UKLA - The UK Literacy Association

Special Interest Groups

Comprehension

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Reading comprehension is as fundamental, but debates on literacy are dominated by phonics.. We are starting a UKLA Comprehension SIG to think about comprehension teaching in schools. We want to know:

• What teachers do that works?
• What teachers have tried that is different?
• What are the problems teachers face in teaching comprehension really well?

Some UKLA teachers tried the following ideas:

“I think poor concentration and poor comprehension are often linked. I gave everyone in my class who had poor concentration extra lessons to build basic comprehension. It didn’t improve everyone, but it worked for quite a lot. “

“I explained that readers always imagine characters, places and events differently; no book is ever understood in exactly the same way by two readers. I challenged reading partners to identify similarities and differences in how they had imagined the characters and places in the book they were reading. I was stunned by the conversations this simple task produced. Instead of thinking about comprehension as a ‘right or wrong, they began to share and explain interpretations.”

“I taught my class to ask themselves: ‘Is the answer in the book or is the answer in my head?’ It helped them think about how to combine what they know with the book information.”

“I asked my pupils to cut faces from magazines and newspapers to show what they thought the different characters in the story looked like. When we compared, the differences and explanations were amazing.”

IF YOU HAVE TRIED THESE, OR HAVE OTHER EXCITING IDEAS, THE COMPREHENSION SIG NEEDS YOU!!!!

If any of the following issues interest you, we’d also love you to join us:

• Research shows that children with poor comprehension at seven years old are likely to be poor comprehenders at 15 (Nation, 2005). Anecdotal evidence is that teachers over-estimate their pupils’ comprehension (Ellis and Jajdelska 2009) and do not reliably identify those with comprehension problems (Ricketts et al 2010).
• Some widely used screening tests may not offer teachers much help. Nation and Snowling (1997) show that children can do well in some of the cloze reading elements of the Suffolk Reading Scale but remain poor at understanding longer texts and open questions.
• Is it time to question traditional assumptions about comprehension teaching? Do lessons tacitly assume that everyone must ‘buy-in’ to one understanding and interpretation (usually the teacher’s)? Are comprehension lessons different when they explicitly focus on (and celebrate) the range of pupil interpretations – seeing them as evidence that we all bring different knowledge, concerns and life experiences to our readings of the text? How often does this approach happen in schools, and could it yield interesting gains?
• Is the traditional framework of ‘literal, inferential and evaluative’ comprehension useful, or should we use frameworks that focus more on how and where children use their knowledge? Approaches such as ‘Reciprocal Teaching’ (Palinsar (1986) and ‘Concept Orientated Reading’ Instruction’ (Guthrie and Humenick, 2004), model transferable strategies that need to be promoted across curriculum areas, texts and reading contexts. Would we be better teaching children how to operationalise their knowledge and strategies? Questions such as: ‘Is the answer in the text or is the answer in my head?’ can help inexperienced readers to use their knowledge flexibly (Raphael, 2005) Or is the real issue less about skills and strategies than about readers bringing different types of knowledge and using them in productive ways, as Vivienne Smith argues in the UKLA book Making Reading Mean?
• Traditional activities such as reading a passage and answering questions, tend to test comprehension rather than teach it. But what sort of written activities are useful? Do you have written activities that actively teach comprehension, and would you share them with us? What about activities that are not paper-based?
• Children who struggle to understand their reading are unlikely to become engaged, avid readers, with all the benefits that such reading engagement brings (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1998). They may face problems accessing other aspects of the school curriculum. If reading engagement matters, which authors and texts are particularly helpful for poor comprehenders? Can you recommend some?
• The need to focus on comprehension is one justification for the ‘simple model of reading’, which splits reading into two distinct knowledge domains, decoding and comprehension. It suggests that these develop independently and can be addressed separately in the curriculum. Colin Harrison (2010) challenges these claims but acknowledges their appeal to policy makers. What do you think?