Studying+Comprehension

|| Once children learn that written words represent spoken vocabulary then decoding meaning from text becomes easier. Hill mentions ‘the research studies showing that teaching words explicitly has a positive impact on comprehension.’ If a learning reader finds an unknown word in a text, then the context in which the word is used provides hints for the reader to gain information, this is the decoding of comprehension. Assessing the knowledge of students comes from asking students and encouraging students to retell the information that has been learnt from the text. Hill (2006) highlights the best way learn about comprehension through active involvement, holding the attention of the learning, taking time to reflect and being persistent. || Effective methods of teaching children comprehension involve engaging students in activities of reading and writing. Five important strategies which are noted by Pressley (2002) are predicting, questioning, making images, seeking clarification and constructing summaries. When reading a book the prediction stage would be finding out what the book might be about. The questioning stage is about children asking questions to things that might not know about the book. Making images involves using descriptive words in a book to develop images of what the characters are like. Seek clarification means that to check if the students understand what is being read. Constructing summaries ensures that the main ideas of the book have been implicated. || Gaskin (2003) stated the main ideas that teachers need to consider when designing comprehension activities. These include providing opportunities for the children to practise comprehension strategies, making sure that the activities designed meet the children’s needs and ensuring that the students have read a range of texts for interest and for learning. Some activities which are suggested by Hill (2006) include text clues, group jigsaw and QAPX. To find about how these activities teach comprehension effectively click on each link below to listen.  Text Clues media type="file" key="text clues.WAV" Group Jigsaw media type="file" key="Group Jigsaw.WAV" QAPX media type="file" key="QAPX.WAV" ||
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 * S t u d y i n g  C o m p r e h e n s i o n    ||
 * Extracting and making meaning from what is read or written for text, is the development of comprehension. The best way to extract meaning from text for children is the way in which print operates to represent words.
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