Understanding

Knowing What We Read, and Knowing What to Do When We Don’t

As literate adults who’ve been reading for decades, most of us have a well-tuned sense of what we understand and what we don’t. As we glide along line after line, we know intuitively if what we read makes sense to us, or if certain words or ideas are confusing. And we usually know what to do when we’re confused.

But many kids don’t.

A big difference between mature readers and those just starting out is their ability to monitor their understanding. Most of us get a feeling, like an alarm going off, when we don’t understand something we’ve read. We can usually tell what we’re missing, too, and what we need to do to find it.

This is what kids need. While it’s important for us to use assessment tools to test their understanding after reading, the best thing we can do is give them tools of their own to test their understanding during reading. The ability to monitor their understanding, and repair it when it breaks down, is one of the most important skills readers can develop. To help kids get the hang of it, I offer the following advice:

• Know what the words mean. Words are slippery things and many kids let them slip right by. Many have simply not had time in their brief lives to build up large vocabularies. They also haven’t had time to develop the expectation, as we have, that they will be able to understand almost all the words they read. So I need to help them increase their vocabulary and develop that expectation. Fortunately, these two goals support each other when kids encounter words they don’t know and then put in an effort to figure them out. To help this process along, in conferences or in sharing, I often ask, “What does that word mean here?” If the student knows the word, great. If not, we can walk through a few strategies and sometimes add many new words to a student’s vocabulary.

• Know where you are. At any moment, mature readers can pick their heads up from the page and tell you, “I’m at the part where...”, or “The writer is talking about...,” or “Right now...”, or something else that clearly indicates a basic level of understanding at a particular point in time. But you’d be surprised how many kids can’t do this, especially when they read non-fiction. Being able to say, “I’m at the part where the writer is talking about why sharks attack people,” is like a shorthand retell or capsule summary that tells me how a reader is tracking the most basic elements of a text. It’s also a great way to start a journal entry and the perfect introduction to a more detailed discussion during sharing or conferencing.

• Keep up with characters and events. In narrative writing, our understanding hangs on a sequence of events and a cast of characters. In addition to knowing what’s happening now, readers have to remember what has happened before and be able to describe a chain of cause and effect relationships. To get kids thinking about this, I ask them questions like “How did that happen?” or “Why did he/she do that?” To help them explore characters, I teach lessons on character traits. But in conference, I tend to engage kids with open-ended questions like, “What can you tell me about that character?” or “What’s important to know about that character?” To help kids develop their responses, I share my own thoughts about characters and model in-depth character-focused discussions. Based on the responses I model, we make a classroom list of all the things we can say about characters cross-referenced against our lessons on character traits.

• Follow the writer’s topics and ideas. In narrative texts, readers tend to follow characters and events. In non-narrative texts, they tend to follow topics and ideas. A topic is the subject of a section of a piece. An idea is what the writer has to say about it. If a section of a book is called “When Sharks Attack People”, that’s a topic. If the writer says, “Sharks only attack when they feel threatened.” that’s an idea. When kids read non-narrative texts, I want them to understand not only the writer’s ideas but how those ideas build upon and relate to each other. I’ll often have kids identify two or more ideas about a topic and explain to me how those ideas go together and if there might be a larger main idea that incorporates them all.

• Re-read if something doesn’t make sense. Re-reading is the single most useful strategy for improving a reader’s understanding. But it’s hard to get kids to do. I have to model it regularly, use it in mini-lessons, and request it constantly in conferences. One of the most frequent things I say to kids is, “Let’s go back and re-read that, and see if we can figure it out.” To get kids to re-read, I have to make it a top priority. Sometimes I’ll just ask kids to do it directly like this: “Today during reading time, please re-read something from a previous day and note in your journal something new you discovered about it.”

• Review if you’re lost. If kids get into a book and can’t seem to keep up, it could be that they’ve forgotten much of what has come before. Maybe they haven’t read for a few days or maybe the book is just too hard. Instead of giving up, or continuing to read on in confusion, I’ll ask them to do a quick review. Reading the beginning of each chapter is good for fiction. Skimming the headings usually works for magazines and other non-fiction texts. Reviewing is also a necessary strategy for making sense of textbooks and when memorizing information for other classes.

There are so many ways to help kids understand more of what they read. But what I like best about this small set of suggestions is that it focuses on simple things any reader can do in any kind of text. Too many kids, it seems, have no ability at all to monitor their own understanding, and no repertoire of strategies to apply when their understanding breaks down. While it’s important, of course, to teach strategies that cover before-, during-, and after-reading situations, strategies kids can use during reading are bound to be the most valuable and to have the most positive influence on overall reading improvement.

Comments

[Steve Peha]

Even since I started teaching reading, I've been interested in ways we can assess kids' understanding without giving kids multiple choice tests or peppering them with a million questions. Does anyone have any good ideas?

I think kids get tired of being questioned about their reading all the time. It also occurs to me that I'm never questioned about my reading. Mostly, I just talk with people about it or apply it in my own life to solve particular problems.

[Margot C. Lester]

I think if we ask the same questions of kids all the time, it does burn them out. But mixing it up makes it seem less formulaic and a little more interesting.

Modeling how adults talk about books is important, too. When we ask each other what our books are about, we don't say, "It's about this huge hurricane that hit louisiana and then the storm surge blew the crappy levees away and then people were flooded and some died and then everyone blamed the government." So showing kids more of what readers really talk about is key to helping them find that kind of stuff in their own reading and journaling.