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- A reader has to know not one, but many, strategies, all of which must be used in various combinations to address different reading materials and purposes.
- Students may know how to activate prior knowledge, predict, visualize, self-question, paraphrase, and summarize, but they may not be able to use these specific strategies at the appropriate time, monitor whether they are working, or know how to fix what is not working.
- Teaching strategic approaches that combine individual strategies into a multicomponent procedure is one way to help students with their reading comprehension.
- Constructively responsive reading is extremely active, moment-to-moment reading affected by complex interactions among text content, prior knowledge, reader's goals, and cognitive and metacognitive processes.
- For readers who are not skilled, the kind of teaching that occurs becomes the key determinant in whether or not these readers ever develop the proficiency they need.
- When reading becomes difficult, poor readers often cease to use strategic processes and rely on a single process rather than integrating information sources.
- Struggling readers need to be taught how to coordinate all the processes for reading.
- Reciprocal teaching is an approach to reading comprehension that combines a student's background knowledge, knowledge of text structure, and reading strategies with self-regulation in a socially interactive procedure.
- During guided practice of reciprocal teaching there is a gradual shift in responsibility from the teacher doing most of the work to the students taking primary responsibility, with the teacher observing and helping when needed.
- The heart of reciprocal teaching lies in the reciprocal teaching dialogue, during which the teacher models the procedures and then eventually switches roles with the students who become the teachers.
- Reciprocal teaching has been found to be effective for good decoders who have poor comprehension skills as well as overall poor readers.
- POSSE relies on lesson dialogue and interactions among group members to promote internalization of strategies, development of self-regulation, and transfer of strategy control from teachers to students through a combination of text structure mapping and reciprocal teaching.
- When using the POSSE strategy the teacher models the strategies and then selects student leaders to guide aspects of the POSSE sequence.
- The name POSSE is an acronym that signals the steps to the strategy: Predict, Organize, Search, Summarize and Evaluate.
- Research with the POSSE strategy has shown that prediction coupled with organizing, summarizing, and clarifying techniques helped students with learning disabilities in grades 4-6 improve their comprehension.
- Meaning involves a transaction between a reader, who has particular perspectives with prior knowledge, and a text, which can affect different readers in different ways.
- Instruction should not be tantamount to imposing static prescriptive routines on passive learners.
- In transactional strategies instruction, emphasis is on flexible decision making, encouraging students to actively choose when and where to apply strategies, and switching strategies as characteristics of text and task change.
- The bottom line is that teaching reading comprehension to struggling readers requires that you teach them to combine strategies into a comprehensive package of goal-specific and self-regulatory elements.
- Good strategy instruction involves substantial teaching and practice over a long period of time across multiple tasks in order to produce active learners involved in meaningful, plan oriented, and reflective processing.
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