Textbook Reading and Comprehension (Bob, Room 155)
Objective: Develop further understanding of why students struggle with reading by
experiencing the student perspective, and compile strategies for tutors to use when tutoring
in reading.
Opener
Reading is complex, ever increasing, always developing.
“Reading does not just pertain to ELA. You could be tutoring in history, science, or even math
and have to tutor reading. Today we are going to show you the student perspective and some
strategies for supporting comprehension.”
“Let’s first look into the student perspective.”
Show FAT CITY video – Reading Comprehension (4 min 10 sec)
“We remember from a preview workshop that F.A.T. City is an acronym for Frustration, Anxiety,
and Tension - descriptors of how students feel when presented with academic readings that are
difficult.”
“Whether students are strong readers lacking interest for the grade level assigned text or
students lacking reading skills or lacking confidence as readers, assisting the development of
reading and comprehension is critical in school curricula.”
Activity
Readings from two texts
Pass out copies of textbook pages
a) History: Transcontinental Rail Road Reading
b) Science: Structural Organization of Human Body
“Why are these texts so difficult for students to read?” (Class discussion and student response.)
Some reasons include:
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MEGO – My Eyes Glaze Over
Intimidating vocabulary
Making meaning from text – requires knowledge and experience
“How can we use our knowledge and experience as learners to help struggling students
understand words, paragraphs, or pages that are unfamiliar and challenging?”
In groups of two or three, have the students read through the pages and come up with tactics
that they would use if a student they were tutoring was struggling with reading such a textbook
for an assignment. Then, have students compile a list on their computers and share with the
group to compile a list of tools and tactics.
Some strategies/tactics include (if they do not get mentioned, site coordinators can
mention):
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rewriting topic sentences (Taking dictation, human typewriter)
creating dictionary of synonyms
rapping or singing information/facts for memory retrieval
reading pictures, graphs, charts, and write bullet list of what we learn
reading captions and discuss what we learn from those
Wordle
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using technology to change how students experience text and context Textbook vs. Techbook
o finding a different alternative to a textbook to gain that knowledge, such
as an online learning tool with multimodal resources, such as the History
Wiki or a Biology Edmodo
Take Away
“Everyone struggles with some kind of reading – charts and graphs, subway maps, longitude
and latitude markings on a globe. Each of us has some type of reading that requires attention
and practice. What helps us learn what we don’t know?
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We have online tools that are now in our delicious accounts to show students.
We have in-hand tools to create with them, pocket dictionaries and thesauruses,
illustrations, diagrams, lists.
We can rewrite paragraphs of the text to make points and facts easy to read and recall.
We can compose new captions or headlines to put with illustrations.
All of these strategies we can do with students and say to them that they can continue using
these when we are not there to support them in person.”
Materials
F.A.T. City Reading Comprehension video clip
20 copies of A&P college textbook page
20 copies of History high school textbook page
Laptops for students to compile tactics list on
Resources for History Teachers Wiki
Biology Edmodo
Wordle