Comprehension Strategies

For today's teachers, there are many different instruction strategies they can choose from to make up their classroom. For me, I believe that the comprehension strategies are a vital key for teaching successful children, at any age. It is very difficult for teachers to make sure that every student understands their vocabulary words, story's, essay's, ect. I feel this is why teachers need to use comprehension strategies, that way they can help the students interpret the words into language.

Around 1970, teachers were told not to encourage comprehension strategies in their classroom. The state board expected teachers to use "decoding skills." Unfortunately, this was a challenge because we all know that just because a child can read a word, does not necessarily mean they understand the word. Over the years, teachers and staff workers have developed a way to produce strategies back into the classroom. There are tons of websites and published books to help teachers gain more knowledge with helping their children understand what they read. Some teachers believe that using multiple strategies can be even more effective. So do I.

In my research, I have came across hundreds of strategies that teachers have found useful and successful. I think that students need to be taught a list of strategies and should have continuous instruction on how to apply them. The top reading strategies I found efficient are the following: cooperative learning, semantic organizers, story structure, comprehension monitoring, and question answering and generation. I will explain each of these strategies in detail and clarify how I could apply these as a teacher.

The first strategy I found was "cooperative learning." This is were students are allowed to work together and teach each other students the context of a story, book, article, ect. I enjoy this strategy because it lets the students that are familiar with the words or sayings have an opportunity to help the other children that are struggling. This also lets the students gain self-assurance with their work, which perhaps, can lead to having a aspiration to learn more. There are many different ways a teacher could approach this, but I think I would set up groups around the classroom. It would somewhat mirror "center time", and let students travel around the room mingling and helping others. As we all know, young children love this idea because this gives them a sense of independence.

The second strategy I found was "graphic and semantic organizers." This allows the student to show diagrams and graphs of the meanings and interactions of the words in the text. They can draw or write down ideas of what they believe puts the story together. This is a excellent way to let the students investigate their minds of what they read. As a teacher, I would probably have handouts of strategies that I would take up and possibly grade. This way I would have a reference of students progress and what other approaches I need to take to help them in the future.

Another strategy was "story structure." This is basically a set of questions for the students to ask their self who, what, when, where, and why. You may know this as the five W's. This is a great strategy that tons of teachers use in a variety of classrooms. In a reading classroom, you can use this for plots, time lines, events, or even for particular characters. This gives the child a good quality review of the story and lets them understand what happened. You can also set up groups and let children interact with others while working on their 5 W's. Again, as a teacher, I may use this strategy as an evaluation for myself and the students to look back on.

""Comprehension monitoring" is a strategy where the child learns how to be aware or conscious of their understanding during the reading and learns the procedure to deal with problems in understanding as they arise." (NRP) I strongly believe this is one of the most significant strategies for any child at any age. Some ways to help the child