Text comprehension strategies pdf

With the support of the counselors of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, the teachers who held a Bachelor degree in Education and had years of experience ranging from 5 to 15 received a 5-day training on the use of each strategy of the combined strategy instruction. It was agreed with the principals of the schools that there would be a full inclusion of students with dyslexia along with those without dyslexia in the same classrooms.

The teachers became experts on language and reading due to the resources they received. The students answered a pre-test and a post-test at the beginning and at the end of the treatment. Tests were picked up at random and were given to the other scorer along with the given and evolved criteria.

Likewise, a third teacher was consulted in case of doubt, and consensus was reached through discussion to ensure agreements of ratings. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences SPSS was used to perform item analysis to ensure reliability of the study instruments through an acceptable alpha reliability coefficient of internal consistency.

Likewise, inter-rater reliability among reported scores of independent judges was computed to ensure high inter-rater reliability correlations 3. Besides, such tests could pose several questions, so their content validity proved to be high.

Additionally, the items of the tests measured the curriculum objectives accurately because these tests were tailored in accordance with the covered and given instruction. The tests, examined in this research, used uniform procedures for administration and scoring in order to assure that the results from different students could be comparable.

Consequently, a specification table that matched the objectives to the test items as well as expert judgment was used to ensure the content validity of the pre-tests and post-tests used in the study. As such, to ensure internal validity and reliability, the teachers received training on the use of the 10 reading strategies forming the combined strategy instruction; furthermore, the same supplementary and basic materials and tests were employed.

Appropriate pre-tests and post-tests specifically designed and validated for the purpose of the study were developed and administered. Descriptive statistics mean scores, and standard deviations as well as inferential statistics three-way Analysis of Covariance tests were used to address the questions and test the hypotheses formulated for the study.

The treatment conditions experimental versus control were used as independent variables, the pre-test scores as covariates, and the post-test scores as dependent variables. The gender and school type variables were also used as moderator variables in order to test for possible interaction effects on comprehension among these variables and the treatment conditions.

In each group, there were both learners with and learners without dyslexia. Table 1. Similarly, there was a statistically significant difference in favor of the private school participants who did better than the public-school learners in comprehending narrative texts.

Table 2. Table 3. There was no statistically significant difference in the performance of the participants in the control and the experimental group. The preceding findings hint the importance of the class-specific contextual variables as possible determinants of the grade 9 dyslexic readers of expository text.

Unlike in grades 7 and 8, the public school rather than the private school readers did better in reading expository texts. The findings of the analysis of the grade 9 results also indicate a statistically significant interaction between the treatment conditions, school type and gender, which call for the need for further research that focuses on specific cases of individual learners of small groups of learners who are dyslexic in order to determine the individual and context-specific factors that may impact their reading achievement.

Table 4. Similarly, there was no statistically significant difference by gender in comprehending expository texts. Furthermore, there was no statistically significant effect for the school type variable on the reading comprehension of the participants. These findings suggest that neither the treatment conditions control versus experimental nor the school type private versus public have had an impact on the reading achievement of the grade 10 dyslexic learners.

This underscores the importance of other school, teacher, or classroom related factors as possible important determinants of reading the grade 10 reading comprehension. Discussion This study was reported the effect of the inclusion theory when the combined strategy instruction on improving the reading comprehension is applied. It is well-known that the implementation of strategies to help students in their process of acquiring a good reading comprehension skill in a foreign language has positive results for both students with and without dyslexia.

But there is no research conducted to establish a solid ground to know if the inclusion of students with dyslexia in a regular class may change these positive results that exist in both groups.

The results of students who worked with narrative texts grades 7 and 8 showed that the experimental group participants who received combined strategy instruction to understand narrative texts outperformed their control group counterparts in reading comprehension achievement. These findings suggest that the learning environment of the private schools which participated in the study might be more organized and effective than those of the public schools.

It is worth noting that the private schools used computers to implement some of the strategies. This factor should be considered to be even further studied.

