What You Need to Know About Comprehension, Inferring, and Summarizing

Continuing with reading Catching Readers Before They Fall, I am going to be talking about chapters 8 and 9 in this blog. Chapter 8 focuses on whether or not strategies should be explicitly taught in order for students to understand and use them. Every student develops a system that will help him or her comprehend texts and many average readers, and especially struggling readers, will need support. Peter Johnson states that "we have to decide what to be explicit about for which students and when to be explicit about it." The need for explicit strategy instruction is higher for struggling readers, so we need to explicitly teach it to them and not as much to more advanced readers. However, we need to continuously encourage students to use strategies that they already know how to use, even if we are only focusing on a certain strategy at that time. We need to be present in order to support problem-solving attempts made by the student. With comprehension strategies, some students need to be walked through how a reader makes connections or questions or visualizes during reading. For some students, the process may start slowly before it speeds up and they are doing this often. Modeling strategies is one of the best ways for children to understand how to utilize them. For example, if a teacher begins to read to her students, she may not introduce the strategy "questioning," but she talks about what she is reading and models questions that she has in order to understand what she is going to read. "The goal is not naming a strategy, but applying it to the reading of text." The example for "visualizing" is similar. While reading, the teacher stops and talks about what she is visualizing from reading the text or what she is visualizing from prior knowledge to reading. "One goal should be for students to feel the strategy working for them-they will only take ownership of the strategy and incorporate it into their reading process system if they feel it has value for them."

This leads us into chapter 9, which continues to focus on strategies, but puts a spotlight on inferring and summarizing. It is important for students to have inferential thinking in order to understand pas the literal surface level of the texts. It is reemphasized that it is more important for students to infer while reading rather than know the name or definition for it. "We keep the focus of the lesson on comprehension and then have the students notice how we went about acquiring meaning." This will also help students to be able to do this independently. Students can learn to infer at the word level (meaning of new terms), the text level (predicting what might happen or inferring about the characters or plot), and beyond text level (theme, perspective, etc.). Of course, we want them to be able to infer on all levels as much as possible because inferring is closely related to comprehending. The book gives tons of books that can be used for inferring on pages 165-172. Summarizing is another strategy discussed in this chapter, especially on tests. In order to model summarizing, it's important for students to see unnecessary information crossed out, important facts highlighted, and the information rewritten in your own words. All of the strategies mentioned within these chapters are very important. However, it's more important that the students know how to use a strategy rather than know the name for that strategy.