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Contents
Introduction: Reading for Meaning -- The Meaning of Reading
Chapter 1. Definition
Chapter 2. Foundation
Chapter 3. Evaluation
Chapter 4. Instruction
Chapter 5. Participation
Chapter 6. Intuition
Chapter 7. Emancipation
Conclusion
Appendix A: Dolch Sight Word List
Appendix B: Resources
Notes
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Introduction: Reading for Meaning -- The Meaning of Reading
Do children need instruction in reading comprehension?
Definitely.
Are they receiving it?
Insufficiently.
Can it be taught?
Yes.
Can parents play an important role?
Yes.
For reading to be worth the time and effort involved, it must convey meaning, information, emotion, suspense, or similar delights. But increasing numbers of children -- across geography, grades, and socio-economic levels -- "bark at print" or dutifully rake their eyes across lines of words, absorbing little or nothing.
Many such children lack accurate skills for decoding (reading) big new words and are left to guess. Some approach muscular passages with scrawny vocabulary. Others plod concretely through inference, reading word for word, missing nuance, overlooking such indicators as but, although, or on the other hand. A large number misunderstand figures of speech, simile, metaphor, or analogy. And there are those who leave new concepts or facts lying on the page, undigested, because they haven't learned techniques for making new information memorable.
As a parent, your role in helping your child become an effective and enthusiastic reader begins with diligence at home. As you read with your child, be on the lookout for the following signs of reading discomfort:
• Your child doesn't understand what he reads.• Your child doesn't know that he doesn't understand what he is reading.
• Your child doesn't think that it matters as long as he spends his homework hours holding onto a book.
• Your child doesn't choose reading -- ever or rarely -- over other forms of entertainment (television, video games, etc.).
Simultaneously, you should be aware of well-intentioned teachers who:
• don't understand the foundations of reading comprehension themselves, and therefore,• don't know how to teach reading comprehension, and
• don't think teachers need to teach reading after second grade.
These patterns may be malevolent fallout from inadequate teacher training or from moth-eaten systems of instruction.
In learning to read, your child needed to see the connection between spoken language and printed words on the page. The next step is to bond the mechanics of reading skills with the meaning of written words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, or chapters. In other words, your child moves from learning to read to reading to learn.
Four major precepts will focus our common purpose:
1. We (children, parents, and teachers) must be able to answer, "What is reading?" Reading is more than osmosis; it harnesses multiple systems: eyes, ears, muscles, emotion, experience, psychological and intellectual availability, curiosity, and the stamina to keep on converting print into meaning.2. Comprehension must embrace the entire curriculum -- and extracurricular life, as well. It is much more than a splinter skill for language arts class.
3. We must infect children with what master teacher John Fennell calls "the contagion of nonpoisonous passions."
4. In this era of swiftly shifting visual stimulation, when electronic floodgates release deluges of information, we must continue to emphasize comprehension. Glimpsing is not the same as grasping.
Many children -- not to mention adults -- aren't aware that there are different kinds of reading, each with its own rules, rigors, and taboos:
• factual/accuracy reading• survey/text reading
• aesthetic/imaginative reading
Recognizing how we as adults shift among these three helps us see how they enfold or threaten younger readers. To me, beadwork, a smorgasbord, and ballroom dancing are images for these categories. Skillful writers may want to weave all three types together, but not all genres allow such combinations, and not all writers are skillful -- or kind.
Factual/Accuracy Reading is like beadwork, slow and requiring accuracy. Readers use vigilance, patience, and logic to string the metaphoric red bead in the proper sequence on the thread. If you are an adult trying to register your car, the bureau of motor vehicles doesn't want to know that your machine is the same color as your eyes, or that the backseat is big enough to carry your mother-in-law in between the kids. The bureaucrat -- or scanner -- wants to know the make, year, color, and license number of your car, as well as your name, address, and zip code. Readers who omit answers or print information in the incorrect box will simply have to try again, while the car, unregistered, languishes in the garage.
Your child faces similar factual/accuracy tasks daily, as she follows directions on work sheets, solves math word problems, or takes tests.
Survey/Text Reading is like selecting food at a smorgasbord. The reader looks over the whole spread of offerings, choosing a bit here, a dollop there, or a metaphoric big piece of bread on which to lay the sardines, cheese, onion, tomato, or hearty slab of brisket with mustard -- with or without horseradish. To make such choices, the reader must be familiar with the taste and texture of the individual dishes -- remember that chocolate pudding doesn't go with pickles -- and know which bring nourishment, which are garnish, and which unfamiliar possibilities might be worth a try.
To assemble a tasty, nourishing, perhaps even healthy mental meal of good ideas, the reader must fit compatible ingredients into an overall plan. If the topic is violent weather systems, an article on hemlines -- no matter how interesting or well written -- doesn't belong.
In order to be an effective survey/text reader, your child needs to learn ways to integrate incoming information, digest new ideas, and decide how and why to put some thoughts aside for later nibbles, treats, or main courses.
