How to Teach Reading Comprehension Without Leveled Books
One of the biggest misunderstandings when shifting from balanced literacy to the science of reading is around how to teach reading comprehension. It has been hammered into us that we need to use leveled books during guided reading and teach a comprehension strategy during every single lesson. Comprehension, comprehension, comprehension was always the focus– how can we fast track our kids to reading comprehension, because after all, the point of learning to read is making meaning from the text and understanding what we read, right?
Well, yes. But in order to comprehend what we are reading and make meaning from text, we have to actually be able to read the words on the page. However, we still need to teach reading comprehension before students can actually read the words. So, how do we do that?
Enter: Language comprehension. Language comprehension is the bridge to reading comprehension- and it is the way we teach reading comprehension before kids can actually read. Essentially, you are teaching reading comprehension, but you are teaching it orally through read-alouds, modeling, and discussion with your students.
Today, I am going to share with you five ways to target language comprehension during your read-alouds.
Build Background knowledge
Knowledge and reading comprehension are reciprocal. Knowledge facilitates reading comprehension and reading comprehension helps the reader build new knowledge. Our background knowledge on a topic determines how well we understand that topic when we read. It is important because it provides a framework for organizing new information and helps us navigate a text. It also helps us make inferences and allows us to fill in gaps of information that are not explicitly shared by the author.
The easiest way to build background knowledge is by showing an image, map, or video that connects to your read aloud. By giving students visuals and explaining how they connect to the topic you will read about, you are giving them the information they need in order to understand the text. Show your image and explain to your students how it will help them understand the text. For example, here is what I would say to kids before reading a text about volcanoes while displaying a map of the ring of fire, to give them a visual of where the volcanoes are located that we would be talking about.
"We have been learning about the processes that change the earth. So far we have learned about earthquakes and tsunamis. Today we will begin learning about volcanoes. Before we read, I want you to look at this map. This is a map of Earth's tectonic plates. Tectonic plates are pieces of the earth's crust that are constantly moving, which leads to earthquakes and volcanoes. The Pacific plate is the largest plate on Earth. Almost all of earth's volcanoes are located on the pacific plate. As we read about volcanoes, I want you to be thinking about whether scientists can predict when a volcano is going to erupt as we read. "
Teach a high utility vocabulary word from the text
For this tip, pull a vocabulary word from the text you are reading aloud. This should be a high utility word, meaning it will be useful for students to have because they will encounter it frequently in texts and will need to know what it means.
I use the vocabulary map when I am teaching a word from my read aloud. Each student gets a prefilled template. I type the word, definition, synonyms, and example sentences into the graphic organizer. I prefill everything except for the blanks for students to write in the missing vocabulary word. Even if your students cannot yet read every word on the page, they will still benefit from having the image in front of them.
The vocabulary map is a great way to introduce vocabulary terms. I like to use this template before my reading comprehension lessons to introduce high-utility words from the text I read to my students. These are terms that are necessary to understand in order to understand the text itself. These are not words that I can just teach on the fly, or words that I believe students can determine the meaning of using the context of the text. In K-2 you can use this map orally for your vocabulary lesson prior to a read aloud. In 3-5 you can pre fill this map, give students a copy, and follow the steps below:
Vocabulary Map
Say the word, ask students to repeat it aloud.
Ask students to write the word.
Show a picture that helps students understand the meaning of the word.
Give a student friendly definition
Give synonyms
Create 3 sentences using the target word. Read the sentences aloud, pausing at the blanks for students to fill in the word- either orally or in writing.
Ask students to discuss examples by giving them two context questions- one that relates to their lives and one that connects to the text you are reading. You can use the question that connects to students’ lives before the text, and the text connection question as a way to review after reading the text.
If you want to learn more about teaching vocabulary, check out this post here for activities to use during instruction.
Teach sentence level comprehension
Sentence level comprehension can be an instructional focal point from Kindergarten on. Before students can decode, help students unpack sentences orally by asking who/what/where/when/why questions related to parts of the sentence. The same process can be done with written sentences once students decode. One easy way to do this is to pull a sentence from your daily read aloud, and take 5 minutes to help students understand the grammatical functions housed within a sentence.
For example:
“Out of the egg came a tiny, and very hungry caterpillar”.
We can ask our students:
Who/what did it? (the caterpillar)
What kind? (tiny, very hungry)
What did it do? (came out of the egg)
Depending on the sentence some other questions you could ask are where, when, how many, or which one? All of these questions teach kids the functions of the 8 grammatical elements:
Nouns (who/what did it?)
Adjectives (how many, what kind, which one?)
Pronouns (who? what?)
Verbs (did what? Is what?)
Adverbs (where? when? how? why?)
Prepositions (signal a relationship between words)
Conjunctions (join words, phrases, or clauses)
Interjections (express emotion)
Helping students unpack sentences from the beginning will set them up for success later on when they encounter more complex sentences. This is how we build syntactic awareness for our students, which leads to better language and reading comprehension.
Teach comprehension strategies (predicting, inference, main idea, summarizing, asking questions, answering questions, monitoring comprehension)
“Research indicates that skilled reading involves conscious application of comprehension strategies” (CORE Teaching Reading Sourcebook, p 614). However, we don’t need to spend a whole week teaching any one of these. When you think of teaching reading comprehension, the purpose is to build knowledge so that students understand what they are reading. When we look at the text we are using, we should ask, what strategy would help my students deeply understand this text? Rather than, which comprehension strategy will I teach this week? Then, pick a strategy to model during a paragraph or page, to practice together on another paragraph or page, and for students to practice independently on another paragraph or page.
Here are the evidence-based strategies we can lean on to teach:
Monitoring Comprehension: teaching students to pause and reread or listen again if they realize they don’t understand something.
Connecting to world knowledge: teaching students to determine whether the text is consistent with background knowledge and life experience.
Predicting: teach students to make predictions, confirm predictions during reading, and shift predictions according to new information in the text.
Recognizing text structure: help students identify parts in the text that represent elements of text structure
Asking questions: teach students to ask questions when encountering new information in the text.
Answering questions: teach students to note whether they are able to find sufficient answers to teacher-directed questions.
Constructing mental images: build mental images based on the text and confirm whether the text matches their mental image.
Summarizing: teach students to summarize the text by combining the main idea from each paragraph into a summary.
Teach Paragraph Shrinking
Paragraph shrinking is an activity that supports reading comprehension because it teaches students to pull the main idea from each paragraph from a text. Students work in pairs. Each student takes turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of the paragraph in a text. Then, students provide each other with feedback as a way to monitor comprehension.
Here are the steps to paragraph shrinking:
Introduce the text to students
Create heterogeneous pairs within the classroom.
Model the procedure
Have each student take turns being “coach” and “player”.
Ask each student to read aloud for 5 minutes without rereading the text.
After each paragraph, students should pause and summarize the main points of the paragraph.
Ask students to share the following;
The who or what the paragraph is about
The most important thing about the who or what
The main idea
A template I use to teach paragraph shrinking
If a “player gives the wrong answer, the “coach should ask the “player” to reread/skim the paragraph again and answer a second time.
This list is not exhaustive, and we could go into further detail on any one of these tips. I’d love to know, which tip do you want to dive deeper on?
