Chapter 3 in Content Literacy for Today's Adolescents talks about increasing our students' text comprehension. I feel like I am always talking about how much my perspective has been changed because of this teaching thing... so here is yet another example. Before, I never really thought about text comprehension. I hadn't heard it being emphasized since my earlier years of schooling. I vaguely remember a "Comprehension" column on the standardized test score breakdown sheet. I didn't pay much attention to it then - when my mother and I stood over it in the kitchen sometime in early July as I got my scores back from whatever test we had taken that year. Now that I am a teacher, I realize how important that column really was. It's not that I didn't know that text comprehension was an important skill. I had just never really thought about the fact that some kids have a really hard time with it.
I was glad that we were assigned Chapter 3 because getting kids to comprehend text seems like a pretty daunting task. Where should I begin? What are some activities that would help? How much time should I spend emphasizing it for a writing class?
Of course the book suggested some of the same old methods... teach them to look at context clues! I feel like that was the only method I was ever taught and it worked for me. Unfortunately it's not coming so easy for my students. Last week, during a subject verb agreement lesson, we were talking about ambiguous indefinite pronouns in sentences with no prepositional phrase. Once we defined "ambiguous" as a class, it was surprisingly easy to get them to understand what I meant by the rest of it. We had learned about singular and plural indefinite pronouns the day prior. We learned about prepositional phrases the first 9 weeks, and they only needed a little prodding to remember how to find those. But when I explained that we have to use context clues in situations when the sentence has no prepositional phrase to help us figure out whether our pronoun is singular or plural, they went blank.
"Context clues, guys! Just look at the sentences around it to figure out how many we're talking about! CONTEXT CLUES!"
Nothing
"All (is, are) here? ......What is the sentence before it talking about??"
Still nothing.
So clearly context clues aren't cutting it. My favorite suggestion in this chapter was probably the one about bridging text ideas. It gave a list of common words that connect sentences and what they signal. For example, it listed the time words: then, presently, now, thereupon, somewhat later, hereafter, finally, since... While these words would not help with subject verb agreement, I like the idea of charting several words to help students remember what they indicate. Keeping things in categories has always been something that has helped me, so I'm going to try it with my students and for now, I'm throwing context clues out the window. Maybe they just need a break from that method.