Whether we are third graders researching the explorers, or golden oldies or boomers delving into a survey of health care plans, or people of any age tackling A Beginner's Guide to the Trojan War, readers investigating new information need:
• strategies to organize vocabulary• connotations to make new material meaningful
• links to join the new to the familiar
Trying to connect unknowns with other unknowns doesn't work.
Aesthetic/Pleasure Reading is like a tango danced by writer and reader, who dip and sway together in rhythm to the words, the cadences, the themes. The dance may be slow, seductive, passionate, fast, flirtatious, teasing, humorous, energetic, or sultry. The dancers, embracing or mirroring across a distance, move as one. As the old saying goes, It takes two to tango.
Some readers enjoy lingering over phrases or descriptions; others surge through, arriving flushed and breathless at the end. Either way is correct. The writer invites the reader to dance. The reader sets the tempo, resonates to the images, and identifies with the characters. Such choices belong to the reader; the words belong to the writer. They must dance together, holding identical words, sharing common purpose.
The following quotes from literature and science substantiate -- and summarize -- the three types of reading:
About factual/accuracy reading. Over the front door to the Harvard Medical School is a quote from Louis Pasteur: "Chance favors the prepared mind."
About survey/text reading. E. M. Forster wrote, in Howards End, "Only connect!"
About the power of aesthetic/imaginative realms. Albert Einstein wrote, "My gift for fantasy has meant more to me than my capacity to acquire positive information."
Reading unfolds this way:
1. pre-reading2. beginning reading
3. emergent reading
4. content reading
5. content reading
6. nimble reading
The pre-reader gathers: vocabulary; an understanding that print is speech mapped onto paper; that letters are symbols for sounds and that words are symbols for people, things, information, and feelings; that print confers permanence; and that writing and reading are a code.
The beginning reader learns: to recognize some words by sight, to use the code for both decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling), to enjoy one of the major secrets of the adult world.
The emergent reader bonds with: characters in stories, information on pages, questions, and narrative.
The content reader absorbs: stories of people, explanations of facts, directions for procedures, and information about how the world works. As deciphering the code becomes increasingly automatic, content becomes ever more accessible.
The content reader harnesses: rudimentary and sophisticated levels of phonics, word recognition, and vocabulary; general information; prowess in visual, auditory, and motor areas; emotional availability and optimism; comfort in using print for discovery.
The nimble reader leaps: into information, through concepts, alongside narrative, over and under conceptual challenges, and inside the mysteries and majesties of language.
To travel the progression listed above, your child needs seven elements of comprehension:
1. definition2. foundation
3. evaluation
4. instruction
5. participation
6. intuition
7. emancipation
Familiarity with these seven overlapping elements of reading comprehension will help you solidify your own knowledge before you start coaching your child. And because of their individual and collective importance, each of these seven elements earns a full chapter. Hence, the organization of this book.
All chapters contain the following common, internal organization:
At Promise/At Risk: An overview of the topic, why it matters, what happens in its absence.
Goals: What to aim for.
Tools: How to get there.
Landmines: What to watch out for, how to spot trouble.
VAIL: General principles of good practice. At the risk of seeming vainglorious, the acronym VAIL shows how to proceed:
V: Visualize. For comprehension, readers need to make their own imagery.A: Anticipate. For comprehension, readers need to have a hunch of what's to come.
I: Interpret. For comprehension, readers need to know what genre they are in.
L: Listen. For comprehension, readers need to listen to the music of the writing.
Evidence: A sample.
Thus, you can read the book chapter by chapter, or you can follow a particular strand all the way through.
While specific suggestions for ages and grade levels are laced throughout the book, it is not designed to be a complete curriculum. While the book is designed to be informative, illustrative, and practical, it does not pretend to be all-inclusive.
Rather, the emphasis is on the spiral, cumulative aspects of comprehension.
By understanding the underpinnings of reading and by using the games and activities in this book, you will be well equipped to help solidify your child's reading comprehension skills.
Four fundamentals surface throughout:
1. Emotion is the on/off switch for learning. Children who are frightened of reading approach print timidly, hesitantly, reluctantly -- or angrily, resentfully, suspiciously. You need to help make reading safe, particularly if your child is dyslexic or has had a rough or unsuccessful beginning. Specific techniques are in Common Ground. (See appendix B for details.)2. The process of developing effective reading skills is like a carefully constructed spiral, always circling to higher levels, while also enfolding and incorporating earlier precepts.
3. Most children need direct instruction in both the structure and texture of reading all the way through. Communicate with your child's teacher to find out how he is receiving this instruction at school. You may be able to incorporate elements of the teacher's reading program into what you are doing at home, or the teacher might provide some insight into areas of strength and/or weakness for your child.
4. Comprehension is reading for meaning -- the meaning of reading. In our electronic era, students must differentiate between having access to information and knowing how to use knowledge. Downloading is not the same as deliberating.
Writers often reveal their own comprehension problems. Recently, I received this note:
"I hear you're writing a book about reading comprehension. Please use all your expert tease."
Copyright © 1999; 2002 by Priscilla L. Vail
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