The Article

With a litany of proven literacy practices focusing on reading comprehension, educators can become overwhelmed deciding which ones to put into practice. In this book chapter, Assistant Professor Nell K. Duke and her colleague, P. David Pearson, dean of the School of Education at University of California, Berkeley, describe some research-proven instructional techniques for helping students acquire productive literacy comprehension skills and strategies. Teaching individual strategies or what they call “collections” or “packages” of strategies can help students become solid in comprehending many kinds of text.

Discussion

Much work on the process of reading comprehension has been grounded in studies of good readers. Therefore, Duke and Pearson begin by presenting the strategies of effective readers, such as setting goals, making predictions and monitoring their understanding of the text as they read. Next they explore the idea of balanced comprehension instruction, which means creating both a supportive classroom context and explicit comprehension instruction. To offer the optimal classroom environment, educators should provide (1) opportunities for students to read text for real reasons, (2) a range of text genres to read and write, (3) an environment rich in vocabulary, concept development and high-quality discussion, (4) word recognition instruction, and (5) large amounts of time for reading and writing. Next, Duke and Pearson present six important strategies for inclusion in a comprehension curriculum: prediction, text structure, “think-aloud” techniques, visual representation of text, summarization, and questions/questioning. Lastly, Duke and Pearson describe class routines that capture the idea of an integrated set of strategies that could be applied regularly to one text after another. These routines include reciprocal teaching, in which teachers model a set of strategies and then gradually increase the students’ active use of these strategies; Students Achieving Independent Learning or SAIL, which emphasizes transactional interactions between teacher, student and text; and others. Duke and Pearson conclude with some final thoughts on where they think comprehension research will go and what are some challenges for the future.

What It Means To You
What types of strategies do teachers in your district use to promote comprehension in literacy lessons? Do teachers explicitly teach comprehension strategies? How much of the class time is allocated to reading, writing and discussion of text?

For More Information

Duke, N. K., & Pearson, P. D. (2002). Effective practices for developing reading Comprehension. In A.E. Farstup & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (pp. 205-242). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

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