Equally important is the fact that students who enroll in public school in the context of the present study usually come from less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds, which can have negatively impacted their academic achievement in general, and reading achievement.

Conversely, there was no statistically significant effect for the gender variable on the reading comprehension of the participants. The results of grade 9 participants using expository texts revealed a statistically significant difference by school type in favor of the public school participants who did better than their private school counterparts in comprehending expository texts.

These findings contradict those of grade 7, 8 and This underscores the importance of contextual variables as determinants of academic achievement in general and reading comprehension. The results also indicate that, in grade 9, there is a statistically significant difference for the interaction between treatment, gender, and school type.

Conversely, there was no statistically significant difference in the performance of the participants in the control and the experimental group and no statistically significant effect for the gender variable. Likewise, analysis of the grade 10 results shows no statistically significant interaction differences by treatment and gender. Similarly, there was a statistically significant interaction between treatment conditions, gender, and school type of the participants.

Conversely, there was no statistically significant effect for the treatment conditions on reading comprehension, nor by gender and no statistically significant interaction differences by treatment and gender. Conclusions and Implications The first research question is if the combined strategy instruction is more effective than regular instruction in improving the reading comprehension within the frame of the inclusion theory as it has been proved in groups of only learners with dyslexia or only learners without dyslexia.

This could be due to the fact that students with dyslexia often experience severe problems in comprehending expository texts despite fluent decoding skills Williams, The present study showed that students with dyslexia like students without dyslexia may need special attention in the classroom to understand this type of texts.

In this case, it seems that the combined strategy instruction is not effective, or at least, not effective as the unique methodology is applied. The second research question presents gender as an important element of the study.

There was no significant difference by gender in all the grade levels under study. Neither was any statistically significant interaction between the gender of the participants and their school type across the entire grade levels; no differences in the interaction between gender and treatment conditions control versus experimental were shown. Furthermore, no gender gaps were statistically shown when combining the treatment conditions, the school type and gender across all the grade levels under study except in grade 9.

Regarding the third question, we can state that there are no statistical differences among grades in the interaction between treatment and school type, which indicates that in general, the treatment conditions were equally effective both in the private as well as public schools.

The fact that only in one group grade 9 the private school students got better results cannot be related to the treatment applied, but suggests that certain classroom contextual variables may have impacted the efficacy of the treatment of combined strategy instruction in improving reading comprehension.

Due to the different results in grade 9, further research is needed to address the last two research questions. As such, the findings of the study partially align with those of Ellis, McDougall, and Monk and Treiman and Hirsh-Pasek who indicated that young students with dyslexia could have similar reading performance of those without dyslexia, and even learners with dyslexia could be faster at some visual processing tasks.

Furthermore, a major limitation of the study is that the intervention in public schools lacked the computer exercises due to the unavailability of the needed equipment. As such, further research should be conducted upon equipping the public schools with all the equipment available at private schools.

References Breznitz, Z. Enhanced reading by training with imposed time constraint in typical and dyslexic adults. Nature communications, 4, Poor readers-good learners: A study of dyslexic readers learning with and without text.

Finding a way through the maze: Crucial terms used in education provision for Canadians with Disabilities. Coleman, C. A comparison of spelling performance across young adults with and without dyslexia. Assessment for Effective Intervention, 34, DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud.

Psychological review, 1 , Processing of derived forms in high-functioning dyslexics. Annals of Dyslexia, 56 1 , Social and behavioral skills and the gender gap in early educational achievement. All Interactive Whiteboards. Internet Activities e. Boom Cards. All Formats. Grades PreK.

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CHAPTER 1 These interactive processes that make connections between Reading what the reader knows and the information presented in a text are Comprehension: what we call comprehension processes. Your own process of compre- Definitions, hending while you read is so well developed and automatic that you Research, and may not be fully aware of the fact that you are actively using your Considerations own comprehension strategies while reading. But the fact of the mat- ter is that if you are a good comprehender, you are using strategies to help make sense of what you read.

