Successful reading comprehension

1. Successful reading
comprehension (Willis, J. 2008)
Teaching the Language Skills
PPT created by Alexander Benito

2. Comprehension motivator 1: Activate prior knowledge
Observation
Student conferences
Parents
Conversations
Assessment
Peer interviews
Information from
previous teachers
Interest inventories

3. Activiting students background knowledge include:
Involve
students
experts
Use prereading
sessions in every few
chapters (Books)
Discussion
about
interesting
topics (before)

4. Comprehension motivator
#2 Big picture first
Guest speakers
Art projects
JournalsQuick writing prompts
These priming activities will
hopefully start the stimulation of brain
categories that will be pattern templates for
students’ brains to recognize, encode, and
transport new information to connect with
the stored patterns.

5. Comprehension motivator #3
Prereading
Prereading prepares students for the content,
focus, organization, and level of difficulty of
challenging comprehension material.
Explore Key Words
Build Interest and Attention
Build Connections and
Background Knowledge
Establish Reading Goals
Asking questions about the book topic
Reading a surprising or intriguing passage from the text
Students are using frontal lobe executive
function cognition when they look ahead,
predict, anticipate, analyze, and evaluate,
making adjustments as they read.
Keep students engaged with open-ended discussions that help
students make connections between the information and their
own interests.
To give students an overview of the topic,
book, or story to be read so they can
develop mental templates upon which to
pattern the new information.
Encourage them to monitor their comprehension, and
stimulate active thinking as they read.
Have students discuss goals of what they want from the book,
both in terms of knowledge they want to acquire and
comprehension skills they want to build.

6. Comprehension motivator
#4 Predicting

7. Comprehension
strategies
Summarization connects reading and memory by linking under-
standing of text to remembering.
Summarizing
Students who are having trouble with summarizing can build
up to story summarizing through scaffolded practice.
If students have trouble with summarizing or recognizing the main
idea in a paragraph or story, they can practice summarizing familiar
stories from other books they read or stories they have heard
multiple times. Summarizing movies or television shows can also
scaffold text summarizing.
Students can be given written prompts as questions to consider
as they first summarize plot and then deduce theme. Questions
they can first write responses to and later ask themselves as they
read include:
• Who is the main character and what important things has he
or she done so far?
• What plot information relates to things the main character
did?
• What qualities does the author seem to think are good or
important in people?
• Has there been any conflict and resolution so far?
• What does this information suggest to you about the author’s
message, reason for writing the story, and therefore, the theme?

8. Compare and
contrast
Comparing and contrasting helps
students make associations between
elements of story, character, setting,
and theme.
Similarities and differences between
their lives and those of the characters.

9. I-dentify: Building Personal Relationships with Content
Make Inferences and Ask Questions
Self-Monitoring
Teacher modeling of comprehension strategies

10. Graphic or visual organizers
Visual displays can increase comprehension, organization, summarizing,
prioritizing, memorization, and analysis by helping students construct and
visualize relationships.
Graphic organizers are compatible with the brain’s process of patterning
information for recognition, transportation along neural networks, and storage in
categories.
As younger readers develop the skill of predicting or previewing by looking at
parts of the book, graphic organizers can help them chart the relationship
between headings, subheadings, and chapters.
These visual organizers help students recognize the patterns of subplots and
family relationships as they translate text into visual displays.

11. Graphic or visual organizers
http://www.edhelper.com/teachers/graphic_organiz
ers.htm
Story webs
Timelines

12. After modeling
Reciprocal Reading for Comprehension
Peer Teaching
Assisting and instructing students to do complex cognitive tasks such as guiding them through these
strategies in actual, concrete activities engages them in purposeful, carefully scaffolded learning
processes focused on challenging learning tasks in their zone of proximal development (ZPD), the
cognitive region just beyond what the student can accomplish alone.

13. Independent
activities: Literature
logs
Consider using literature logs to pull students in
through their comfort and interest zones thus lowering
their affective filters so new information can penetrate
their amygdalas, connect with personal and relational
memories, and be consolidated and stored as long-
term memory. In their logs, students are prompted to
include quotes, paraphrase conversations, and briefl y
summarize parts of the plot that cause them to pause
and think. Asking students to select the sections that
are most meaningful to them supports student
comfort and resonance.

14. Note Taking for
Comprehension
Modeling Questions making as
note taking
Key Word notes Note-Taking and Note-
Making Strategy

15. Memory and comprehension:
Working memory
Goals for Strategy Use in Building Memory for Comprehension
• Build patterned links to prior knowledge.
• Increase flow of comprehension information through the
amygdala by lowering the affective filter with low-stress and
high interest activities so the information has a more efficient
pathway through the amygdala to the MTL (medial temporal
lobe) and the higher cognitive functioning regions of the
prefrontal cortex.
• Increase consolidation of information into students’ long-
term memories without the negative influence of high
circulating cortisol to interfere with the storage and retrieval of
this information needed for reading fluency (McGaugh,
McIntyre, & Power, 2002).
• Highlighting, note taking, review, and rereading can
restimulate newly formed patterns recently consolidated in the
MTL and strengthen the long-term memory circuits in the
neocortex.

16. Memory
Building
Activities
Reading Comprehension Quiz
Show
Mnemonics

17. Demystifying Text
Note Taking and Highlighting

18. Metacognition for Comprehension
Instructions to Prompt Student Metacognition
• Stop periodically and consider if you understand what you just read. Try to
summarize the information.
• Check what you are reading against what you already know.
• Make predictions about what is to come, and continually construct and revise a
sense of the whole out of the parts.
• Identify the comprehension problem—is it a confusing vocabulary word, difficulty
recalling past information about a character named in the passage, confusion about
what happened previously that connects with the current action?
• Consider the strategies you have used before: look up the vocabulary word, check
your graphic organizer or timeline, look back through the text, look ahead to see if
the information in the next page will clarify your confusion. After repeated
experience with their metacognitive strategies, students become more comfortable
moving among the different strategies for different purposes.
• Metacognition is reinforced if after using a successful strategy students write a
brief note on a list they keep of strategies that will serve them well in the future. Th
ese can be shared with classmates in whole-class discussions and added to class
strategy lists.