Reading Comprehension

After doing the assigned readings, I was able to see that there are many comprehensions strategies that I use unconsciously while reading. While I am sure that some of these strategies were taught to me when I was in elementary school, I honestly do not remember being taught them. When I read, I often make connections from the text to my own life. This helps me to understand how the characters are feeling and makes me think about what I would do if I were in the same situation as the characters which I am reading about. According the Tompkins, there are many factors which readers use to comprehend a text (225). The factors which I now believe that I use the most, are activating my prior knowledge, making predictions, making connections to my own experiences, and creating mental images. After our discussion in class, I came to the realization that I never really took into account how my prior knowledge and experiences will affect the inferences that I make about what I am reading. This helped me to see how people can take away such different meanings from the exact same text. I had realized that this can occur when reading things such as texts about history (which I am not very good at, so people often take away much different meanings than I). This weeks readings also helped to remind me how much motivation affects the amount of attention we pay to a text and therefore affects our comprehension of a story. I know that if I don't believe a text is going to be interesting, that I am going to be far less motivated to read it and will pay little attention (I will most likely skim over it).
In field, I am seeing quite a bit related to comprehension processes and literacy instruction. In the Literacy for the 21st Century, it describes how reader factors such as phonics and other skills, comprehension strategies and vocabulary knowledge greatly affect a readers comprehension (224). There are quite a few English Language Learners in my classroom and they have great difficulty when it comes to decoding due to differences when it comes to sound-letter knowledge. This affects not only their reading, but their writing as well. Since some of the students have so much trouble with phonics, they take virtually no meaning from the text since they don't understand the words which they are reading. This then makes it so they have difficulty when it comes to writing assignments which relate to the readings. For this reason, my CT is using a series of intervention books to help them develop their sound-letter knowledge and work on their fluency. Not only this, but she makes sure to go over any challenging vocab to ensure the fact that students are understanding what they are reading. A word wall is posted, with new words being added every week. When discussing books, my CT will also ask students to make personal connections to the text. She does this by calling on students and by also having them do worksheets where they describe how a character in a story was feeling, how they knew that the character felt that way, and if they have ever felt the same way that character did. Much of this work is done with their classmates during literacy centers, which according to Tompkins, more likely allows them to be engaged with reading and writing (236). So far, I have seen a lot of good instructional techniques which I believe can help me to be a better teacher in the future.