Reading Comprehension is a complex issue, with many moving factors. That is why it is a very good practice for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grader teachers to do literacy assessments on their students at the beginning of the year to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each child in the classroom. I am not in schools now, obviously, but when I was and when I was a professor, few teachers were systematically assessing their students to start the year.
This graphic that I rebuilt from my notes shows the three main areas that affect reading comprehension. In the early grades, usually the emphasis is on word identification. "Mediated" means working out what the word means and "immediate" means the reader knows the meaning of the word upon sight. The way word identification most affects comprehension is that if the reader is spending more time on mediated efforts (does not know the words upon sight and has to decode them), then the ability to hold the meaning of the combination of all those words—the message—is compromised because too much mental energy is spent on decoding the words.
I am a huge advocate of Words on the Wall, both at home and at school. The idea is to fill the walls with both spelling words and vocabulary words so that students are surrounded by them all the time. This means that spelling tests are "open," with the ability to just look up on the wall to see how to spell a word. In this environment, students can collectively decide when they have moved words from "mediated" to "immediate" and take the words they all know down off the walls to make room for new words. Such emphasizes the importance of learning words and empowers the students with the responsibility and celebration of that learning.
When it comes to teaching words and words play, the GOLD STANDARD is Patricia Cunningham's Phonics They Use.
The other main emphasis educators take is on print processing. For students raised in print rich homes with parents who regularly read to them, print processing knowledge is usually mastered before they arrive at school. One cannot understate just how important it is for infants, toddlers, and young children to experience lap reading. When an adult (or older sibling) reads to a child, that child is learning:
- Reading is a valuable and important activity.
- You open books to read them.
- Books are read from the front of the book to the back.
- The black marks on the page have meaning.
- Chunks of black marks are words.
- Words are read from left to right.
- Pages are read from top to bottom.
- Illustrations help portray meaning to the story.
I could go on, but you get the point. Thus, students who come to kindergarten from print poor homes are handicapped in literacy development from the outset of their education. Teachers focus on print processing, in addition to word recognition, because of its importance. But, also, it is the easiest aspect of reading comprehension to teach.
Walk into any elementary classroom where there are books in abundance, a reading corner with comfortable pillows and such, words on the wall, student made books on the shelves, and student writing on the walls and you know that literacy development is important to that teacher. If you see such a classroom, take the time to stop and thank the teacher for his/her literacy instruction efforts!
Such an approach, however, in not fully structured and, thus, can be more challenging with behavior management. Allowing students to read to each other, to read in spare moments, to curl up in a reading corner or beneath a desk or any place desired means allowing students to control their learning environment. For some teachers the lack of regimentation is uncomfortable.
For parents who do not see such freedoms in their classrooms, they can create that environment in the home to foster their child's literacy development. They can emphasis story reading and story telling. They can bring books and other texts with them to take any spare moments in their outings or on their errands to read or story tell. They can have a spot in the house (usually best near the table) where spelling and vocabulary words can be posted on the wall. They can also make use of a pocket chart to promote word play at home.
For those who practice religious instruction in their homes, they can incorporate word play in their religious lessons. For example, if your children are learning a Bible verse, putting each word of the verse on a piece of sentence strip, mixing them up on a pocket chart or a table top, and then letting children put the words back into the proper order helps then both memorize the text and gain immediate word recognition for the words in that verse.
If you cannot afford a pocket chart and sentence strips, you can use index cards to play with words. Or even scraps of paper, as show in the movie The Color Purple. Visually labeling items with their words and having children interact with those words is a powerful, powerful literacy education activity.
That leaves language development. This is the most difficult area to remediate when students have deficiencies in this area. It is also, in my personal opinion, the most neglected area of literacy instruction. With a society that has utterly devalued proper spelling, punctuation, and sentence construction, fostering language development has become even more difficult.
For parents with children who have literacy difficulties, get them assessed. If the teacher does not do it, ask the school. It is your right to have a professional assessment by the public school system if your student is struggling with literacy. If you homeschool, then pursue the assessment yourself. And, if the results show a difficulty in language processing, get professional help. Barter or trade for it if need be. That intervention will be the best investment you could ever make in the education of your child.
I hope this brief overview has at least provided a bit of insight to literacy instruction, if not food for thought for how you can help foster literacy development. It is my hope to continue discussing these factors of reading comprehension as I pursue my goal of capturing what I still remember about literacy.
