Students' Reading Comprehension

An article in Reading Today (2004) includes a book review of Tell Me a Story. The article explains that comprehension is one of the critical elements of reading identified by the National Reading Panel (NRP) and is widely considered the true goal of reading. Retelling incorporates several of the research-based strategies recommended in the NRP report, such as using graphic organizers, identifying story structure, and summarizing text. If students' retellings are to be assessed effectively, teachers need to instruct retelling in such a way that the students can retell what they have read in a logical, sequential manner. The article states that Hansen's book shows teachers how retelling a story can help children improve students' comprehension skills ("Retelling strategies to boost comprehension offered in new IRA book," 2004, 14).

Kerry Stanley writing in ASHA Leader (2003) suggests that story-retelling tasks have the potential to be used as a brief screener of children's' global syntactic features. Story-retelling is already used to assess narrative skills, but in a recent edition of the Journal of Speech-Language Pathology it was suggested that there is a possibility that a standardized story retelling task could be used to determine if a child needs further testing for learning disabilities. Stanley was careful to point out that this idea has not been validated by clinical tests, nor is it precise enough to determine the severity of language delay or the reason for that

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ons. Goodman also encourages teachers to remember that part of the complexity of understanding literature is trying to place it into a socially relevant context. She provides a simple example: If a fourth grade reader has never seen a basement, he or she will almost certainly struggle with any story in which the characters must transition to or from a basement. If teachers understand the social and personal influences on reading, they will be less apt to misclassify individuals as poor readers once the added dynamic of personal experience is clearly understood as it relates to reading ability (Goodman, 2001, 307). Yetta Goodman writing for Reading Teacher (1997) notes that there are many people who still believe that simply counting errors on informal reading inventories can help a teacher determine a student's instructional level. Research on reading miscues continuously reaffirms the conclusion that when a student's errors are counted and this quantitative information is used for placement, the student may be misclassified. Goodman explains that miscues are a natural part of the reading process and that by placing a premium on error counts a teacher must also believe that minimizing miscuing behavior is desirable. However

Category: Psychology - S