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Setting a Purpose 

by Arleen Stuck
  What is setting a purpose? 
Setting a purpose for reading means formulating and articulating the reason for reading. There are many different reasons for reading including:
  • For enjoyment
  • To perfect oral reading performance or use of a comprehension strategy
  • To increase knowledge about a topic by linking new information to that already known
  • To obtain information for an oral or written report
  • To confirm or reject predictions
  • To perform the steps in a scientific experiment or to follow a set of instructions
  • To learn about the organizational patterns and authors' techniques
  • To answer specific questions

For maximum effectiveness, setting a single purpose for reading, especially for struggling readers, helps avoid confusion from the overload of multiple purposes. The purpose should be fairly broad in scope and sustained throughout the entire selection, not met after reading only a small portion of the materials. Purposes should be formed carefully, because poor ones can misdirect the students' attention by focusing on information that is not essential to the passage. Purposes should help readers differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information. Responsibility for setting purposes should gradually shift from the teacher to the students.
 

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  Where is setting a purpose discussed in the Ohio Academic Content Standards? 
In all of the Content Area Standards, setting a purpose is an embedded strategy that is applicable to all learning experiences.

English Language Arts
Standard Reading Process—Concepts of Print, Comprehension Strategies and Self-Monitoring Strategies
Grade 4–7
  Benchmark A. Determine a purpose for reading and use a range of reading comprehension strategies to better understand text.
Grade 8–10
  Benchmark A. Apply reading comprehension strategies to understand grade-appropriate text.

 

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  How does setting a purpose support reading comprehension? 
As discussed in Row and Smith (2005), students who read with a purpose tend to comprehend what they read better than those who have no purpose. This result may occur because the students are attending to the material rather than just decoding words. Purpose-setting activities can help students activate their existing background knowledge about the topic of the material. Providing specific purposes avoids presenting students with the insurmountable task of remembering everything they read and allows them to know whether they are reading to determine main ideas, locate details, understand vocabulary terms, or meet some other well-defined goals. As a result, they can apply themselves to a specific, manageable task.
 
 

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  What activities support students in setting a purpose for reading? 
Use an anticipation chart where students answer questions about a topic and then read to find if their answers are correct. For example, for a lesson on snakes, provide students with a graphic organizer such as this:

Do you agree or disagree with the statements about snakes?
Before Reading
Agree or Disagree
What is your reason for your answer?		 Statements About Snakes After Reading
Agree or Disagree
What is your reason for your answer?
  Snakes are slimy.  
  Snakes lay eggs.  
  Snakes eat bugs.  


Directed-Reading Thinking Activity
Students predict what will happen in a story, thus helping them set their own purpose for reading—to find out if their predictions are accurate. Teachers should follow up on predictions to reinforce the setting of purpose.

For further development, see Nancy Padak's "Directed Reading-Thinking Activity" at http://www.deafed.net/PublishedDocs/sub/961007k.htm.

Think-Aloud
Through a think-aloud, model reading for a purpose. Tell the class about a selection you have chosen, and explain your purpose for choosing it. Then read a portion aloud and show how your purpose is guiding your reading.
  
Group Investigations
The purpose of this activity is to have the students read for meaning so that they can convey the most important parts to other classmates. Begin by having students work in groups of two to six members. Each group selects a subtopic of the main topic to research. Each student in a group does a part of the group's research, and then the students share their information within their group to assure they have covered their individual topic. Each group then presents its information to the entire class.
 

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  How can setting a purpose be used to teach vocabulary? 
The teacher can have students search for words that describe a setting, character, or event.
Thing to be described Words used to describe
The kites Painted with propitious numbers
Tubular
Box
Pennons with swallowtails
Triangular
One of the purposes for reading can be to find and define new or unusual words. Students can list the words in a chart and then fill in the answers to the questions that appear as column heads. Questions might include the following:
  What do I think the word means?
  What support is in the text for the meaning?
  What does the dictionary say the word means?

For example, for The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean (HarperCollins, New York, 2001), students might complete the following graphic organizer:
Vocabulary word What do I think the word means What support is in the text for the meaning? What does the dictionary say the word means?
pattens Some kind of shoe "She had been wearing pattens rather than straw slippers. She alone walked raised up above the dirt and litter of the dirty dockside lanes."(p. 18) High sandal used for walking on the muddy ground; clogs.
cormorant Some kind of scary creature The cormorant was part of a bad dream. "A big black cormorant! I dreamed it came swooping down on me, and I was going to be swallowed..."(p. 19) Large pelican-type bird with webbed feet.


Templates of three of the graphic organizers are available for your use:
 

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  Where can I go for additional resources pertaining to setting a purpose? 
Blanton, William E., Moorman, Gary B., & Wood, Karen D. (1986, December). A model of direct instruction applied to the basal skills lesson. The Reading Teacher, 40, 299–304.

Dowhower, Sarah L. (1999, April). Supporting a strategic stance in the classroom: A comprehension framework for helping teachers help students to be strategic. The Reading Teacher, 52, 672–688.

Row, Betty, & Smith, Sandy. (2005). Teaching reading in today's middle schools. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Zwiers, Jeff. (2004). Building reading comprehension habits in grades 6-12: A toolkit of classroom activities. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
 
 

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References

Blanton, William E., Moorman, Gary B., & Wood, Karen D. (1986, December). A model of direct instruction applied to the basal skills lesson. The Reading Teacher, 40, 299–304.
 
Row, Betty, & Smith, Sandy. (2005). Teaching reading in today's middle schools (p. 95). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
 
Arleen Stuck works at Otterbein College as Field Faculty for Reading First in Columbus Public Schools. She worked on the development team for SIRI and continues to facilitate SIRI sessions. She retired from Columbus Public Schools as a teacher and administrator.
 

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