Hi! After Reading Reflex, Earobics, Fast Forword, and Seeing Stars
in 1st and 2nd grade, my struggling reader became very good at
decoding. Her sight word recognition is excellent. Her spelling skills
are great. She reads fluently and with expression. I thought
I was home free. WRONG! Her comprehension has always been okay,
but not great. She is in fourth grade now, and her comprehension is
increasingly weak. She struggles to comprehend science. She has
trouble filling out worksheets that go with her reader.
She just tested out of speech/language, her CELF scores were around
the 50th percentile for both expressive/receptive. She does have
CAPD, but the district doesn’t recognize that diagnosis.
What can you do for a good decoder/poor comprehender? I plan to
work on this over the summer. It is a huge stumbling block for her.
Any suggestions appreciated!
Stephanie
Teaching Comprehension
Hi,
Do what Victoria suggests, but also teach strategies in a systematic fashion. Example: first teach pre-reading strategies. Scan titles, visuals, subheadings; read the first paragraph of a section of text. Stop. Make a prediction, ask a question, make a connection. Model these. Model again. Have the student help you then get her/him to do it independently and practice a lot. An article in Judith Birsh’s book the Multisensory Teaching of Language Skills says many dyslexics need these taught independently and repeatedly with lots of practice and the sort of scaffolding I’ve just outlined.
Next, tackle during reading strategies. Read and stop after chunks of text. Check—were predictions confirmed, questions answered? Ask more questions; make more connections. Use K-W-L charts (list what you already know as background before reading, what you want to know, and after record what you learned.) Have the student develop a system for marking text for analysis. Ex. on clear post-its, put an ? mark for questions etc. “I” for important stuff etc. Model the use of “jot-notes”.Check to see that the student is visualizing. If not, model the process. Use think-out-louds to model the second voice (the commenting-analyzing-the-reading-voice) that many struggling readers don’t “hear”. As an introduction to visualizing, put some descriptive text on the left side of a page in biggish type. Divide the page. Have the student draw visuals on the right hand side to correspond.
Finally, after-reading strategies. Retell, rephrase, put the stuff in another form.
Get Kylene Beers’ When Readers Can’t Read - What Teachers Can Do - great source. She has a great system for teaching inference-making called “Syntax Surgery” - and is publishing a new book in the Fall on this topic. Jeffrey Wilhelm is also a good source for strategies. They work.
Re: Help! Reading comprehension is weak
Agree with what they said — also, there are lots of exercises to help learn reading comprehension at my site — click on “reading comprehension.”
Primarily, you want her to get lots of practice processing words and thinking about words. It’s pretty easy for me to tell which folks I’m working with at the college level have gone through the years using the same 970 words or so, and pretty much ignoring the rest and getting by on nonverbal clues; other students (with all ranges of other academic skills) at *least* know when there’s a word they don’t know, and know that, say, there are more than two words for “mad.”
Joanne Carlisle has some neat materials — most of what I put together evolved from things I got from her books on “Reasoning and Reading” which can be had fairly inexpensively from places like RLAC ( http://www.rlac.com ) . She also has a book out called _Improving Reading Comprehension_ that explains a lot of how assorted reading difficulties can contribute to comprehension difficulties, and what to do about them.
Comprehension is also (like math) something that tends to be taught ‘way above where kids really are. Don’t stress if you think she’s not really getting what an assignment is asking for; make sure she’s getting it better than she would have without talking through it with you.
Re: Help! Reading comprehension is weak
So much good information already given…but I think most parents need materials that can help them systematically teach the remedial skills. The very best comprehension program in my opinion is Visualizing and Verbalizing by Lindamood-Bell, but the training is expensive and it would be hard to do correctly without the training. However, there is a program which I have not personally seen that supposedly takes these skills and gives scripted lessons for the parent to follow. It is called IdeaChain by MindPrime.
http://www.understandmore.com/
She needs these skills before teaching other comprehension strategies.
Janis
Re: Help! Reading comprehension is weak
Thanks to everyone for your suggestions. I plan to work hard this summer
to help her. I may just order the V/V manual and try to do it myself.
I wish I could take her to the Lindamood Bell clinic but it is so expensive,
and there isn’t one close to me.
Thanks again for all the suggestions!
Stephanie
Well, I feel I am repeating myself here, but this is what works:
Talk, talk, talk.
First have her read the material out loud. If there is a lot, you and she read alternate pages, out loud.
As you are reading, stop at natural breaks. In a novel this may be at or near the end of a page. In denser material like social studies this may be at the end of a short paragraph. In really dense material like science this may be at the end of a sentence or even a clause.
Talk about it in a natural way, from simple to complex:
simple — vocabulary — what does this word mean? Can you figure out from context what it means — or especially in texts, is there an explanation in the next sentence or clause? Can you see roots and additions? Does it resemble any other word you know? Are there any spelling oddities to take note of?
medium — factual — what is this sentence/paragraph/page telling you? What have you found out from it? Any interesting points that surprise you?
complex — connections and inferences — does this remind you of something else, real life or reading? Where do you think this is leading? Do you agree or disagree? etc.
When you read a book in depth this way, yes it does take time. But it is time very very well spent, well invested, in developing those mental connections.