Monday, March 2, 2009
Tompkins Ch. 7
The book defines comprehension "as the reader's process of using prior experiences and the author's text to construct meaning that is useful to that reader for a specific purpose". I think this definition is an excellent meaning of comprehension because through reading students will rely on their previous knowledge acquired to make sense of the view point the author is trying to convey then using both of these to construct their own viewpoint. If a reader is just reading with no previous knowledge or no understanding of what the author is trying to get across, the reader will be able to read all the words but the reader will not be able to interact with the text in a meaningful and educational way. Odds are that the student will become bored with reading the book and might lose interest in reading all together. I think it is necessary for silent reading in classrooms, but the books that the children are reading need to be carefully selected. I have seen children reading books that a high schooler would have a hard time understanding. The elementary kids enjoy the pictures but are not reading the text and if they are they have zero previous experiences with the text and therefore can not interact with the text and make meaningful insights about the idea or ideas they are reading about. "Students must comprehend what they are reading to learn from the experience; they must make sense of their reading to maintain interest; and they must derive pleasure from reading to become life long readers". To me this underlines the main goal of reading in a classroom. Its not to do better on a standardize test, it is to become life long readers and to read and evaluate different perspectives and viewpoints than their own. It's to learn about the world and how it works with the different people that inhabit it. It's also to form their own opinions on topics and to question others.
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I think the point you made about kids not being able to extract personal meaning from a text with no background knowledge, in part, defines the necessity for good teachers. Right now for our book club I am reading Number the Stars, which is in part about the Nazi occupation in Holland. The best lesson I've ever been taught was in the sixth grade about the Holocaust. My teacher got through the material required for sixth graders to know, and spent the last half of the year teaching about the Holocaust, Australia, and Mexico- subjects she thought would be important for us to know. I still use the background knowledge I learned in that lesson to select books and relate new things I learn about the time period to the previous knowledge from that one lesson. Good teachers will give kids the facts and know-how that will help them to make connections to new things they are learning. Comprehending texts beyond what is written on the page does make reading more enjoyable, and will make for more lifelong lovers of reading, which is so important.
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