Reading Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners
Lydia Breiseth
Comprehension is the goal of reading, but it can be the most difficult skill to master, especially for English language learners (ELLs). ELLs often have problems mastering science, math, or social studies concepts, for example, because they cannot comprehend the textbooks for these subjects.
ELLs at all levels of English proficiency and literacy development will benefit from improved comprehension skills, which allow them to
Read more accurately.
Follow a text or story more closely.
Identify important events and concepts in a text.
Master new concepts in their content-area classes.
Complete assignments and assessments.
Feel motivated to read in school and for pleasure.
There are a number of ways to build ELLs' comprehension skills. Often, standard strategies that teachers use in mainstream classrooms are a good starting point—they just need to be tweaked with ELLs' language and academic needs in mind. This article focuses on strategies that are part of three main approaches: building background knowledge, teaching vocabulary explicitly, and checking comprehension frequently.
1. Build background knowledge.
Draw on students' existing knowledge.
Students may already possess content knowledge that they cannot yet demonstrate in English. Look for opportunities to make associations between students' experiences and new content. Allow students to use their native language with peers for a quick brainstorm to discover what they know about a topic before presenting their ideas to the whole class.
Build students' background knowledge.
Students with limited or interrupted schooling may not have the same level of knowledge as their peers, especially when it comes to historical or cultural topics. When starting a new lesson, look for references that you may need to explicitly explain.
Take students on a tour of the text.
Each time you hand out a new textbook, take students on a "virtual tour." Show them different elements of the text, such as the table of contents and the glossary, and discuss how these sections can be helpful. Explain how the text is organized, pointing out bold print, chapter headings, and chapter summaries. Once students learn how to recognize these elements, they will be able to preview the text independently. Remember that students need to know how to use a tool in order for it to be helpful.
Use a "picture-walk."
You can use this strategy for fiction or nonfiction books. Walk through the book with the students, pointing out photographs, illustrations, and other graphic elements. Ask them what they notice about the pictures and how they think those details may relate to the story or content.
Use outlines to scaffold comprehension.
Provide a brief, simple outline of a reading assignment or an oral discussion in advance of a new lesson. This will help ELLs pick out the important information as they listen or read.
2. Teach vocabulary explicitly.
Focus on key vocabulary:
Choose the vocabulary that your students need to know in order to support their reading development and content-area learning. Provide student-friendly definitions for key vocabulary.
Include signal and directional words:
Remember that students may also need explicit instruction in signal or directional words ("because" and "explain"), in addition to key content vocabulary ("photosynthesis" and "evolution").
Use a "picture-walk" for vocabulary:
Once students know a new word's definition, ask them to connect those new words to the pictures they see in the text.
Teach students to actively engage with vocabulary:
Teach students to underline, highlight, make notes, and list unknown vocabulary words as they read.
Give students practice with new words:
Ensure that your students can
Define a word.
Recognize when to use that word.
Understand multiple meanings (such as the word "party").
Decode and spell that word.
Incorporate new words into discussions and activities.
For students to really know a word, they must use it—or they will lose it. Use new words in class discussions or outside of class, in other contexts such as on field trips. Give the students as many opportunities to use and master the new vocabulary as possible.
3. Check comprehension frequently.
Use informal comprehension checks:
To test students' ability to put materials in sequence, for example, print sentences from a section of the text on paper strips, mix the strips, and have students put them in order.
Test comprehension with student-friendly questions:
After reading, test students' comprehension with carefully crafted questions, using simple sentences and key vocabulary from the text. These questions can be at the:
Literal level (Why do the leaves turn red and yellow in the fall?)
Interpretive level (Why do you think it needs water?)
Applied level (How much water are you going to give it? Why?)
No matter what the students' proficiency level, ask questions that require higher-level thinking:
To probe for true comprehension, ask questions that require students to analyze, interpret, or explain what they have read, such as the following:
What ideas can you add to...?
Do you agree? Why or why not?
What might happen if...?
How do you think she felt...?
Use graphic organizers:
Graphic organizers allow ELLs to organize information and ideas efficiently without using much language. Different types include Venn diagrams, K-W-L charts, story maps, cause-and-effect charts, and time lines.
Provide students with many different ways to show what they know:
Drawings, graphs, oral interviews, posters, and portfolios are just a few ways that students can demonstrate understanding as they are beginning to develop their reading and writing skills in English.
Summarize:
Ask students to use the following strategies to summarize, orally or in writing, what they have read:
Retell what you read, but keep it short.
