During-Reading Strategies

My book is:  Benjamin, A. (2007).  But I’m Not a Reading Teacher:  Strategies for Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.

Black font indicates what the author says.

Red font indicates my comments.

After the before-reading strategies comes the during-reading strategies.  The strategies for during-reading involve ways to keep the reader engaged and focused on what they’re reading, use prior knowledge, just as before-reading strategies, and also allow the reader to realize when they’re losing focus and comprehension.  I loved the way she added a strategy for when you realize you’re just not in the mood to read or you’re just staring at the pages.  She said to punt and revert to skimming.  That way when you come back to it, to do the close reading, you’ve got some basic knowledge. 

There are three during-reading strategies:  recognizing textual pattern clusters, visualizing and animating, and making connections.

There are numerous patterns found in texts.  The reason it’s important to recognize them is that the brain likes things that are organized.  Science texts rely heavily on classification, definition and example patterns, comparison & contrast, and process analysis or sequencing.  She gives several diagrams to help students organize the text, depending on the type of pattern they find.  I found some of these helpful and some not. 

Visualizing and animating text may be more common with fiction, where our imaginations and emotions run riot.  However, Benjamin does give a science example where the teacher describes wetlands and gives a demonstration to the class of how wetlands work before they read about it.  It helped bring the topic alive for them.

As with before-reading, Benjamin writes about the students connecting with the text.  She states that learning happens when we make connections of the new knowledge to prior knowledge, and that this can happen in three ways:  text-to-text (what the student is reading reminds them of something they’ve read), text-to-self (what the student is reading reminds them of their own experience, knowledge, and emotions), and text-to-world (what the student is reading reminds them of something going on in the world or in history).  This to me, was far more powerful than recognizing patterns in the text.  She lists questions for each type of connection, that at first might be cumbersome to students until they begin to occur naturally.

She gives a great example from a social studies text that describes how railroads changed America.  She asked the students to briefly think about and discuss how their lives would be different without cell phones.  Armed with a new awareness, they then read the text about how railroads changed the way America communicated and could more easily understand.

Connections should be made to any type of text, from textbooks to fiction to poetry.  She writes that readers with comprehension problems typically read 1% of a novel, then put it down because they don’t feel connected.  Perhaps nobody ever told them to ask the connection questions:  “What have I read that reminds me of this?  What has happened to me that reminds me of this?  What has happeneed in the world, today or in history, that reminds me of this?”  Benjamin is in favor of the teacher modeling the reading-for-connections process, to demonstrate how students should be thinking as they read.  The more I read this section, the more convinced I became that we don’t teach this concept when students are first learning to read.  We teach pronunciation, fluency, and how to pick out settings and character names, but not how to connect to the text. 

Feeling a connection to the text seems a simple, yet integral part of comprehension to me.  So why did it feel like such a revelation when I read about it?  Thanks again, Amy Benjamin!