Moss-Literature-&-Literacy, Language Acquisition
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//-->Literature,LiteracyComprehensionStrategiesin theElementary School&Joy F. MossAcknowledgmentsvContentsAcknowledgments1. Theory into Practice2. Text Sets in the Kindergarten3. Cat Tales4. Friendship5. Heroes, Heroines, and Helpers6. Patterns in Traditional Literature7. Breaking Barriers, Building BridgesReferencesIndexAuthorvii1285785115144183217257279Theory into Practice11Theory into Practicehis book is about teaching reading-thinking strategies to elemen-tary school children in the context of authentic literature experi-ences that include rich interpretive dialogues and provide the sup-port children need to become engaged, thoughtful, and independentreaders and writers. The rest of this chapter explains and expands onthese central concepts.TReading Comprehension Instruction: A HistoricalPerspectiveThe reading comprehension instruction practiced in most Americanschools today evolved out of instructional methods and programsgrounded in behavioral and task-analytic theories of learning that flour-ished during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century. Read-ing was viewed as a skill that could be divided into a set of subskillsinvolved in both decoding and comprehension. Reading instruction wasbased on the assumption that reading could be improved by teachingstudents each of these subskills (Guthrie, 1973; Rosenshine, 1980; N. B.Smith, 1965). Once a reader mastered the skills, he or she was consid-ered a proficient reader who could comprehend any text. In this viewof reading, readers were assumed to be passive recipients of the infor-mation or meaning that resided in the text. In the 1970s and 1980s, ba-sic and applied research in reading resulted in new understandings ofthe reading process and a different view of what is important to teach.A classic study by Dolores Durkin (1978/1979), “What ClassroomObservations Reveal about Reading Comprehension Instruction,” calledattention to the need for change in comprehension instruction. Durkinfound that most of the questions that teachers asked students duringreading instruction required only literal responses, and she observedthat very little comprehension instruction was actually taking place inelementary school classrooms. In the late 1980s the National Assessmentof Educational Progress (Applebee, Langer, & Mullis, 1987) recom-mended that reading instruction should emphasize thinking skills andstrategies that would enable readers to engage in higher-level interpre-tive responses to texts. Since Durkin’s study, reading researchers havestudied the strategies expert readers use as they read and how to im-prove readers’ understanding of text through comprehension strategy2Chapter 1instruction. Allan Collins and Edward Smith (1982) were among the firstto provide a framework for using these strategies as an integral part ofcomprehension instruction. They categorized reading strategies into twogeneral classifications: comprehension monitoring and hypothesis gen-eration, evaluation, and revision.That is, they suggested that readersconstruct meaning in response to an unfolding text by integrating tex-tual information with their prior knowledge to generate predictions,inferences, and questions about the piece. Readers build a “workinghypothesis” about the meaning of the text as it unfolds, and as theyencounter new information or activate relevant knowledge they con-firm, revise, or reject initial predictions, assumptions, or interpretations.Readers monitor comprehension as the text unfolds by evaluating theirworking hypothesis to identify gaps or problem areas that need rethink-ing and revision. The instructional plan presented by Collins and Smithfeatured teacher modeling and student engagement. That is, the teachermodels both comprehension monitoring and hypothesis generationwhile reading a text aloud. Then the teacher invites student participa-tion in these strategic activities. The goal is for students to internalizethese strategies so they can use them as thoughtful, independent readers.Strategy instruction was also a central part of the studies in “re-ciprocal teaching” conducted by Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and AnnL. Brown (1984; 1988), who focused on teaching four comprehension-monitoring and comprehension-fostering strategies. What was uniqueabout this plan was the use of dialogue to help students internalize thestrategies. The teacher supports the students as they work in smallgroups interacting with a text and engaging in a dialogue about the text.Their dialogue is guided by the use of the four basic strategies: askingquestions, identifying sections in the text that require clarification, sum-marizing the text, and making predictions about it. The reciprocity ofthe dialogue emerges as the students take turns assuming responsibil-ity for leading the group. This work reflected the shift from identifyingand teaching discrete skills to focusing on students’ efforts to make senseof ideas or to build their own understanding of text and their own ac-tive involvement as readers as they construct meaning in a social context.The research of the 1970s and 1980s served as a point of depar-ture for further studies of strategy instruction, and other researchershave expanded on this earlier work. For example, Michael Pressley andhis colleagues (1992) used the termtransactional strategies instructiontodescribe an approach in which students are taught to coordinate a rep-ertoire of strategic processes and “teachers and students jointly constructTheory into Practiceunderstandings of the text as they interact with it” (p. 516). This col-laborative construction of meaning results in a “small interpretive com-munity” (p. 516). The long-term goal is for students to internalize thestrategies used in the group setting and to use these strategies as inde-pendent readers. “The thought processes that were once interpersonalbecome intrapersonal” (p. 516). That is, students internalize these pro-cesses: development and practice of a repertoire of reading strategies;regular discussion of metacognitive information, such as when, where,and why to use particular strategies; building a nonstrategic worldknowledge base; and motivation to use the strategies and world knowl-edge being learned (p. 517). The termtransactionalas applied to thisapproach is based on the reader-response theory of Louise Rosenblatt(1978). Her transactional theory of reading will be discussed later.The new view of reading that evolved out of the research of the1970s and 1980s emphasized the cognitive and interactive nature of thereading process and the constructive nature of comprehension (Ru-melhart, 1980; Spiro, 1980). This research highlighted the active role ofreaders as they engage in cognitive and affective transactions with textand generate meaning by bringing their prior knowledge and experi-ence to the text (Adams, 1977; Golden, 1986; Goodman, 1967, 1985;Rosenblatt, 1982; Rumelhart, 1976; F. Smith, 1978, 1988). Frank Smithintroduced the termnonvisual informationto refer to this prior knowl-edge used to construct meaning (1978, p. 5). According to Smith, “Themeaning that readers comprehend from text is always relative to whatthey already know and to what they want to know” (1988, p. 154). Herefers to organized knowledge or cognitive structures as “the theory ofthe world in our heads,” which enables readers to make predictions asthey interact with a text (1988, p. 7). “Prediction means asking questions,and comprehension means being able to get some of the questions an-swered. . . . There is aflowto comprehension, with new questions con-stantly being generated from the answers that are sought” (1988, p. 19).In the interpretive dialogues featured in this book, the children wereencouraged to develop their own questions to guide the reading-think-ing process as they encountered literary texts. The authentic literatureexperiences that formed the core of the literary/literacy program de-scribed in this book were cumulative, and, as such, provided opportu-nities for the children to expand and revise thetheory of the world in theirheadsand to build new cognitive structures (or prior knowledge) to bringto and enrich each new experience with literature.These authentic literature experiences set the stage for readers toengage in cumulative meaning-making processes. According to Judith3
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