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Students with reading challenges continue to face adversity when it comes to reading classroom texts. This adversity consists of decreased comprehension, awareness, and understanding of the written word (Cibrowski,
1993). Because textbooks dominate the middle school curriculum as an instructional tool, teachers must discover strategies that will assist these students in appropriate engagement of the text and an
increased ability to comprehend the text. The ability to read is often thought to be synonymous with the ability to pronounce individual words. Certainly, being able to do this is part of reading- but there is much
more to reading than creating words through sounds. Reading consists of understanding a text, and this understanding involves five basic processes (Irwin, 1991).
Microprocesses involve the recognition of the relationships between words in an individual sentence as well as the ability to select those ideas of primary importance from a sentence.
Integrative processes involve the recognition of relationships between sentences and phrases.
Macroprocesses involve being able to summarize a passage by organizing and synthesizing ideas.
Elaborative processes involve thinking beyond the text.
Metacognitive processes are those processes that one uses to select, evaluate, or regulate reading comprehension. The major components of metacognition involve the sub-processes of what a reader knows about
comprehension strategies and the choosing of the strategies to evaluate comprehension.
Usually, a good reader can monitor reading comprehension rather automatically, but struggling readers are less likely to follow a plan of attack when reading. Research indicates that children understand informational
text better if they use an overall structure to organize the material (McNeil, 1992). Readers need to learn a process of how to find information in a paragraph, chapter, or book, and how to go about finding that
information efficiently (Chall, 1996). As teachers, we need to familiarize ourselves with strategies that will teach students how to accurately find and retain information while reading.
One way of finding information efficiently is to incorporate the strategy of concept mapping into the understanding of a text. Pictorial languages of thinking, such as a concept map, are advantageous in that they
enable students to simplify complex patterns of ideas and they minimize the amount of information students must hold in their minds (Perkins, 1992). Concept mapping incorporates a multi-sensory approach for a
student to improve his recall and comprehension of a reading text. Middle school learners, who are many times in the concrete operational stage of development, can learn to implore more abstract thinking with the
use of a concept map. Concept mapping would only be appropriate to use with middle school students if the students are provided a form of direct instruction as to how to use the strategy.
Using strategic instruction can help students acquire, use, integrate, store, and retrieve information across time, settings, and situation (Deshler, 1996). Deshler noted that strategic instruction could help
students make the connection between what they need to know and which skill will help them get that information. Students can be taught to recognize the structural patterns of written text through the use of
various maps, and this can increase their comprehension (Pearson, 1991). This form of direct instruction provides students the prior knowledge of how to use the strategy most effectively.
As teachers, reading should not be taught only in the context of sounding out words, but for students who are reading to learn information, strategies that will help them summarize, paraphrase and demonstrate an
overall increase in comprehension must be combined with reading instruction (Paris, 1991). When we begin to combine reading strategies as a vital part of our overall reading instruction, students will begin to read
classroom texts in a more comprehensive matter.
Work Cited
Chall, J.S. (1996). Stages of reading development (2nd edition). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
Cibrowski, Jean (1993). Textbooks and the student who can’t read them. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Brookline Books.
Deshler, D.D., & Putnam, M.L. (1996). Learning disabilities in adolescents: A perspective. In D.D. Deshler, E.S. Ellis, & B.K. Lenz (Eds.). Teaching adolescents with learning disabilities: Strategies and
methods (2nd ed.). Denver, Love Publishing Co.
Irwin, J. (1991). Teaching reading Comprehension Processes. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
McNeil, J. (1992). Reading Comprehension (3rd edition). New York: HarperCollins.
Paris, S.C. (1991). The development of strategic readers. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson. Handbook of reading research (Vol. 2) 609-640. New York: Longman.
Pearson, P.D., & Fielding, L. (1991). Comprehension instruction. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson. Handbook of reading research. (Vol. 2). 815-860. New York: Longman.
Perkins, D. (1992) Smart Schools. New York: Free Press.h
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