mess up their comprhensions. We’d really focus on the accuracy at first and gradually incorporate more & more comprehension instruction. So — you are probably doing the kids the most good with what you’re working on. Unfortuantely — it takes more than a year of good instruction to make an education. )