Retelling, Questioning, Student Teacher Decision Points

(Review) Three Instructional Comprehension Supports:
1. Explicit Strategies
2. Reading practice
3. Support for a specific piece of text.

Retelling:

1. tool for assessment
2. strategy for comprehension instruction

• connect with prior knowledge
• use visual aids
• provide modeling
• encourage rereading
• focus on text structure

Reasons for focusing on text structure:

• enhances memory for text
• facilitates prediction
• promotes goal setting
• provides tool for monitoring
• (knowing what text structure is makes it easier for students to recognize. give them the map of how to get there so they can focus on what they are doing not looking for the structure).

Strategies for teaching text structure

• explicit instruction
• repeated modeling with real text
• gradual release of responsibility
• graphic organizers.

Narrative Story Structure: Story Grammar

1. Character
2. Setting
3. Plot

• Events
• Problem/solution
• Theme

Book Suggestion: The Little Red Hen

Text Structure Types (teach with graphic organizers, look for key words)

• description: the text gives you facts about something
• cause/effect: there are things that happen and why it happens
• explanation/process: text that helps them understand steps or a process.
  
• compare/contrast: text that tells what is alike or different between two things.
• sequential(time order): similar to process, text that goes in order of events.
  
• problem/solution: text that tells you how something can go wrong and then solves the problem.

Questioning
Uses of Questioning:
Tool for comprehension assessment (questions before, during, after reader)
Strategy for comprehension instruction:

• emphasize self questioning
• look backs and rereading is good
• provide modeling
• tie questioning to text structure
• teach question types

Types of Questions
Question Answer Relationships

In the book questions:

• Right There Questions: (explicit) you can point to them in the text.
• Search and Think: (explicit inferential) text and text, or text and prior knowledge. Put together pieces from the text that are not in one spot. Still right in the text.

In your head questions:

• Author and You: (scriptally implicit) use the text and your head to put together an answer.
  
• On Your Own: (scriptally implicit) use prior knowledge or application of what they learned to answer question. "what would you do?"

Student & Teacher Decision Points
Before Reading

• teacher: How can I help a student read this text?
• student: Do I know what I need to know to read this text?

During Reading

• teacher: How will I put this text on offer? How will I facilitate understanding?
• student: What is my purpose for reading? What should I know when I'm done?

After Reading

• teacher: How can I determine if a student understood this text?
• student: What did I learn? How can I demonstrate what I learned?