Include only important information.
Leave out less important details.
Use key words from the text.
It may be challenging to improve ELLs' comprehension skills, but it is well worth the extra effort to put them on the path to becoming successful readers.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Connected Practice/Literacy Centers
Children learn to read and write by having meaningful, authentic reading and writing experiences. In order for students to become expert readers and writers, they must have time to practice and apply what they are learning - reading and writing. Therefore, it is essential that the literacy-centered classroom provide time for students to read independently in self-selected books and to engage in self-initiated writing in literacy centers.
Centers should provide students with additional opportunities to practice and apply strategies and skills that have been taught. Center activities should connect to the components taught in the core program…they should grow out of what the teacher has done during whole group and small group instruction.
Multiple opportunities to practice words in a hands-on manner accelerates the accuracy and automaticity necessary for fluent reading.
Here are a few pictures of centers at work in our school!!!
Independent Reading
Research
The Effects of Independent Reading on Reading Achievement
Research clearly shows that the reading of meaningful, connected text results in improved reading achievement. In one of the most extensive studies of independent reading yet conducted, Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988) investigated a broad array of activities and their relationship to reading achievement and growth in reading. They found that the amount of time students spent in independent reading was the best predictor of reading achievement and also the best predictor of the amount of gain in reading achievement made by students between second and fifth grade.
Among the many benefits of independent reading are the following:
Builds Fluency
Independent reading builds fluency. There is substantial evidence that unless students can accurately and effortlessly deal with the word-identification demands of reading, difficulties will result in comprehension and overall reading achievement.There is also evidence that unless children read substantial amounts of print, their reading will remain laborious and limited in effectiveness. Finally, evidence exists which shows that when students do read substantial amounts of text, their reading performance improves.
Increases Vocabulary
Independent reading leads to increased vocabulary development. One of the best-established relationships in the field of reading is the very significant relationship between vocabulary development and achievement in reading. There is also evidence that shows that independent reading is probably the major source of vocabulary acquisition beyond the beginning stages of learning to read. This same research shows that while the probability of acquiring the meaning of any specific word simply through reading it in the context in which it appears in independent reading materials is not high, students who read widely can learn the meanings of thousands of new words each year.
Builds Background
Independent reading builds background knowledge, or schema. Another extremely well-established research finding is that students' reading ability is dramatically influenced by the amount of interrelated information (schema) they have about the topic about which they are reading. By reading widely, students are exposed to diverse topics and information which they can then use in future reading.
Don't forget about www.readinglady.com
There are tons of reader's theater scripts for you to download for FREE!! :)
The Effects of Independent Reading on Reading Achievement
Research clearly shows that the reading of meaningful, connected text results in improved reading achievement. In one of the most extensive studies of independent reading yet conducted, Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988) investigated a broad array of activities and their relationship to reading achievement and growth in reading. They found that the amount of time students spent in independent reading was the best predictor of reading achievement and also the best predictor of the amount of gain in reading achievement made by students between second and fifth grade.
Among the many benefits of independent reading are the following:
Builds Fluency
Independent reading builds fluency. There is substantial evidence that unless students can accurately and effortlessly deal with the word-identification demands of reading, difficulties will result in comprehension and overall reading achievement.There is also evidence that unless children read substantial amounts of print, their reading will remain laborious and limited in effectiveness. Finally, evidence exists which shows that when students do read substantial amounts of text, their reading performance improves.
Increases Vocabulary
Independent reading leads to increased vocabulary development. One of the best-established relationships in the field of reading is the very significant relationship between vocabulary development and achievement in reading. There is also evidence that shows that independent reading is probably the major source of vocabulary acquisition beyond the beginning stages of learning to read. This same research shows that while the probability of acquiring the meaning of any specific word simply through reading it in the context in which it appears in independent reading materials is not high, students who read widely can learn the meanings of thousands of new words each year.
Builds Background
Independent reading builds background knowledge, or schema. Another extremely well-established research finding is that students' reading ability is dramatically influenced by the amount of interrelated information (schema) they have about the topic about which they are reading. By reading widely, students are exposed to diverse topics and information which they can then use in future reading.
Don't forget about www.readinglady.com
There are tons of reader's theater scripts for you to download for FREE!! :)
Body Coda Blending
Teaching Blending
Young children usually get their first taste of blending through rhyming. Rhyming is essentially blending a new onset to an old rime. Children should not be expected to produce rhymes until they have a great deal of experience recognizing rhymes. Listening to rhyming stories, reciting rhyming poetry, and singing rhyming songs should be daily activities in the early childhood classroom.
