Module Five: Strategies for building "plain sense" or literal understanding of text (2nd base)
Objectives
After this module you will be able to:
- Define the concept of literal comprehension in content reading.
- Assess if students have "plain sense," literal understanding of text material.
- Analyze the factors that affect students' developing literal understanding of text.
- Identify students with functional literacy.
- Work cooperatively in a collaborative group situation.
Introduction
Getting to Second Base – Literal Comprehension
As teachers, we are pleased -- even sometimes surprised -- when students complete a reading assignment and have some basic knowledge of the content.
Using the baseball model for reading comprehension, basic knowledge or the ability to read the lines places the students at 2nd base. Students are able to string together the separate words and make meaning of the sentences and paragraphs.
Perhaps students can answer questions asking them to recall specific facts or ideas from the text. Students may be able to retell the text in their own words in the same order that it was presented. Literal "comprehenders" may be able to pick out the main idea(s) specifically mentioned in the text.
Factors that Help
There are several factors that enable content readers to read the lines and reach second base in the baseball model successfully. Knowing the meaning of every word that is in the "line" is of utmost importance.
Module Four examined the importance of teaching vocabulary and developed strategies that enabled students tolearn unfamiliar words.
Prior knowledge of the content being read is another important factor in making plain sense of content. For example, prior knowledge of forests and trees, either first hand or through previous reading, makes understanding a rain forest science unit a bit easier. If a Martian attempted to explain life on Mars, we either would try to link his words to things we know about life on earth, or we wouldn't understand it all.
Accessing prior knowledge becomes a useful strategy for getting students to second base. Unfortunately, some of the complex content required in our curriculums, that we must teach, is about as comprehendible as the Martian example stated earlier chiefly because students lack any prior knowledge of the topic.
Fluency matters!
The speed at which students read a line of content print affects their understanding of the print. Your reading comprehension brain allots you about 18 seconds to get from the beginning of a sentence to the end. Take any longer than that and meaning from the beginning of the sentence, which you are holding temporarily in your brain, may be lost if you are struggling with word meanings or concepts in the latter part of a sentence.
The 18 Second limit Rules Comprehension
Too many unknown words or new ideas in a sentence are an assault on our comprehension ability. Neurologists refer to it as our short term memory capacity. That's the part of our brain with limited capacity and time limits for holding information. It lasts about 18 seconds, and has limited capacity.
Text information, words and phrases enter our brain and are temporarily held in short term memory. If not sent on to long term memory through rehearsal or linking to prior knowledge in long term memory, it is dropped.
Reading the Lines
Reading the lines, also known as literal comprehension, becomes an exercise in using short term memory to capture word meanings and combine them with the overall meaning of the sentence, all of which must be completed within the 18 second limit.
Speed "Kills" Comprehension
Stumble over an unfamiliar word, reread part of a sentence before reaching the end, or become distracted by something outside the text, and you lose the18 second fluency race. Unfortunately, reading at "warp" speed through a text can also limit literal understanding. Reading too fast to gain content understanding is perhaps as damaging as reading too slowly. Think of it like freeway driving. Drive too slowly and you will create problems. Read too slowly and your brain begins to dump out information before you have a chance to piece it all together. Drive too fast and you miss some of the surrounding scenery. Read too fast, especially in an unfamiliar content rich text, and you will miss important information.
Teaching Literal Understanding
As the sentences flow into paragraphs and the paragraphs become entire pages of text, content readers will need strategies for capturing the literal ideas found in the ever-growing, accumulating of text.
Too often curriculums are thick with methods for assessing literal understanding. Direct instruction in literal comprehension strategies is frequently overlooked or assumed to have been mastered through previous teaching.
Front loading the literal understanding process by training students in procedures and strategies that build factual comprehension is necessary if you intend to move student thinking even further into inferential and evaluative thinking about the text.
Proceed to Module Five Activities.