Sunday, February 28, 2010

Text-to-Self Comprehension

Chapter 8 from Tompkins emphasizes the importance in students’ reading comprehension strategies. From the twelve comprehension strategies, I value the importance in connecting comprehension strategy. In my kindergarten classroom, the students are still learning to read in which the CT has to read the text out loud for them. The CT reads the story couple times with the class before she asks the students to make connections. The process takes more than a day, and by reading the same story repeatedly to the students, they are able to inherently comprehend the story. Sometimes, the students memorize the entire story from numerous repetitions in which some of the students find it boring to read a same story over and over again. However, I believe the habit of reading a story repeatedly helps students with comprehension since the more you read, the more things you realize from the story.

When the CT decides to transfer students’ comprehension of the text into creating their own story through text-to-self connection, the CT asks the students to pay special attentions to a specific moment that she had previously depicted from the text when she planned her lesson. Most of the times, the specific moment chosen by the CT has to do with students’ daily experiences. Through this activity, the CT can make observations on the process of students’ comprehension level along with their writing and visualization skills from the created stories.

Renee and I have planned our literacy lesson plan in having students make text-to-self connection on a chosen text by the CT. Hope students can still make connections when we plan to read only once through the entire text.

1 comment:

  1. The idea of repetitive reading intrigues me, Yoon. While I firmly agree that reading a text multiple times contributes greatly to comprehending more and more of the story, I wonder about the decreasing motivation factor that seems to be happening, here. I don't have any actual evidence for the claim, but it seems to me that spending too much time on a particular story could hurt motivation through boredom just as much as it could help with understanding more of the story. Does this ever happen in your classroom or does your teacher have a specific way that she keeps the book interesting throughout several readings?

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