Children can first try making rhymes by blending a single onset to a variety of words. For example, they could play a Silly Sally game where they blend /s/ to the rime of each word. This might lead to sense (me, see; hand, sand) or nonsense (mouse, souse; fork, sork). Any phoneme, for example, the sound of the week, could become the onset in such a game (Silly Filly, Silly Milly, etc.).
Another simple prereading blending activity is Secret Code, a guessing game. The teacher could turn an illustrated word face down and name it in phonemes, e.g., /h/a/t/. When a student blends the phonemes and guesses the word, the teacher shows the picture. This game also works well with riddles, which don't require pictures. For example, the teacher could say, "I'm thinking of the animal Bo Peep lost. It's a /shee/ /p/." Secret Code is good blending practice because it works on blending alone without the complications of remembering correspondences.
Where blending becomes crucial is in decoding printed words from their spellings. To simplify blending with printed words, we need to rethink the structure of the syllable. One way to break down the syllable is into onset (everything before the vowel) and rime (the vowel and everything after it). The onset and the rime are parts of spoken syllables, not written. For example, street could be broken into /str/ and /eet/. The onset-rime break seems natural, but it is probably a special case of the salient vowel. The vowel is the loudest part of the syllable and the sound you can always stretch out. It is easy to break a syllable on either side of the loud vowel.
For blending, it is better to divide the syllable a different way. If we combine the onset with the vowel, we get the body of a syllable. Everything after the body is the coda. For example, in dream, /drea/ is the body of the syllable and /m/ is the coda.
There is an important payoff for this new terminology: Body-coda blending is easier than onset-rime blending. This is because onsets are often quite distorted during blending. For example, if we ask a child to blend d-ice, it is very difficult to pronounce /d/ without considerable distortion. Because /d/ involves the vocal cords, it takes some vowel to pronounce /d/ (usually a schwa /u/), and this artificial voicing interferes with blending in the actual vowel. However, there is no distortion of consonants after the vowel, i.e., in the coda. Thus, di-ce is a very easy blend.
In general, the easiest way to blend in decoding is body-coda, e.g., swee-t. Onset-rime blending (sw-eet) is usually harder, but at least there are only two parts to blend. Phoneme blending is harder still, because there may be 3, 4, 5, or 6 phonemes to blend in a single syllable. Sounding out and blending words in left to right order is usually not the best way to proceed. It is better, at least at first, to begin by sounding out the vowel. For example, with rag, focus first on pronouncing a as /a/. Then blend the onset to the vowel to get the body, e.g., /r/a/, /ra/. Last, blend the body to the coda, e.g., /ra/g/, rag.
One creative way to get children started is with a blending slide. Using an image or model of a playground slide, have the vowel (e.g., short e) climb to the top of the slide, where it calls for help, /e/, /e/. Bring up the onset (e.g., r) to make the body of the syllable (e.g., the letters re, pronounced with a short e). Place letter d at the bottom of the slide to catch re. Stretch the vowel in re until it hits d to make red. Repeat with a variety of bodies and codas to model and practice blending.
Young children usually get their first taste of blending through rhyming. Rhyming is essentially blending a new onset to an old rime. Children should not be expected to produce rhymes until they have a great deal of experience recognizing rhymes. Listening to rhyming stories, reciting rhyming poetry, and singing rhyming songs should be daily activities in the early childhood classroom.
Children can first try making rhymes by blending a single onset to a variety of words. For example, they could play a Silly Sally game where they blend /s/ to the rime of each word. This might lead to sense (me, see; hand, sand) or nonsense (mouse, souse; fork, sork). Any phoneme, for example, the sound of the week, could become the onset in such a game (Silly Filly, Silly Milly, etc.).
Another simple prereading blending activity is Secret Code, a guessing game. The teacher could turn an illustrated word face down and name it in phonemes, e.g., /h/a/t/. When a student blends the phonemes and guesses the word, the teacher shows the picture. This game also works well with riddles, which don't require pictures. For example, the teacher could say, "I'm thinking of the animal Bo Peep lost. It's a /shee/ /p/." Secret Code is good blending practice because it works on blending alone without the complications of remembering correspondences.
