Vocabulary supports Reading Comprehension

      In our content reading class we focused on many aspects of reading and how to strengthen reading for students.  One of the areas of focus was reading comprehension.  During my position paper I focused on a model called reciprocal teaching.  In that I also studied how vocabulary can assist students in becoming better at comprehending the stories they are reading.  Many times throughout this course vocabulary and background knowledge were referred to and discussed over and over. Below is a portion of my position paper that focused on the importance of language and how it can strengthen comprehension. 

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CONTENT READING COURSE:

      When looking at the students within my school having books read to them at home is not something that happens often.  According to Dymock and Kleeck, “Students experiencing such reduced and restricted language input are often less likely to develop extensive vocabularies and background knowledge, complex morphological and syntactical knowledge, or text structure knowledge" (Dymock p. 62 ; van Kleeck).  This is the case at my school, so I see a huge need for a specific and focused strategy to teach reading comprehension.  This lead me to my research and findings of a strategy called Reciprocal Teaching.  This process is used to teach reading comprehension through the interactive read aloud model.  It is my goal to increase reading comprehension for all of my students and teach them strategies that they can continue to use as they progress in their education. During the process of reciprocal teaching we introduce the vocabulary needed to be successful with the strategies of comprehension.  Students created movements and real life pictures to relate to the strategies.  This process of incorporating academic vocabulary pushed students to learn and practice higher level vocabulary words that they will continue to use in upper grades. 

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      When we think about reading comprehension many times we think that students just need to recall certain information, but that is not the case.  Students need to be able to ask questions about what they have heard, clarify their thoughts about the story, predict what is going to happen later, and then summarize the story.  These four steps are ones that I know I have not been using often in my classroom.  When using this model of reciprocal teaching, students predict before reading and then they need to check their predictions during reading. They stop to clarify unknown words or ideas during reading. This focus brings us back to vocabulary.  The words that students encounter need to be explained and broken down so they create a basic understanding and continue to build on each year.  Learning and understanding new and unknown vocabulary words is an area I have been working on in my classroom this year.  I have seen great growth from just this process alone.  They ask “teacher questions” during and after reading to check for understanding and summarize either a page or the entire text selection after reading. 

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NOW WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE....

     Students have learned content words through this process but also used literacy vocabulary words that will continue to be needed and practiced as they progress in their learning each year.  I continue to use these strategies in my classroom and students are much more motivated in the process of comprehension of stories we read because we practiced the words and motions enough that they are independent.  Their vocabulary in talking about stories continues to increase and strengthen with each practice we do of this skill.