User:Dcabrera819/sandbox

Explicit Text Analysis, Chunking, Scaffolding, Visualizing, and Academic Conversations as Vehicles to Increase Comprehension of Text

Students often think that briefly skimming the text for the correct answer is the way to garner the essence of the piece, in an attempt to get the "right" answer. However, nothing could be further from the truth. If you think about the writing process, particularly with reference to fictional writing, authors weave intricate twists, turns, and even obstacles, as a way to pique the reader's interest as well as to propagate a particular theme into the text. Authors exert large amounts of energy into these nuances and yearn for readers to "catch" these implicit messages. How can teachers prepare students to extract these higher order concepts from text?

I. Explicit Text Analysis Teachers must provide explicit text analysis so that students can readily access the author's writing. The easiest way to do this is to provide a synonym for unknown terms. In addition, studying the roots of words is always an impressive way to help students broaden their understanding of the language. This is of particular benefit to ELL students.

II. Chunking Text Teachers should teach students how to chunk text, particularly when commas are involved, to help the understand that each chunk has a meaning that is affected by what was written prior to that chunk and impacts the text that follows.

III. Scaffolding Text When teachers want to teach a specific element of literature, including foreshadowing, identifying the theme, symbolism, etc. the teacher must teach students how to identify these elements by asking them to analyze the text in chunks. By scaffolding the text, the teacher can teach the student the student how to zoom-in on the text that hints that some of these higher order concepts are present in the writing.

IV. Visualizing Students often read chunks of text that they deem unintelligible. Most often, when students encounter this challenge, they choose to reread it for clarification or move along. Modeling visualization techniques helps to clarify text by taking the abstract and making it more tangible, and thereby, more accessible.

V. Academic Conversations Stimulating students with planned academic conversations provides students with the opportunity to engage in academic analysis. It is also a very quick form of assessing your students' thought process and understanding of the desired expectation.