We also noticed that the new akonga were unable to do things for themselves. They lacked the ability to get themselves a chair, didn't seem to be able to figure out how to use an exercise book to write in or how to follow simple instructions.
This required a massive rethink of the organisation of our classrooms. Cognitive load had to be reduced, daily routines unpacked and simplified and repeated constantly and even then I found I was still struggling.
These akonga were behind primarily in reading, some had an inability to decode, but the biggest issue for my classroom was comprehension. As a student of te reo Māori, I have spoken the language since I was young, however I am unable to understand a majority of it. So in effect, I can decode and say a word in te reo, however, I can't understand everything I read. These tamariki are like this too but with their first language.
A few do have difficulties with decoding, these were put into a special reading programme developed by the RTLit for one student, and copied for 3 others in my classroom. But how to tackle comprehension?
The current route is to teach comprehension strategies in isolation, for example, how to infer, how to find the main idea etc. We choose books that make it easy to use that strategy and teach it regardless of the topic.
Unlike the "reading wars," there has not been the same focus on comprehension as there has been in decoding. However, there is plenty of research about it and most points to the way we teach comprehension as individual strategies is not best practice. It will be interesting to see the way this research develops further.
In my opinion, this research makes sense. Readers who have relevant knowledge about a topic prior to reading a piece about the topic, or have a good vocabulary before reading about a topic, understand what they are reading more.
One example given was a reading comprehension assessment which was about baseball. Those kids who played baseball or were involved in the sport in some way did far better than the readers who knew nothing about the sport before reading the text. Even poorer readers (as assessed prior) scored well if they were in baseball teams in comparison to their "normal" reading level. Knowing a bit about something first (especially vocabulary) meant the children could comprehend better the article or story they were reading.
According to research, understanding word meaning accounts for as much as 80% of reading comprehension
(Davis, 1972; Nagy & Scott, 2000). So why are we spending so much time on teaching strategies when we would be better off increasing their word knowledge base instead? If the strategies may only account for 20% or LESS of a child's reading comprehension, why would we waste so much time teaching them how to find the main idea in a story? Which they may indeed miss because they don't understand what they are reading in the first place?
Good general knowledge or "topic" knowledge means better comprehension. Being able to find the main idea in a text won't happen unless they understand what they are reading in the first place. They need the vocabulary involved at a basic level to be able to make inferences from the text that the author is making. You can teach them what an inference is, but if they can't understand a few key words, it won't be apparent to the reader.
So, practically, what should I be doing in the classroom?
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