Acquiring Cognitive Tools for Reading part 2

Two blogs ago I discussed RT.  I mentioned that I would be talking more about this.  Every teacher knows of the importance in the four components of RT.  But what is important is the way each component is taught and internalized by the students.  According to Schoenbach (1999), "RT is a process that helps students monitor their reading comprehension and practice and internalize four cognitive strategies known to be key parts of the repertoire of proficient readers: questioning, summarizing, predicting, and clarifying" (p. 79).  When it comes to reading most of what goes on is invisible, or difficult for students to see.  "RT makes the invisible visible by explicitly teachign students to carry out the critical cognitive strategies proficient readers use for problem solving", as stated by Schoenbach (1999, p. 80)

Students should practice questioning.  Questioning is the most important process in the four components of RT.  Once they are able to question they will begin to learn to summarize.  students will need lots of practice summarizing text, or putting into their own words.  They should use key words such as first, the, and finally.  Next students will predict text.  A good way to get students to understand predicting is to think of the weather.  The weather man doesn't guess at the weather, he uses information and clues in order to make a good judgment call.  so a prediction is not just a guess, it is a judgment call based on what else is happening in the text.  Next students will learn to clarify.  Clarifying text means making it more clear by using meaning making strategies to better understand the text.  All of these components of RT take practice and don't come automatically.  (Schoenbach, 1999, pp.80-94)

Students need to lead their own learning.  When they are able to think about their own learning they will be able to better understand where they are struggling or succeeding and what they need to do to improve.  One great strategy is for students to chunk.  I have heard of chunking when learning words for early education, but I had not heard of chunking for upper grades.  In this book chunking refers to breaking down the text into smaller chunks to make meaning of individual parts then putting it all together.  A good analogy that this book by Schoenbach (1999) uses to teach students to chunk is about pizza:  "Even if you're really hungry...you can't eat a whole pizza at once.  You have to eat it a little bit at a time, in slices.  Understanding text is similar to eating pizza: though you may want to read a large amount at once, you may not be able to understand it unless you take it in bits and pieces. Depending on the type of text you're reading, you may be able to understand a lot at once or only a little at once" (p. 95).  Most kids like pizza, so I think this is a great analogy.  Students can understand the importance of taking once slice of text at a time.