Group Reflection on Comprehension Strategies

Tierney & Pearson (1998, pg 85) in ‘Reading and Writing Connection’ by Carol Olson advocate that ‘teachers must participate as senior members of the school community by sharing and modelling how they negotiate complex learning tasks, thereby making the use of cognitive strategies to construct meaning visible to inexperienced readers and writers.We are in agreement with this statement as we know that often times students model the behaviour of their teachers; even the teaching strategies that they apply in the teaching - learning process.

What Tierney and Pearson call for however, can be a challenge. Many teachers are not aware of exactly how to use the strategies, or are not even aware of the strategies because they are not trained in the area.One of the group members explained that, many times, in her subject areas of English and Literature, in presenting texts to her students, she would employ some of the learning strategies that we are studying, but not necessarily outlining their names, or the steps involved for the students because she was not aware of them. She now realises that she used the following comprehension strategies to enable her students to get a deeper understanding of the texts:

Deducing the main idea
Summarising
Making inferences
Making predictions
Forming interpretations
Tapping into prior knowledge.

She admits that these strategies were of tremendous assistance to the students who faced difficulties in comprehending the texts. However, the higher order strategies such as reflecting, visualising, analysing authors’ craft were often neglected. We recognise that literature affords the students opportunities to use such strategies as they are constantly required to critique, analyse, evaluate or draw conclusions based on the actions of the characters, and issues in the play, novel or poem.
How well we employed these strategies is questionable as we had little, or no concrete knowledge of how to use them effectively to make the activities very meaningful. Had such strategies been made clear to us as students, while they were being used by our teachers, me might be better able to utilise them as teachers, and to understand their importance in the comprehension process.
This course has made us realise that in fact we are strategic readers as we have been using the strategies in our own reading. However, we did not know that they were actually comprehension strategies! Our ignorance of these important strategies we realise may have been detrimental to some of our students who were not able to develop the three types of knowledge which are critical if they are to be strategic teachers – declarative, procedural and conditional.