Comprehension Strategy Instruction for Primary Grades

For reading comprehension I read the article by Katherine Stahl, "Proof, practice, and promise: Comprehension strategy instruction in the primary grades." I decided to read this article because of my kindergarten placement and thought that I could possibly find connections between the article and my field time.

There was a time when reading fluency was the only emphasis of the early grades. Recent research has indicated that although fluency is important, so too is comprehension. Students need to start learning comprehension strategies as soon as possible because the strategies allow students to read and understand text that they have no previous knowledge of. Stahl writes that comprehension strategies "have the potential to provide access that is removed from personal experience." (p. 598)

According to research and usage, Stahl breaks comprehension strategies into four categories. The first two categories are well researched strategies that are either widely used or in limited use by teachers. The second two categories are strategies that haven't been researched, and are either widely used or in limited use by teachers. The strategies are all connected in that they can be used in some way in the early elementary grades to promote and work on reading comprehension. All of the strategies have the potential to help students, but some are better researched and proven to work. Regardless of which strategy a teacher uses, the point is that the teacher is trying to teach the students how to comprehend and understand the text that they are reading. Learning reading comprehension will greatly benefit the students as they move on to higher levels in their education.

It was interesting to read through the different strategies and think about what I have seen in my kindergarten class. When my CT reads to the students she will guide a discussion where she asks the kids to make predictions, she relates the story to her own life, she asks plot related questions, and she asks many other types of questions related to the story. My CT is in complete control of the discussion and is guiding the students in their comprehension of the story. This is understandable because it would be too much to expect that the kindergarten students could lead a productive discussion of the book. Teacher driven discussion and questions are widely used and researched strategies for teaching reading comprehension. Stahl supports these types of strategies, saying that, "teacher-led questioning can be a powerful vehicle in moving text interactions toward higher levels of thinking and critical literacy." (p. 601)

One strategy that I have never seen used before, but that I think could work well, is literature webbing. To do literature webbing, the teacher writes the events of the story on cards, mixes them up, and then gives them to the students to put in order. After the students predict how the story will unfold, the teacher reads the story to the class. After the reading, the class returns to their original prediction and makes corrections as they talk about what happened in the story. This strategy could be used in first grade, and I believe that with the right book, it could work in kindergarten too. This comprehension strategy isn't widely used, but research does validate its effectiveness. Reutzel and Fawson studied literature webbing and came to the conclusion in a 1991 study that, "first-grade readers using the webbing procedure read the text with higher percentages of accuracy and were also more successful in answering specific questions about the text than a control group." (p. 603)