If you created a mental image while you read the sentence about walking down the alley, you put a comprehension strategy to work. Do you ever find yourself thinking about what may happen in the next chapter or part of text? That is a compre- hension strategy. Have you ever found yourself retelling or summa- rizing a passage to a spouse or friend or colleague?

When reading an information book, has the passage ever led to you to ask questions that you would like to answer? Or have you ever jotted questions or comments in the margin of a book while reading? Those are all com- prehension strategies.

And, have you ever come to the point in read- ing where you discover that you are not understanding the passage as well as you think you should and you decide to reread the passage or to look up some words in the passage for which you are not quite sure of the meaning?

That, too, is a comprehension strategy. Indeed, there are many strategies that readers use to help create meaning to texts. Some strategies are used more often than others—some are used with particular kinds of texts, and some are used with all texts.

But the fact of the matter is that reading is an active process of con- structing meaning that goes well beyond simply reading the words and knowing what the words mean. It is an elaborate dance between the reader and the text in which the reader attempts to filter or mold the information from the text through using his or her own background knowledge so that the new information can fit within the existing knowledge structures or schema that the reader has in place.

In recent years literacy scholars have attempted to identify com- prehension strategies that have been shown through research to fa- cilitate comprehension. In particular, the National Reading Panel has identified a set of set of research-validated strategies. Other scientific reviews Reading of the comprehension and learning research have identified other Comprehension: Definitions, promising strategies for promoting textual understanding.

In their research into effective reading instruction, Pressley and Wharton-McDonald noted several additional strategies they call transactional in nature that have been shown to improve comprehension.

In ad- dition to the ones previously mentioned, they identified respond- ing to texts based on prior knowledge and interpreting text. In Chapter 2 we provide a more detailed explanation of each of these processes and suggestions for making these strategies come to life in the classroom. Levels of Comprehension Comprehension is indeed a complex process, and there are many ways to examine comprehension.

One helpful way to look at com- prehension is through the levels or types of comprehension readers do when reading. Thomas Barrett Clymer, developed a sim- ple three-level taxonomy that is useful in understanding how readers comprehend.

The first level is literal or factual comprehension. This refers to the simple understanding of the information that is explic- itly stated in the text. In the sentence, The dog chased the three children across the field, the literal comprehension involves knowing that it was a dog that was chasing, that the dog was chasing three children, and that the chase occurred in a field.

Applying the definition of comprehension presented earlier in this chapter, literal comprehen- sion is heavily reliant on the information presented in the text.

These pieces of information were not explicitly stated in the 7 text; however, the reader could call up his or her background knowl- CHAPTER 1 edge about dogs chasing children to make reasonable guesses about Reading the scene. These are inferences that most readers can agree on. Most Comprehension: readers, for example, would agree that the dog was barking and that Definitions, the children were running.

From the definition of comprehension Research, and presented earlier, inferential comprehension can be seen as relying Considerations significantly on both the text and the reader.

This level of comprehension obviously relies on the text, but to an even greater extent, it requires the reader to make personal judgments about the text. In a sense, these are inferences also, but they are highly depen- dent on the individual and unique background of the reader.

One reader may love the passage, and another may have disliked it in- tensely. Who is correct in their judgment? A fine example of critical comprehension is the presidential election that we referred to earlier. Although the positions, back- grounds, and expert opinions may be known by the entire electorate, the decision or judgment made by the voters is usually widely split— never unanimous. All three levels of comprehension are important and need to be fostered. In the past, however, literal comprehension was the primary focus of instruction.

Perhaps that is because literal compre- hension is easier for a teacher to deal with—the facts are indisput- able, and questions that focus on literal comprehension are simple to develop and evaluate. Literal comprehension, however, requires little in the way of engaged thinking and problem solving on the part of the reader.

It is the second and third levels of comprehension, inferential and critical, that challenge the reader to actively engage his or her background knowledge and reasoning skills to construct meaning— meaning that is not simply stated in the written text but meaning that can be discussed and debated.

These are the levels that make reading comprehension a thinking task rather than simply a recall task.