Helping Children Struggling With Comprehension

Introduction to reading comes through phonetic reading boxes. The reading boxes are cleverly organized, going from simple to the complex. Reading does not follow the same process of writing, which is taking our own thoughts and symbolizing. When we read, it is not our language with which we are working with, it is the author’s language. Reading is the analysis of the language followed by a synthesis. Story telling and socio-dramatic play in the environment can help the child develop an imagination that fosters a higher capability to understand what is being read to them.

Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning and begin to evaluate texts by drawing on a growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features

In Christina Haas and Linda Flower’s article “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning”, they point out, and break down, the three reading strategies that are used by students when reading a passage, or paper. An experiment was constructed to show what each of these strategies are like while being used and what the reader may ask, or get out of, a certain excerpt.

Many ninth grade students carry a heavy burden with them as they enter high school. McCallumore and Sparapani (2010) point out that these students are coming from middle school with low reading comprehension level; therefore, they are behind before they begin. The study continues with data from the Southern Regional Education Board that 51% of teachers in high school believe their incoming freshman are ill-prepared with the background knowledge needed to enter high school.

In Christina Haas and Linda Flower’s article “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning”, they present three different strategies readers use when reading a paper or an article, and the importance of each. An experiment was constructed to show those strategies in action, and what each type of reader does while using the strategies.

Learning to read is beginning to develop earlier in elementary grades. Students are expected to be emergent readers by the time he or she leaves kindergarten and enters first grade. If a child is not, he or she is labeled as being behind. According to Hughes (2007) emergent readers are using early reading strategies in consistently, read easy patterned text, retell text with simple storyline, and respond to text at a literal level. Hughes (2007) also says literacy develops in young children through play, daily conversation and interactions with text of all kinds. Many children come with emergent literacy skills; can recognize signs and labels, scribble letters, retell stories by pointing at pictures and talking about them, and some have varying degrees of phonemic and phonological awareness. This essay will define and explain implication for each theory in learning to read.

In "Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning," Christina Haas and Linda Flowers suggest that readers have issues using rhetorical reading strategies and must be instructed to find rhetoric in text in order to do so. Haas and Flowers reference a study where several students ranging from freshmen to undergrads were asked to read an article and describe the authors intentions at several points throughout the article. Haas and Flowers noted that younger, less experienced students had a harder time connecting points and surmised the text; where older and more experienced students connected each point of the article, and gave their interpretations of the text.

According to the Georgia Department of Education, the Georgia State School Board of Education adopted a new set of standards known as the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. Since the Common Core Standards State Standards assess the same English Language Arts standards as the Georgia Performance Standards, Georgia’s curriculum is called Common Core Georgia Performance Standards. Of the ELA standards for first grade, one requires that students be able to ask and answer questions based on the details in a text. This standard also requires that the student be able to retell stories, including details, and demonstrate comprehension. This could be an issue for special needs students. Students with a learning disability in reading often have difficulty comprehending texts in books and other reading material that is written at their grade level. However, there are many strategies to use to improve reading comprehension in struggling readers. With the increase use of technology, my review is written to determine if pre-recordings readings are more effective than teacher-led read aloud in improving comprehension skills of students with disabilities.

Throughout the beginning of my Elementary school years we were taught literacy by writing creative stories with illustrations. In my story, “The Girl Who Had The Magic Finger” (4) you can see that I was not great at spelling and completing sentences. I also noticed my tendency to complete things in a big hurry and end sentences with phrases like, “And that’s the end of that.” I continued to learn by putting together little books like, “Little People Book (5).” These type of books aloud me to read the stories and comprehend what I’ve read because they were followed by short questions at the end.

Reading comprehension may be the most important skill for any student to acquire and is therefore an area of particular interest to educators. Without adequate comprehension skills, students are limited in their reading, analytical and occupational abilities. To many, including the student’s themselves, comprehension or “good reading” skills begin and end with simple decoding. It is thought that if students can ‘read’ and define the vocabulary they are reading, then they also comprehend what is read. True comprehension goes far beyond decoding, however. True comprehension requires visualization of a text, predicting events in the text, making inferences about the text and clarifying what is not

As the Sociolinguistic theory suggests, preschool-aged students can be at risk to develop a reading disability if they do not acquire high-quality oral language foundations (Tracey & Morrow, 2006). The effort to create and implement early intervention programs is driven by the idea that it easier to prevent reading problems than to attempt to remediate them in the later grades. The Interactive Strategies Approach is a comprehensive and highly responsive approach to instruction and intervention for struggling readers in the primary grades. It has features in common with and different from contemporary approaches to intervention.

Young children are like sponges; they absorb information like a sponge absorbs water. It is essential for them to be emerged in an environment in which they can absorb positive information so that one day they can become contributing members of our society and have a better future. For this reason, there is a pronounced importance on providing enriching environments for children to learn and develop appropriately. One of the ways that this can be achieved is through a literacy rich environment specifically with the use of story reading and storytelling.

Explicit instruction is important in connecting to prior knowledge and skills when beginning a learning sequence (Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority, 2016). It helps to lay the foundational areas of reading and literacy as a whole in the early years of schooling. Effective reading instruction builds on what children already know, how students learn and on what degree of support they need to become successful in reading/learn and apply new information (Archer, 2011, p.18). Here the idea of scaffolding is evident where “the support provided by the teacher (or another student)…bridge(s) the gap between their current abilities and the intended goal” (Rupley, Blair and Nichols, 2009, p.129). It is important for students who are learning something new, to have the opportunity to have it explained, the opportunity to apply that information guided by their teachers and the opportunity to apply it independently (Archer, 2011). Through an explicit approach the responsibility for learning shifts from teacher to student as they gain confidence and competence with reading. Reading is not an automatic process and must be taught, “explicitly, systematically, early and well” (National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, 2005, as cited in Hempenstall, 2016,p.5). Building on this, it is not enough for explicit instruction to be effective; it must also be efficient so that students can meet outcomes as soon as possible and are given the opportunity to apply it. This highlights

Students having hard times in comprehending the thought of the text and what the author implies. It seems to be reading by words but not reading between the lines. It is important to know how comprehension plays an integral part in a manner of thinking and conceptualizing facts and ideas from the

That being said, comprehension is not just understanding the singular words that are being read, but being able to put them together, along with activating previous knowledge, make sense and develop meaning to the text. Essentially, when a reader is immersed and engaged in text, they are actively developing meaning to the text while formulating questions that may later be answered by the text itself.