I would like to post an open ended question to all elementary education teachers to answer a brief open ended question for my research class in regards to comprehension. I am doing research on why students do not understand text and if it is caused by the findings of the Durkin study that comprehension strategies are not being taught effectively. Anyone who can answer this question would be helpful, no name need just your grade and permission to use your answer. Open Ended Question: What problems do you see in reading comprehension? Do you think reading comprehension is taught to test or do you think fluency is a major factor in the problem of reading comprehension? What other factors do you think play a role?
As a second grade teacher, I see fluency as one major cause of poor comprehension. If a child can barely read and sound out words, the reading becomes long and labored and the student focuses more on just trying to sound out each word. The idea of the sentence and the whole story becomes lost in the struggle. How can we expect a student who cannot read fluently to comprehend a story that took him 10 minutes to read? Another thing that really effects comprehension is vocabulary. Many of my students do not speak English at home and so their English vocabulary is very limited. When they are reading an unfamilair text it may be so loaded with unfamiliar words that they are unable to use context clues to figure out a new word. Vocabulary study is really important when helping students with comprehension.
I think the major struggles vary significantly by grade level; for the younger kids, decoding and fluency play a big role. For my older (testing-level) students who are closer to grade level in terms of fluency but still struggle with reading comp, there are a lot of different things they struggle with. For some, especially my ELLs, it's word meaning, but they can often use cognates and their knowledge of prefixes/suffixes quite strategically if given enough practice. All of my students struggle with making inferences and drawing conclusions - skills that require them to go beyond what's stated directly in the text. Sometimes they can't quite look at things logically and consider what would make sense. More than anything, the majority of my students do not read at home and therefore find reading laborious and boring. I've made a point of finding highly engaging novels for our read alouds and book clubs that really motivate my kids to read outside of school, and I've it seen pay off big time this year... I tried implementing Reader's Workshop for the first time this fall, and while their December benchmark scores were lower than I had hoped, by February their scores all jumped up in spite of minimal test strategy practice (although i did emphasize word meaning/word study a LOT this spring). I used to teach 1st/2nd and am in my fourth year teaching 5th grade.
In my fifth science course, reading comprehension is impacted most by inexperience with non-fiction expository text. Technical vocabulary is the other concern. Put together, students struggle with individual words and meanings with no sense of the whole of what they just read, or interrelationships among concepts or overriding themes. Their writing, likewise, becomes punctuated and disjointed with few interconnections or cohesive movement. I'm not sure how much testing or test prep plays a role in this, but I do think a social movement away from reading is a contributor.
In my own opinion, I believe problems with reading comprehension very with age groups. A younger student is more likely to loose focus while reading than an older student. I believe there should not be a test to determine the reading level of a younger student because so many circumstances come into play with a young childs day to day reading. For instance, the child may comprehend more while reading in the mornings because they maybe thinking about what he or she is going to do afterschool, if the child is reading in the afternoon time period. What I am trying to say is, from my own experence, young children are easily distracted. These students are going to read at a different level for each day, and this is directly influenced by the circumstances of that day.
I think comprehension issues have a lot to do with motivational issues. Putting aside special needs students, children generally master decoding and fluency issues quickly if they are motivated to read, and this sets the stage for developing comprehension. In my experience, the most powerful motivator in reading is writing- that is, shared self-expressive writing. This gives students a reason to write, and hence a reason to read, and it generates texts that are developmentally appropriate and engaging.
