Fostering Comprehension in Content-Area Reading

by Jeffery L. Williams, Solon City Schools, Solon, Ohio

"I am not a reading teacher...I teach history!" was the heartfelt sentiment of a recent workshop participant. "I do not know how to get my students to be able to read and remember the textbook."

After acknowledging her frustration, I asked a simple question: "How would you rate your textbook on how easy it is for readers to use to get needed information?" She paused and then admitted that, indeed, the text is not a simple resource but rather is more complex than most of her students could handle.

"So, we really have two issues here: Part of the problem might be that students don't have strategies to read nonfiction, and part of it might be that the text they are reading is not easy to access."

This frustrating scenario, both the reaction about having to teach students who cannot read well and the reality of having to use resources that are not well constructed, is ubiquitous in Ohio's middle and high schools. The answer to this issue is not that content-area teachers should teach reading or that we should discard all the materials we have purchased. But we cannot continue to simply assign text, lecture about the text, and then test the text and expect to get anything different than what we are already getting. Instead, the answer lies in a shift in time and focus: We must give students ways to navigate these materials successfully and shift our emphasis away from teachers doing the majority of talking to students talking and constructing thinking.

A Helpful Framework

Richard Allington, noted researcher and past president of the International Reading Association, conducted a study (reported in his 2002 article, "What I've Learned About Effective Reading Instruction") that looked at the highest-achieving classrooms in districts where poverty and diversity were issues. The recommendations from his research identified six conditions that were pervasive in each high-achieving classroom. These conditions, cleverly categorized with alliteration, are text, talk, teaching, time, tasks, and testing. Allington's work offers a useful framework for thinking about how to increase comprehension of content material in middle and high school classrooms, and we will examine the issues of how to help students navigate texts and how to increase comprehension of content texts using some of Allington's terms.

How to Navigate Content-Area Text

Text

How we use text will impact readers' understandings. Though it is impractical to supplement the texts at every juncture, when possible, supplementing or supplanting with alternative texts, perhaps news articles, other resources, or Internet websites, is very helpful. A more practical thing to do is to help students acclimate themselves to the texts by doing an "introduction" to the text. A text introduction explicitly tells students what they will encounter before they read and includes setting them up to read for a specific purpose, such as to be ready to answer a particular question.

Text introductions vary. One might consist of a five-minute mini-lecture on what information will be found as the students read. Another may come in the form of a "text-feature walk." To use a text-feature walk, students are encouraged to browse through the section for three to four minutes before they actually read it, paying attention only to the text features such as headings, subheadings, diagrams, maps, captions, etc. At the end of the browsing time, the students are expected to write down at least two facts that they think will be explored in depth in this section. This can be expanded through whole-group questioning so that many different facts are shared.

Teaching

Obviously, our teaching matters and our language matters. Though it is not the role of content teachers to actually teach students about text features or text structures, both of which are contained in Ohio Language Arts indicators, it is important that we use language that is accurate when referencing these aspects. For instance, our language about headings and subheadings may be confusing to readers if we are not mirroring what is taught in language arts. Looking within this article, you will see that I intentionally used headings and subheadings. Headings contain the main ideas, and subheadings are used to further break a main idea into smaller chunks. The subheading "Teaching" appears at the start of this section and is a category of the larger heading, "How to Navigate Content-Area Text." Also, headings and subheadings can be distinguished from one another by the use of a different font, color, or size of print, or sometimes with indentations. A close examination of your own content textbook will assuredly provide you with insight into the publisher's patterns: Throughout a textbook, all main headings are likely to be of the same font, size, and color, and subheadings will retain another, slightly different style. Knowing about these subtle distinctions is important in teaching content areas because we may be inadvertently calling attention to an area of the text by using the wrong terminology, thus causing students confusion. Additionally, knowing that nonfiction authors use text features to reinforce their main ideas in more than one way is helpful to students. Any information that is critical is likely to be repeated across a text in titles, headings, bold print, captions, maps, charts, etc., in addition to being stated in the actual text. Text features reinforce the information visually and allow students another opportunity to think about the author's message in a section of text.

How to Increase Talk and Thinking

Talk

Much research exists on the topic of student talk that all points to the same conclusion―one major way we process information as learners is to talk about it. Yet in most content-area classrooms, the person doing the most processing―that is, talking―is the teacher! Talking solidifies thinking and helps with retention of information. In the Learning Pyramid chart (National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, n.d.), shown below, we see that lecture and reading offer the lowest retention rate, while discussion and teaching others cause more learning to happen. Obviously, adolescents are already built for talk, but as teachers, we must learn how to focus conversations on the material while increasing the amount of conversation within the classroom.

	The Learning Pyramid: How We Retain Information

Periodically, doing a "stop, jot, and talk" session, during or after reading a section of text (or during or after a period of lecture), is one way that allows us to use talk to get students actively thinking about content. To do this, announce the activity by directing students to write for one minute about anything they are thinking about in relation to the current content. Students could summarize many facts, expand one fact, relate the content to current events or real life, or list questions they have about the content. After one minute, they stop and share with one or two people near them as you roam about, listening in or commenting. These periodic checks assure that students are processing the content and provide the needed structure for increasing talk about their thinking, which increases retention of material.

Time

This four letter word is the enemy of most teachers...we never feel as if there is ample time to do the deep processing that we want with our content. While this will always be a factor for teachers, we might not be using the time we have very effectively or efficiently. One highly provocative strategy to try in relation to time is to increase the amount of in-class reading time we afford students. We already know that a myriad of factors―lack of home support, sport commitments, forgetfulness, lack of motivation―all of which are out of our control, contribute to the reality that many students simply do not make the time to read our assigned texts. Knowing this and doing nothing about it is like knowing that you are low on gas and not refueling before a long journey―you simply are not going to reach your destination. By providing at least fifteen to twenty minutes of in-class reading time when we assign text reading, we can easily increase comprehension merely by ensuring that students take the time to read the texts. Furthermore, we can scaffold those who we know are struggling readers by meeting with them in small groups to support their reading or by touching base with them periodically to answer any questions they might have.

In most content-area classrooms, we are dealing with a "love the one you're with" mentality, in that we find ourselves teaching content that we love with a text that is not the best example of writing or organization that we could imagine. Therefore, we have to do what we can with what we have. The suggestions offered have been shown to improve student abilities to access information and to comprehend better and yet are easy to implement. There are many resources for content-area teachers that show numerous meaningful ways to help students deepen their content knowledge (see the list below for a start). As content teachers, we cannot continue simply admiring the problem in a standards-based environment; we have to do something different, or we risk getting the same results that currently frustrate us and our students.

References

Allington, R. L. (2002). What I've learned about effective reading instruction. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(10), 740—747.

National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Science. (n.d.). The Learning Pyramid. Alexandria, VA: NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science.

Jeffery L. Williams is the District K—12 Literacy Teacher Leader and Reading Recovery Teacher for Solon City Schools. He has been a teacher for sixteen years, is currently an adjunct professor at Ashland University, and is a national literacy consultant and speaker.

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