Educational Leadership:Reading: The Core Skill:The Challenge of Challenging Text - 131 views
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The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina.
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Students' ability to comprehend a piece of text depends on the number of unfamiliar domain-specific words and new general academic terms they encounter.
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If students are to interpret the meanings such complex sentence structures convey, they need to learn how to make sense of the conventions of text—phrasing, word order, punctuation, and language.
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Students who are aware of the patterns authors use to communicate complex information have an advantage in making sense of text.
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Students' background knowledge, including developmental, experiential, and cognitive factors, influences their ability to understand the explicit and inferential qualities of a text.
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even students who have basic decoding skills sometimes struggle to deploy these skills easily and accurately enough to get a purchase on challenging text. To help these students develop reading fluency, teachers should give them lots of practice with reading the same text, as well as instruction to help them develop a stronger sense of where to pause in sentences, how to group words, and how their voices should rise or fall at various junctures when reading aloud.
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pair repeated readings of the same text with questions that require the student to read closely for detail and key ideas.
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In contrast, in reading history and literature, readers need to be concerned with not just the causes of events, but also the human intentions behind these causes.
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teachers should not convey so much information that it spoils the reading or enables students to participate in class without completing the reading; rather, they should let students know what learning to expect from the reading.
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Teachers may be tempted to try to make it easier for students by avoiding difficult texts. The problem is, easier work is less likely to make readers stronger.
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Students experience success in the company of their teacher, who combines complex texts with effective instruction.