The comprehension lessons which follow are designed both to enhance teachers\u27 awareness of the processes that lead to comprehension and to provide a framework within which they may develop their own lessons for comprehension awareness

Spiegel, Dixie Lee

English

ScholarWorks at WMU

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and 
Language Arts 
Volume 24 
Issue 1 October 1983 Article 2 
10-1-1983 
Readiness for Reading Comprehension 
Dixie Lee Spiegel 
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons 
 Part of the Education Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Spiegel, D. L. (1983). Readiness for Reading Comprehension. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and 
Language Arts, 24 (1). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol24/iss1/2 
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by 
the Special Education and Literacy Studies at 
ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion 
in Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language 
Arts by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at WMU. 
For more information, please contact wmu-
scholarworks@wmich.edu. 
READINESS FOR 
READING COMPREHENSION 
Dixie Lee Spiegel 
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL 
Over the last four years several students in my graduate 
courses in the teaching of reading have informally questioned 
kindergarten teachers about their reading readiness programs. 
The results have been rerrarkably consistent. Almost all of the 
kindergarten teachers surveyed did have some kind of readiness 
program. Generally they reported that these programs were designed 
to teach letter names, consonant sounds and fine motor skills. 
Occasionally listening skills, following directions, and interest 
in reading were mentioned. Only rarely. however, did kindergarten 
teachers report that building comprehension was part of their 
readiness program. 
My reaction to the omission of comprehension training is 
reminiscent of the m:m in the steak sauce corrmercial: "After all, 
what is reading?" Reading is not knowing the names of the letters 
or huffing and puffing to sound out words or staying on the lines 
when you write. Reading is understanding what the author is trying 
to tell you. It is absorbing and reacting to the author's ideas. 
Identifying the words is only a means for getting to the ideas. 
When a program designed to enhance readiness for reading does 
not include a strong comprehension component, that program becomes 
at best a decoding or word identification readiness program. It 
is not a reading readiness program. 
Fortunately, an effective comprehension component may be 
included in any kindergarten curriculum in a relatively simple 
manner. The series of lessons described below does not require 
expensive kits or a great deal of teacher preparation. What these 
lessons do require is teacher/child interaction, with careful 
attention given to how the child arrived at an answer, and for 
that reason these lessons work best with groups of six to ten 
children. The activities are built around the concept of parallel 
lessons (Curullngham, 1975) and are a non-threatening but very 
effective way of guiding children toward the comprehension aspects 
of reading. In Cunningham's mcxiel for parallel lessons, the pro-
cesses of comprehension are taught at, the listening level (which 
is easier than reading for most children) and then transferred 
to the reading task. At the listening level, the teacher reads 
the passage while mcxieling the thinking processes necessary for 
understanding while the children listen. At the reading level, 
the children are then encouraged to utilize these same thinking 
strategies while reading the materials themselves. Moore and Read-
ence (1980) have extended Cunningham's suggestion for parallel 
14-rh 
lessons to ~nclude pictures and oral reading as well as listening 
and silen:u reading. With each mode the teacher first models the 
processes, then helps the children recognize and later generate 
eood responsps. 
l"or the purposes of a kindergarten progr'arn, oIlly the lJictw'e-
based and listening methods will be discussed here. The compre-
hension lessons which follow are designed both to enhance teachers' 
awareness of the processes that lead to comprehension and to 
provide a framework within which they may develop their own lessons 
for comprehension awareness. 
Picture-based Lessons 
Beginning with pictures, the teacher goes through three 
strategies designed to mOve the children gradually to independent 
application of the thinking processes required to interpret a 
picture. The teacher should focus only on one specific aspect 
of comprehension during each set of lessons, such as identifying 
the main idea or determining a sequence. The example I will use 
in the following descriptions is inferring the characters' feelings 
or personality traits. 
The first strategy is teacher modeling. Holding up a picture, 
the teacher models for the children, for example, ways in which 
they can figure out how a particular character in the picture 
feels. This modeling should always include two components: 1) 
exploring why a right answer is right and a wrong answer is wrong, 
and, 2) showing the children that they always have two sources 
of information-what' s on the page (whether it's a picture, or, 
later, words) and what's in their heads ( i . e., what they already 
know about the world). By emphasizing how one can tell when an 
answer is reasonable and when it is not and what kinds of informa-
tion are fair to use in making these decisions, the teacher is 
modeling the thinking processes necessary for arriving at answers 
