Teaching Comprehension Skills

1. Teaching Comprehension Skills Learning Support Guidelines PCSP

2. What is Comprehension? • Comprehension is the act of constructing meaning with text • The reader plays an active role – filtering, organising, interpreting and generating relationships with incoming information • Comprehension is an interaction between word identification, knowledge and comprehension skills (Johnson, A.P., 1998)

3. Why teach comprehension skills? • To increase students’ ability to create meaning with text independently • This is best done by explicit teaching in the use of comprehension skills • Not all students acquire these skills naturally

4. Purpose of Reading • Narrative Texts – to enjoy the story • Expository (Information) Texts – Information/ Explanation/ Persuasion • Diagrammatic/ Representational Texts – present or illustrate information

5. What are comprehension skills? • They are the strategies a reader uses to construct meaning and retrieve information from a text • They are cognitive processes which can be broken into steps and taught explicitly

6. Three types of comprehension skills • Pre-reading • During reading • Post-reading

7. Pre-reading Skills • Pre-view/ Overview • Web and Brainstorm • KWL

8. During – Reading Comprehension Skills • Paragraph Re-Read • Read and Pause • Note-taking

9. Post – Reading Comprehension Skills • Summarise • Article re-read • Sequencing

10. Teaching Comprehension Skills • Direct instruction and modelling • Identification of the procedural components • Scaffolded Instruction • Regular Practice • Integration across the Curriculum

11. Resources • A.P. Johnson (1998) Teaching Comprehension Skills: Reading : 32:2:98 • Drumcondra Primary Reading Test:Levels 3 – 6: Administration Manual: pps.22 – 25 • Drumcondra English Profiles: pps.108 – 116 • English Curriculum Handbook –Teacher Guidelines: pps.61 - 65