o a number of studies, improves everything from classroom achievement to interpersonal skills to classroom management to self-esteem. One grouping strategy involves group retellings and it be used with students of all ability levels. According to Woods and Jones, this maximizes class participation and gives everyone a chance to engage in the learning process. Students are instructed to read the information, engage in a group discussion, contribute their recollections and then see the content again in print on the board. In this way, they experience the content in many different modalities using the language of their peers, not just the language of the text (Woods, Jones, 1998, 37).
In an article in Theory Into Practice (2001), Yetta Goodman discusses what she has learned from retellings of literature into readers' comprehension processes and the significance of this process for instructors. Goodman differentiates between to related but distinct processes. The first is the act of comprehending what is being read. This is the process in which a reader attempts to make sense of the text. The second process involves comprehension. Goodman defines or describes comprehension as involving what the reader has understood the text to mean at any point in time.
According to Goodman, comprehending is the process of how a reader integrates reading strategies such as predicting and confirming with the language cueing systems. The major difference between good and poor readers involves their ability to master the comprehending process. Specifically, proficient readers are able integrate their uses of strategies and cueing systems. By sepa
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