Where blending becomes crucial is in decoding printed words from their spellings. To simplify blending with printed words, we need to rethink the structure of the syllable. One way to break down the syllable is into onset (everything before the vowel) and rime (the vowel and everything after it). The onset and the rime are parts of spoken syllables, not written. For example, street could be broken into /str/ and /eet/. The onset-rime break seems natural, but it is probably a special case of the salient vowel. The vowel is the loudest part of the syllable and the sound you can always stretch out. It is easy to break a syllable on either side of the loud vowel.
For blending, it is better to divide the syllable a different way. If we combine the onset with the vowel, we get the body of a syllable. Everything after the body is the coda. For example, in dream, /drea/ is the body of the syllable and /m/ is the coda.
There is an important payoff for this new terminology: Body-coda blending is easier than onset-rime blending. This is because onsets are often quite distorted during blending. For example, if we ask a child to blend d-ice, it is very difficult to pronounce /d/ without considerable distortion. Because /d/ involves the vocal cords, it takes some vowel to pronounce /d/ (usually a schwa /u/), and this artificial voicing interferes with blending in the actual vowel. However, there is no distortion of consonants after the vowel, i.e., in the coda. Thus, di-ce is a very easy blend.
In general, the easiest way to blend in decoding is body-coda, e.g., swee-t. Onset-rime blending (sw-eet) is usually harder, but at least there are only two parts to blend. Phoneme blending is harder still, because there may be 3, 4, 5, or 6 phonemes to blend in a single syllable. Sounding out and blending words in left to right order is usually not the best way to proceed. It is better, at least at first, to begin by sounding out the vowel. For example, with rag, focus first on pronouncing a as /a/. Then blend the onset to the vowel to get the body, e.g., /r/a/, /ra/. Last, blend the body to the coda, e.g., /ra/g/, rag.
One creative way to get children started is with a blending slide. Using an image or model of a playground slide, have the vowel (e.g., short e) climb to the top of the slide, where it calls for help, /e/, /e/. Bring up the onset (e.g., r) to make the body of the syllable (e.g., the letters re, pronounced with a short e). Place letter d at the bottom of the slide to catch re. Stretch the vowel in re until it hits d to make red. Repeat with a variety of bodies and codas to model and practice blending.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Resource Website
This is a WONDERFUL website for resources in teaching how to decode. It is divided into grade levels too. Learn about decoding strategies for young readers. Find out what decoding strategies are and why they are so important. Also includes teaching tips, handouts for students, and online activities. There are links to eThemes resources on sight words and contextual clues. I hope you can utilize it for yourself and for your students!! Let me know how you put it into use and the outcomes!
http://www.emints.org/ethemes/resources/S00001676.shtml
http://www.emints.org/ethemes/resources/S00001676.shtml
Tips for Motivating Students
Here are suggestions for motivating students that author Deborah Reed has used and drawn from numerous sources.
■ Offer students choice in their reading materials.
■ Arouse curiosity of books by previewing them with students, activating students’ prior knowledge, connecting the book to students’ lives or to popular culture, and helping students make predictions about possible outcomes.
■ Allow students to respond to their reading through discussion with both peers and adults, through reflective writing, or both.
■ Frequently and explicitly model reading, responding, and monitoring comprehension.
■ Reduce the number of activities associated with the book to focus more on the reading itself and foster an aesthetic stance (as opposed to an efferent stance where students read to carry away information).
Here are a few important points to remember....
*Students with high interest in a topic might be able to read more difficult material than an ability test might indicate.
*Students who struggle with reading need consistent feedback on their efforts, regardless of their achievement.
*More importantly: Every minute with a good teacher is precious to a struggling reader, and to the extent that independent practice time cuts into more effective instructional
time, it can actually undermine reading success.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Using Podcasts as a Center!
New Ideas for Centers!
So how is podcasting relevant to education?
It is a powerful publishing platform that addresses different learning styles, is highly mobile, and can deliver content “just in time.” Think about some of these possibilities:
A teacher uses her cell phone to create a podcast with daily homework assignments and other classroom information. Parents download the podcasts to stay up-to-date on their children's school activities.
The district technology staff podcasts quick tech support tips for teachers to access as they need them.
Kids create a podcast about the Civil War to show what they've learned and share it with other classrooms.
A school board podcasts their meetings and special events as a way to increase community involvement in the school system.
A teacher records her class for students to download as a podcast. These podcasts are used by students who are absent as well as by those who need extra reinforcement or want to review.
A class takes a virtual field trip to NASA via a soundseeing tour podcast. The virtual field trip is broadcast in several formats, some designed for English language learners and others for GATE students.
