Processes Used by Strategic Readers
What is Reading?
Reading is thinking by figuring out words, spelling the words, and interpreting words by using the brain.
Types of Readers
4 kinds of learners/readers:
Tacit learners/readers- who lack awareness of how they think when they read.
Aware learners/readers- who realize when meaning has broken down or confusion has set in but who may not have sufficient strategies for fixing the problem.
Strategic learners/readers- who use the thinking and comprehension strategies we describe in this book to enhance understanding and acquire knowledge. They are able to monitor and repair meaning when it is disrupted.
Reflective learners/readers- who are strategic about their thinking and are able to apply strategies flexibly depending on their goals or purposes for reading. They also reflect on their thinking and ponder and revise their use of strategies.
Strategic Thinking
Good readers make connections between the texts they read and their own lives. By comparing the text with prior knowledge, readers are better able to understand the text through their connections to the characters, the events, and the issues based on their own thoughts, knowledge, and experiences.
Comprehension Strategies
Comprehension is a complex process involving knowledge, experience, thinking, and teaching. It is important to think not only about what you are reading but what you are learning.
Making connections between prior knowledge and the text
It is natural for readers to bring their schema (sum total of our background knowledge and experience—is what each of us brings to our reading) to reading, but they comprehend better when they think about the connections they make between the text, their lives, and the larger world.
3 Connections to Reading:
Text-to-Self- connections that readers make between the text and their past experiences or background knowledge
Text-to-Text- connections that readers make between the text they are reading and another text, including books, poems, scripts, songs, or anything that is written
Text-to-World- connections that readers make between the text and the bigger issues, events, or concerns of society and the world at large
Asking questions
Readers clarify their understanding and make meaning of the text by asking questions.
Visualizing
Active readers create visual images in their minds based on the words they read in the text. (It is like watching a movie in your mind.)
Drawing inferences
Inferring is drawing conclusions about the text based on what is known, clues from the text, and thinking ahead to make a judgment. (Remember this as “reading between the lines.”)
Determining important ideas
Readers must differentiate between less important ideas and key ideas that are central to the meaning of the text. (Just because it is interesting to you does not mean that it is the main idea.)
Synthesizing information
Synthesizing combines new information with existing knowledge to form an original idea or interpretation.
Repairing understanding
When confusion disrupts meaning, readers need to stop and clarify their understanding.
Monitoring Comprehension
Proficient readers proceed on automatic pilot most of the time, until something doesn’t make sense or a problem arises and understanding screeches to a halt. A reflective, strategic reader knows which strategies to activate when meaning is lost.
Ways to monitor and repair understanding:
Track thinking through coding, writing, or discussion
Notice when you lose focus
Stop and go back to clarify thinking
Reread to enhance understanding
Read ahead to clarify meaning
Identify and articulate what’s confusing or puzzling about the text
Recognize that all of your questions have value
Develop the disposition to question the text or author
Think critically about the text and be willing to disagree with its information or logic
Match the problem with the strategy that will best solve it
Monitoringthinking as we gominimizes the chances of coming to the end of a chapter without having a clue as to what we have read.