I found it surprisingly difficult to relate these readings about comprehension to my own comprehension processes. I have studied the topic of comprehension extensively in many of my classes here at MSU, but have never really reflected upon my own strengths and weaknesses with regards to comprehension. Using the chart on page 262 of the Tompkins book, I would say that the comprehension strategies that I use the most are connecting, evaluating, and monitoring. While I am reading, both for pleasure and for school, I like to think about the other things I know about the topic. Mostly, I make text-to-self connections, but this strategy really helps keep the material meaningful to me as I progress. I also enjoy evaluating the content of the text that I am reading. I really love being able to recommend books to other people, and being able to recognize what the author did well and what was not adequately illustrated throughout the book comes down to being able to critically evaluate the content while reading. I am also really skilled at monitoring how I am comprehending while I read. I am able to catch myself daydreaming or skimming after only about a paragraph of non-comprehension, which is crucial if I want to quickly complete books and articles. The two comprehension strategies that I struggle with the most are drawing inferences and predicting. I think I do poorly drawing inferences because I was always taught in elementary school that there was a "right" answer and a "wrong" answer. As I got older, adjusting to inference and interpretation was difficult for me. Also, I am very bad at predicting. Once I allow myself to sink into a good book, I rarely take the time to evaluate what I think will happen next throughout the story. Although I know that this is a very valuable skill to have, sometimes I simply cannot force myself to slow down enough to evaluate my thoughts about what I think will happen next.
In my placement, I spend most of my time working with the students who are at a lower reading level than most of their peers. They often struggle to answer the comprehension questions at the end of the text, and when I ask them questions about what they have just read, they cannot go into details about why they answer the way that they do. According to the article by Applegate, the students that I work with are minimalists. I believe that some of them are afraid of failure, so they fail to elaborate. However, many times I think that the students simply cannot remember what they have read adequately enough to respond to the most basic questions. What worries me the most about these students is that they do not have the strategies they need to become successful as readers in the future. Instead of looking back to the text to find the answers to the questions, they either look to me for what I think is the answer or simply guess. I believe that if they were taught some of the skills that are also discussed in the Applegate article, they could make gigantic progress and eventually match their peers' levels of understanding. One of the reasons that I think that these students are struggling with comprehension questions so much is that they are not yet fluent in their reading. The Tompkins book discusses this as a reason why students cannot comprehend; instead of focusing on understanding the story, these students are using all of their energy to decode the unknown words in the text. Related to this is the fact that most students who are not fluent do not have advanced vocabularies, so when they are finished reading the text, they may not understand some of the words that they have just finished reading. It is our job as teachers to teach students the comprehension strategies that they should use to become skilled readers. I cannot wait to relay some of the things that I read about for class this week to my future students!