The future of podcasting will bring even more exciting innovations. Some universities have already begun issuing all incoming students MP3 players and voice recorders and have found that this makes a significant difference in learning. A new development in this technology is the ability to podcast video — imagine students being able to download instructional videos or short “talking chalkboard” tutorials. Future podcasts may even include embedded interactivities so that learners can practice what they're learning, create an end product, or assess their learning.
So, what do you need to get started?
To listen to podcasts, all you need is:
A device on which to listen to the podcasts
Software for playing media
Podcast content
Podcatching software (optional)
To create your own podcasts, you need the above listed items plus:
A microphone
Recording and editing software
Music clip library (optional)
A way to publish your podcast
Listening devices
One of the best things about podcasts is that there are many different devices that can be used to listen to them. Some of them include:
Palm handheld computers
Windows Mobile handheld computers
MP3 players (include iPods and others)
Desktop and laptop computers
Cell phones
Software for playing media
To listen to a podcast, you need software to play the media files. Depending on what device you use to listen to your podcasts, a variety of software is available. For desktop or laptop computers, the most common media player programs are Windows Media Player, iTunes, RealPlayer, and Winamp.
All Windows Mobile handhelds are audio-capable and come with Windows Media Player Mobile, which can be used to listen to podcasts. Palm handhelds that are OS 5 or higher are audio-capable. Some devices require an SD card for this, while others can play audio from built-in memory. A variety of audio software is available for the Palm OS including Pocket Tunes and the RealPlayer for Palm.
MP3 players typically come with their own player software, which is built in to the device.
A word about file formats — Digital audio files come in a variety of formats. Some formats have encryption built in, while others don't. Different media players may play some formats and not others. For example, the Apple iPods play AAC files. Windows Media Player plays WMA, WMV, WAV, and MP3 files. One format that is broadly compatible across almost all players is MP3.
So how is podcasting relevant to education?
It is a powerful publishing platform that addresses different learning styles, is highly mobile, and can deliver content “just in time.” Think about some of these possibilities:
A teacher uses her cell phone to create a podcast with daily homework assignments and other classroom information. Parents download the podcasts to stay up-to-date on their children's school activities.
The district technology staff podcasts quick tech support tips for teachers to access as they need them.
Kids create a podcast about the Civil War to show what they've learned and share it with other classrooms.
A school board podcasts their meetings and special events as a way to increase community involvement in the school system.
A teacher records her class for students to download as a podcast. These podcasts are used by students who are absent as well as by those who need extra reinforcement or want to review.
A class takes a virtual field trip to NASA via a soundseeing tour podcast. The virtual field trip is broadcast in several formats, some designed for English language learners and others for GATE students.
The future of podcasting will bring even more exciting innovations. Some universities have already begun issuing all incoming students MP3 players and voice recorders and have found that this makes a significant difference in learning. A new development in this technology is the ability to podcast video — imagine students being able to download instructional videos or short “talking chalkboard” tutorials. Future podcasts may even include embedded interactivities so that learners can practice what they're learning, create an end product, or assess their learning.
So, what do you need to get started?
To listen to podcasts, all you need is:
A device on which to listen to the podcasts
Software for playing media
Podcast content
Podcatching software (optional)
To create your own podcasts, you need the above listed items plus:
A microphone
Recording and editing software
Music clip library (optional)
A way to publish your podcast
Listening devices
One of the best things about podcasts is that there are many different devices that can be used to listen to them. Some of them include:
Palm handheld computers
Windows Mobile handheld computers
MP3 players (include iPods and others)
Desktop and laptop computers
Cell phones
Software for playing media
To listen to a podcast, you need software to play the media files. Depending on what device you use to listen to your podcasts, a variety of software is available. For desktop or laptop computers, the most common media player programs are Windows Media Player, iTunes, RealPlayer, and Winamp.
All Windows Mobile handhelds are audio-capable and come with Windows Media Player Mobile, which can be used to listen to podcasts. Palm handhelds that are OS 5 or higher are audio-capable. Some devices require an SD card for this, while others can play audio from built-in memory. A variety of audio software is available for the Palm OS including Pocket Tunes and the RealPlayer for Palm.
MP3 players typically come with their own player software, which is built in to the device.
A word about file formats — Digital audio files come in a variety of formats. Some formats have encryption built in, while others don't. Different media players may play some formats and not others. For example, the Apple iPods play AAC files. Windows Media Player plays WMA, WMV, WAV, and MP3 files. One format that is broadly compatible across almost all players is MP3.
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