| When students apply the metacognitive-process awareness of what they're thinking to their reading, they can quickly use appropriate strategies to understand text.
During Reading Strategy for Fiction: Literary Elements Asking students questions about different literary elements can help engage them in their reading of fiction. To help students delve into the heart of a story, prompt them to establish genre, identify or analyze plot, identify character motivation, visualize setting, understand mood, and identify and understand themes. When students can discuss these elements of fiction comfortably, they'll know what to look for so they can truly comprehend and appreciate fiction.
During Reading Strategy for Nonfiction: Analyzing Text Structure Understanding the organization of ideas allows nonfiction readers to see the big picture and the most important information. When students know how a selection is structured, they can answer questions such as: What circumstances led to that result? How was that era different from this one?
Lead students to identify the most common text structures as they read:
- Sequence of Events: The time order of events. Signal words: first,
next, then, after, before, prior, subsequent, finally.
- Cause and Effect: What happened is the effect. Why it happened is
the cause. Signal words: cause, effect, because, result.
- Compare/Contrast: How things are alike and how they are different. Signal words: like, unlike, similar, different. Comparative suffixes: -er, -est.
- Main Idea/Details: A main idea about a topic may be stated or inferred. Supporting details provide additional information about the main idea.
- Problem/Solution: A well-defined problem is addressed and solved through a series of attempts, leading to a solution.
- Spatial Relations: Where physical things are in space. Signal words: up, down, over, under, right, left, above, below, beyond.
During Reading Metacognitive Strategies Whenever you try to clarify your understanding of a topic, you are engaging in metacognition, or thinking about thinking. A good way to do this is through Think Alouds. When students periodically pause in their reading to "think aloud" about what they just read, they can clarify what they do and don't understand about the passage. The following fix-up strategies will enable students to pinpoint areas of poor comprehension and approach them using the appropriate reading strategy.
- Find Connections. Connect the text to their life experience, general knowledge, and other reading.
- Pause. Stop to think about what they've read.
- Visualize. Make mental pictures to help clarify meaning.
- Adjust Speed. Slow down or speed up for fluency.
Self-Monitoring Questions In addition to the strategies described above, students can ask themselves questions to promote "thinking about thinking" while they read. Here are some model questions:
- What just happened in this passage?
- What do I find difficult in this selection?
- Where do I think I began to lose track?
Special Education Focus: Engaging with Fiction
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Students who read poorly will need more structure, more support, and more visual representations of the meaning in a text. Text should be read aloud with a teacher guiding a small group, rereading when necessary. The teacher models the thought processes of comprehension: asking questions of the text; summarizing as reading proceeds; clarifying any words or ideas that are unclear; and anticipating where the story might go. Try the following steps.
The teacher can:
- read the text carefully before the lesson to determine where it can be segmented and what kinds of questions can be asked.
- go over with the students, before reading, what kinds of questions they might ask as they go (finding information, such as a fact or story element; clarifying a meaning that is ambiguous or unclear; predicting outcomes; summarizing what has happened).
- ask students to take turns being the reader and the one who raises a question.
- pass out cards that name each kind of question that can be asked and give students rotating responsibility for formulating and asking questions of a specific type.
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