Blog #7

· What is Book Club?
· How is comprehension taught in Book Club?
· How does knowledge of text structure facilitate comprehension?
· How can I help English language learners develop reading comprehension?

I think book club is a great way to involve all students in a book discussion. I think that by creating different jobs- i.e. facilitator, artist, time keeper, recorder, etc., the teacher can create a community of learners that feel comfortable sharing and thinking about literature. If you ask one student to do all these tasks they may get a little overwhelmed. It may be too much to ask them to comprehend, prove they understand, create a piece of art and turn it in on time. Some students are just poor at multitasking. By breaking the tasks up and giving them to different students you can alleviate some of the stress related to reading and comprehension activities. You also don’t lose any instruction if you require every student to perform every task over the course of a week or unit.

If a student has a working knowledge of text structures, such as characterization, irony, metaphor, dialogue (and others), then they will be more apt to understand the context in which the story is taking place. If they have never seen dialogue or don’t understand ironic phrasing, then they may stumble over the structures in the text before they are even at the meat or information that you want them to get at. By introducing these ideas in simple terms that the students feel comfortable with, then you can give them the tools to take on new and challenging pieces of literature.

I think the biggest struggle with helping English Language Learners develop reading comprehension is to learn to read fluently. Comprehension will only come when decoding is not the primary focus. And this is hard. Unless you are providing translations or really obvious context clues, it is going to be really hard for an ELL to understand a large piece of text if they are not fluent. I think that working on fluency will lead to comprehension. You must also teach students strategies on how to pick up ideas from the text, pictures and relate them to their own ideas. You have to teach the students the strategy, then how to use it and then when to use it. If they cannot read easily or fluently however, it is going to be hard for them to apply many comprehension strategies.