Implications
There are many children who have a difficult time comprehending text, be it narrative or expository. This indicates that it is necessary to address the needs of the children and implement the teaching of comprehension strategies, beginning in the first grade. By the time the students come up to the middle school years, they have established a pattern of learning and if they have not developed the appropriate skills necessary to process text they will be struggling for the remainder of their school years.
Modeling the strategies of clarification, question generation, summarization and prediction (just four of the many strategies to improve comprehension) is important to do at an early age so that students can continue to scaffold off of each and become more confident in their reading materials.
Introducing and modeling the strategies in isolation is key for the development of metacognition. It is important to master one strategy before introducing a new strategy then scaffold off of each so that the students observe the natural progression of comprehension.
Having students develop a pattern for organizing their thoughts into some type of graphic organizer or learning log is an important element in improving comprehension skills. Also allowing students time to reflect on their independent work and recording those thoughts down helps to improve a student's awareness of his or her own abilities and what needs to be done for future improvement.
To teach strategies only within a reading class is very limiting and detrimental to authentic learning. Strategy use needs to be taught among the disciplines, especially if a child is experiencing more than one teacher within a school day. If every teacher incorporates strategy use within the classroom, it will validate the process more and help the students acquire higher levels of thought processing, which any teacher hopes to achieve with his or her students.
It is important to remember that motivation plays a key factor in comprehension development. Offering a variety of material that is differentiated for the students enhances the classroom curriculum and motivates students to want to read more.
Lastly, it is important that strategy use be taught within authentic work samples. Be it narrative or expository text, students learn better if it is text that relates to what is being learned. Curriculum material lends itself nicely, especially with expository text, to the practicing and modeling of comprehension strategies. The use of narrative text to accentuate curriculum and expository text (called twin text) is extremely meaningful for the students as well. This interdisciplinary approach is a stepping stone for initiating students to become metacognitive in their approach to reading.