Connecting and Questioning

Rather than comment on all the comprehension strategies listed - I just talk/write too much to do that - I want to focus on one thing I see in my placement (connecting) and one thing I don't see (questioning), and talk about my thoughts on each.

Connecting: It's amazing how first- and second-grade students can learn not only how to do this, but to recognize when they or other students are doing it. I've heard a student say to my CT, "I've got a text-to... text infection!" (He probably didn't really say "infection," but what they said was so garbled that it could have been infection for all I know.) I believe this happens in my class for two main reasons. First, readers do this naturally. It is quite a normal thing - not just a thing that is done in classrooms, or at the request of a teacher - to read or hear something and go, "Oh! That relates to me!" At times, younger students need lots of help articulating exactly what this relationship is - i.e., what the text-to-self connection is - but they are ready with examples. Second, it happens because my teacher is always talking about these connections. She has introduced and repeatedly gone over the concept of text-to-___ connections with the class. Often, after she raises makes one of these connections herself, she will say, "See what I am doing, I am connecting the text to my own life. I've just made a... [and the class says this next part together:] text-to-self connection!" If the text gives the students a sort of cognitive framework or structure for thinking about a particular experience (let's say, being tricked by someone you know), text-to-self, -world and -text connections really fill in this structure in individualized ways for the students making the connections. This explains why that which different students learn from reading a text is usually related. The two students' learning don't tend to completely contradict one another, because they tend to get the same general structure of some lesson or experience. How this is filled in, however, is very subjective, which leaves room for large amounts of variability in student learning.

Questioning: There is a common rut that children fall into when they have a teacher doing most of the reading aloud, and when most of their assignments, if they have anything at all to do with the reading, are completely crafted by the teacher. Kids in this situation are used to being asked questions, and not used to asking questions themselves. Of course, there is nothing wrong with asking our students before-, during- and after-reading questions. In fact, these generally have great benefits to children: they help them look for particularly important elements of the text, make connections (like we talked about above), and gets them used to being active, thinking readers rather than passive, turn-their-brains-off readers. Yet well-developed critical thinking skills not only include the ability to receive and respond to questions, they include the ability to engage in the questioning process themselves. When I said that asking children questions "helps them look for particularly important elements of the text," that was a rather subjective statement. The elements I spoke of are particularly important in the eyes of the teacher, but they may or may not be in the eyes of the student. Questions, then, give students the chance to look for important elements themselves, and give them practice in reading to find meaning on their own. After all, they won't have a teacher scaffolding their literacy understanding all their life. This is something that I find missing in my CT's classroom. While she asks plenty of questions herself, the children have not begun to ask their own questions. I think this could especially guide after-reading activities. Rather than having the students answer questions all the time during their after-reading writing time, it would be great for them to write their own questions about the text - things that confused them, or made them curious, or connections they made.

Dave Koch