My Book Blog 4: Teach Comprehension

I read this section of my book while completing the "Two Student Readers-Jeremy and Rachel" assignment, and I was able to make connections between these two texts. In Jeremy and Rachel's case, they look and sound competent, read smoothly, and can retell what they have read, but they are unable to go further in their comprehension, for example, determine what is more important in a text. Therefore, they are only "superficial readers" according to Routman. Real and good readers are always aware of their understanding or lack of understanding and always do whatever is necessary to make sense of what they are reading.

In the book, Routman argues that comprehension is critical to reading and we need to teach comprehension right from the start, from the day kids enter preschool or kindergarten. The good news is that comprehension has become a focus in our teaching; the bad news is that the teaching of comprehension strategies is often isolated from exercises. Routman describes in the typical reading classroom nowadays, teachers often focus on practicing one comprehension strategy for weeks and then move on to teach the next comprehension strategy.

That is exactly how I teach in my developmental reading course. We have a required list of strategies to go over during a semester based on the course syllabus, and we tackle those strategies one by one hoping that our students will exit our course equipped with a toolkit of comprehension strategies to use in their college reading. However, the reality is that our students spend large amount of time learning and practicing these strategies, often without knowing how to apply them and how the strategies fit into their reading of college materials. The problem, according to Routman, lies in not enough time for independent reading that enables students to use and practice these strategies.

The book then goes on to recommend the 20%-to-80% rule, which means 20% of class time allocated for explicit instruction of strategies and 80% of class time dedicated to the act of reading.

In my own teaching practice, I do leave the majority of class period for students reading practice. But a frustrating problem I have constantly experienced is that students go ahead to read with their old reading habits in spite of all the instruction on the useful strategies that were taught to them 10 minutes ago. For example, after I teach highlighting, some of the students are still reading with their hands in their pocket and their text as clean as new. Another frustrating problem with a lot of my students is that they rarely reread materials for better comprehension, even though rereading is the single most useful comprehension strategies as Routman describes it. They read through the material and then rush to do the comprehension questions. When they stumble on one question, they generally do not go back to reread the text; instead, they just go with their memory of the text or instincts. I have simply blamed some of my students for their laziness, but I am aware that as the teacher, I need to address the problems, but I have been  and am still looking for the solution…