Reading Comprehension
Today’s guest post is by Katy Ganino Reddick.
Background: Being committed to a reading approach to Latin, my students rarely translate an entire story from Ecce Romani. I read the story aloud in Latin, paraphrasing in Latin and using images to illustrate vocabulary words. At the end, however, I am concerned that students still have questions that I haven’t addressed.
A elementary level colleague recommended to me the book Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst. The book focuses on literacy strategies to help students with reading comprehension in English. The second half of the book has strategies that might be helpful for upper level classes, but the first part contains something that has been very useful with my middle school students.
1. Read a passage aloud to students. Allow them to follow along on their own copy. I usually do this after the story has previously been introduced to students the class before.
2. As students follow along silently, they underline anything in a passage that they find confusing or about which they have a question.
a. Some students will want to underline everything- remind them how much they know! Instruct them not to underline words they know or short sections they understand.
3. Instruct students to silently reread the passage. Anything they have underlined should be turned into a question.
a. Who is this clause describing?
b. What is the form of this word?
4. Create a master list of all the questions on the board.
a. Some students will say that they underlined a word because they didn’t know what it meant. Have them turn this into a question – what does iter mean and what is it doing in this sentence?
5. Students then work in pairs. Each pair can choose any two questions from the board to answer. They are encouraged to use all their resources- notes, textbook, dictionary, etc. to discover the answers. If they get stuck, provide hints as to where to look.
6. Bring the entire group back together. Go through the list of questions and have students share their answers.
Reflection: By the end of this process, students know the story more deeply. Because they choose their own questions, they are invested in the answers. Because they are student framed questions, students can understand why they are important for understanding of the story. Because questions vary greatly in difficulty, students differentiate for themselves question complexity. Students listen closely to their peers’ explanations of things. My students have told me that they have found the activity very useful in developing deeper understanding of the texts we read.