Читать книгу Comprehension [Grades K-12] - Douglas Fisher - Страница 14

Given our experiences with the nearly exclusive focus on strategies, we question the idea that the goal of reading comprehension instruction is to develop strategic readers. As Afflerbach et al. (2008) noted, strategic reading is “effortful and deliberate” (p. 368) and occurs during initial learning and when the text becomes more difficult for the reader to understand. In contrast, “reading skills operate without the reader’s deliberate control or conscious awareness” (p. 368). To our thinking, the goal is to develop skilled readers, those who deploy the strategies they have learned with great automaticity. In other words, they have developed habits that they use almost without thinking about them. And, when texts are difficult, they revert back to known strategies to regain meaning.

As an example, we were sitting near Nick, a third-grade student, as he was attempting to read Hey, Water! (Portis, 2019). We selected Nick because he shares his thinking verbally as he reads. His ability to think aloud is strong and thus provides us glimpses into his cognitive processes. At one point, he said, “I’m lost. I don’t know what is happening now. I hafta reread.” He turned back several pages and started again. Later, he read the large word on the page: tear. He pronounced it /ter/. Then he read the sentence in smaller font: Sometimes you slide down my cheek without a sound. Nick paused, looking perplexed. Then he said, “That’s not right. It’s /tir/ not /ter/. Why are those words spelled the same? That’s really confusing.” Then he proceeded with the rest of the book.

Nick reminds us that skilled readers periodically recognize that they have lost meaning, and when this happens, they use fix-up strategies, reread, and so on to regain their understanding. Most of the time, Nick is a skilled reader. But importantly, he knows how to be a strategic reader when necessary. Thus, to our thinking, the goal of comprehension instruction should be to develop skilled readers.

Skilled readers periodically recognize that they have lost meaning, and when this happens, they use fix-up strategies, reread, and so on to regain their understanding.

iStock.com/PeoplesImages

Before we leave this comparison of skilled versus strategic reading, we would like to return to Afflerbach et al. (2008) one more time. They remind us that comprehension is much more complex than the cognitive skills that we have named thus far. As they note, “The progression from effortful and deliberate to automatic use of specific actions while reading occurs at many levels—decoding, fluency, comprehension, and critical reading” (p. 368). This is an important reminder and one that is often forgotten in conversations about comprehension. Each of those literacy processes is important if readers are going to understand what they read. As we will explore more fully in the next chapter, students must reach automaticity with each of those component parts. As readers develop automaticity with one aspect of reading, they free up working memory to focus on something else.

Building on the work of LaBerge and Samuels (1964), Bloom (1986) explained automaticity as the brain developing its ability to “perform a skill unconsciously with speed and accuracy while consciously carrying on other brain functions” (cited in Wolfe, 2001, p. 102). This is why developing automaticity with decoding and word recognition is so essential to comprehension. Automaticity allows the reader to focus attention on the meaning rather than the process for acquiring the meaning.

Skilled reading versus strategic reading

All of us spend a lifetime acquiring what Paris calls the unconstrained reading skills of vocabulary and comprehension.

The question remains: Which skills (or strategies) need to be taught? Importantly, some skills have a finite stopping point, and others do not. In the research world, it’s the ceiling effect. For example, once you learn the names of all of the letters, there are no more to learn. You have reached the highest point possible. However, it is unlikely that any of us have reached the top end of our vocabulary development. Just the other day, we learned the word ganked from our high school students. (It’s to steal something and has replaced jacked in the popular vernacular.) By the time you read this, that word will probably be dated, and we will have learned countless new words.