Comprehension: Understanding and Learning with Informational Texts

Julia Smith READ 3262 Fall 2011
External Features of Informational Texts
1. Focus students attention on features: you can have students complete a nonfiction book report using a checklist. For intermediate-grade levels, you can have children preview expository textbooks and other recourse materials. Let students know that recourses are available. Reading magazines and books aloud and consciously thinking aloud provides further opportunity to focus their attention on illustrations, captions, and other presentations of information. Viewing a transparency of the first one or two pages in a chapter or article with the class lets you talk with the students about what they do when they navigate a page of informational text.
2. Predict the tables of contents: Intermediate-grade students should begin to anticipate how informative expository material is organized.
3. Create chapter graphic organizers: The mapping of text can be used as an interactive guide for reading. Students can brainstorm what they know about each section before reading; write those ideas on the map; highlight the areas that are least familiar and that will require slower reading, note making, and possible rereading, and then make notes on their ma of new information as they read.
4. The impact if readers' vocabularies is most clear in the comprehension of academic content; English Language Learners usually do well because they engage in more academic topics
5. Jigsaw text sections: A strategy that teachers use to help students utilize the external structure of articles and chapters
6. Use visual and graphic information: Information presented visually in pictures, diagrams, and graphics is critical in many informational texts.
7. Understanding the organization of internet sites: internet web-sites have an external structure just as informational print texts do. The organization is different form print but has some of the same elements. A key to decoding if a site is worth reading is knowing who created the web-site. This information is located on the initial page of each site and is required by law.
Internal Organization of Informational Texts
1. The most common ways of organizing ideas include description (main ideas and details), compare and contrast, problem and solution, cause and effect, and sequence of events.
2. Compare texts: One way to introduce internal patterns is by collecting several books on the same topic and guiding students to compare their internal structures. This allow students to become engaged and to think in terms of the big picture about what an author is trying to accomplish in a text.
3. Write texts: A good way to help students apply their knowledge of text organization is to have them write their own books using the structure of one they have studied.
4. Attend to vocabulary and content-specific terminology: A key to learning content material is to give attention to vocabulary that conveys key concepts. The three important components to vocabulary learning in content materials is: words the authors prioritize (boldface, italics, marginal definitions, or illustrations), teacher-highlighted key new terms, and students' own monitoring of what words are new and need to be learned.
  1. Word shift: www.wordshit.come lets yo paste a passage of text and have it scanned to distinguish the easier words from the more challenging words, many of them contain Tier Two Words.
Active Reading of Informational Text
1. K-W-L: a group process in which the teacher models and guides active engagement with informational texts. It uses knowledge and information students bring to help each other build a better starting place for learning and for sharing the results of their reading. The teacher helps weave together ideas either topical or principled knowledge, and stimulates questions for all to pursue as they read to learn. The process also helps students who lack confidence in both reading and writing, because the teacher is the first one to write on the board.
2. I-Chart: its using multiple sources of information in order to find texts that meet their own levels of knowledge and interest, as well as discover and answers to their own questions, and compare and contrast authors point of view. It encourages the critical thinking so needed in the world today.
3. Reciprocal reading: its to help less able readers handle the demands of expository texts, reciprocal teaching includes four different strategies: summarize what has just been read, think of two or three good questions about the passage, clarify any ideas or information that was not clear, and predict what you think will be in the next part of the text.
4. Metacognitive graphic organizer: metacognition refers to the process in which learners are self-aware of their own learning needs and can monitor and adjust to the demands of the text.
5. ReQuest Procedure: is best suited for use with informational text. In this procedure, two students read through a text, stop after each paragraph, and take turns asking each other questions about it, which the other students must try to answer.
6. Paired reading/paired summarizing: students pair up and read a text together and then divide the text into chunk of one ore two paragraphs. The first student reads a chuck aloud as the other student reads along silently. Then the first student summarizes what the passage said. The second student then asks questions about the passage to probe its meaning.
Student Engagement
1. Anticipating: Students need to anticipate-to ask what they want to learn from the reading. They do this by first assessing what they know and what the task demands are and what needs to be accomplished. For younger students this is modeled using a K-W-L chart.
2. Building knowledge: Students need to monitor what they are thinking and learning, ask questions as they go, and create summaries of ideas for themselves; think out loud, taking notes, drawing, or share ideas with others.
3. Consolidating what they learn: Students need to go back and think again about how the ideas fit together and what they means. Students can create a new graphic representation of what they have learned. They might write and outline and then elaborate on it on a summary, or they might want to talk to someone about the ideas they have gained.
Teachers Guide Instruction
1. Developing principled knowledge: a key to comprehending a text is having the ability to link ideas presented within and across sentences to create a sense of a whole text.
  1. combines fluency, meaning, drama, and rhetoric as students practice reading texts aloud, using their voices to convey meaning of the text
    1. Readers' theatre
2. Teachers influence students' knowledge fformation in two important ways: by the questions they ask and by the depth of study they encourage with their students
3. Skills: are processes that readers use habitually
4. Strategies: are the processes by which they use their skills under conscious control
5. Interest and Motivation: comes from the prior knowledge readers have about a topic. Readers who have principled knowledge about a topic tend to be interested in adding to and deepening that knowledge, versus readers with shallower topical knowledge might be motivated automatically to learn more about something through reading
6. Its important to create a learning environment in which students can become immersed in a topic over time and explore it deeply, also to guide students attention to the way the texts they read are organized. In addition, helping students develop principled knowledge by encouraging them to consider ideas deeply, and pointing them toward the main ideas and underlying structures and issues. Also, teaching thoroughgoing, powerful strategies for comprehending and remembering and then supporting and reinforcing these strategies until they become habituated into skills. Lastly, engaging children in deep discussions of what they read and getting them to think about, write about, and respond to what they read so they will understand issues deeply and extend their curiosity to other meaningful topics in their world.
Comprehending informational Texts
1. and consolidate the ideas with what we previously knew, sometimes modifying those ideas and sometimes expanding on them
  1. build knowledge as we read and engage with authors
    1. anticipating what we want an need to learn
      1. Starts with the ABCs of reading to learn
2. Recursive process: with each new set of ideas we read, we rethink what we knew, ask new questions and set new purposes, and build on the ideas that are freshly ours.
3. Essential aspects to active learning: Assessing schemata or prior knowledge, assuming a metacognitive orientation, setting ones own purposes and asking questions, actively seeking information and making notes so that it can be retained for connecting and organizing ideas, forming interpretations of what is read, consolidating new information and ideas, analyzing and evaluating the sources and adequacy of information, creating a synthesis and representation of the learning that can be shared, and reaching conclusions about and finding applications of what has been learned.