reasonably. Too often comprehension instruction deals only with 
what the right answer is (Durkin, 1978-79), but doesn't show the 
children how to get the right answer. Actually, what the right 
answer is 15 not of primary importance in comprehension instruction. 
What is important is knowing the processes and strategies for 
figuring out the right answer when you are on your own. Furthermore, 
by pointing out to the children what it is that is right about 
a particular answer and contrasting that with what is wrong about 
another response, the teacher focuses the children's attention 
on the pertinent features of each answer. Without such a discussion, 
the children may decide that an entirely irrelevant feature is 
the important aspect. 
Showing the children what kinds of information are fair to 
use is also crucial. Children need to understand from the beginning 
that the book doesn't always gi ve the answer and that they are 
supposed to use what they know about the world when they listen 
or (later) read. Sometimes, of course, that means different chil-
dren will arri ve at different answers because of variation in 
their experiential backgrounds. Exploration of differing answers 
will help children understand that there will not always be just 
one right answer; indeed, sometimes several different answers 
rh-15 
llBy be justifiable, as long as each can be supported by some kind 
of evidence. 
In the sample roodeling script below, these two emphases are 
coded as EX + ( exploring reasonable answers), EX - (exploring wrong 
answers), TXT (using information from the text) and HD (using 
information from your head). 
Teacher (holding up a picture of a children's 
birthday party and pointing to the "birthday child"): 
I can tell how this boy feels right now. He feels 
happy and excited. How can I tell that? For one thing, 
I can just look at him (TXT). He is smiling and claJr 
ping his hands. When we're happy we smile (EX+, HD). 
Have you ever done that? When? (HD) I don't think I 
would say that this boy is being silly (EX -). If he 
were being silly, his mother would probably be look-
ing annoyed or even angry (HD) and she's not doing 
that. (TXT) What does your mother do when you're 
being silly (HD)? --
After the children have watched the teacher roodel thinking about 
two or three pictures, they will start to interrupt to share their 
own reasoning. Terrific. Now's the time to move quickly to the 
second strategy, recognition of a reasonable answer. In this step 
the teacher shows the children a new picture and asks: "Does this 
person feel angry, happy, or sick?" This is essentially a multiple-
choice exercise in which the children have to do some of the work 
( i . e., recognize reasonable answer among several wrong answers) 
but not all of it. The most important part of the recognition 
step, however, is not recognizing a reasonable answer but under-
standing how one determines that it is reasonable. Therefore the 
teacher should always ask: 
How do you know that's a good answer? What do you see 
that ITBkes you think that's a good answer? (EX + , TXT) 
Is that how you would feel? Why? (EX+, HD) What do 
you see that lets you know the person doesn't feel 
sick? (EX-, TXT) Why wouldn't you feel sick if this 
happened to you? (EX-, HD) 
After the children have become adept at selecting a reasonable 
answer when given a choice and supporting their decision with 
confidence, the teacher should move to the third strategy--student 
generation of a reasonable answer. In this step, the children 
have to come kup with an answer all by themselves; they have to 
produce it, not just recognize it. As with the first two strategies, 
the priITBry emphasis should be on process (how to get a reasonable 
answer), not product ( what the right answer is). After asking, 
"How does this person feel?" the teacher should have the children 
tell why they decided on that answer and rejected other possi-
bilities, following the questioning format described earlier. 
The teacher will most likely spend several short (10-15 
minutes) lessons just working with pictures in order to insure 
that the children really do understand the thinking processes 
involved. When they can deal with pictures with ease, it is time 
to move to a slightly more abstract level, listening. 
16-rh 
Listening Lessons 
At the listening level the teacher uses the same three strat-
egies that were used with pictures: teacher modeling, student 
recognition of a rea::;onable answer, and student generation of 
a reasonable answer. Although the listening level i::; more alJ::;tract 
than the picture level, it has one very important advantage over 
pictures. It is more like reading than looking at a picture because 
infornation is not received all at once but is received by the 
listener over time. As with reading, a tentative conclusion reached 
early may need to be altered later as additional information is 
processed. At the listening level, therefore, the teacher should 
break the listening into segments and these breaks should come 
as new infornation becomes available. Somehow many children think 
that it is wrong to change your mind when reading. They need to 
learn from the very beginning that reading is a gathering and 
sifting through infornation, and as one gathers more information 
and gets more clues, an earlier, very reasonable hypothesis may 
need to be modified or even discarded entirely. At the listening 
level teachers can emphasize the hypothesis-testing nature of 
comprehension by pausing when new infornation becomes available 
and asking the children to re-evaluate their answers. 
The teacher modeling step during a listening activity might 
follow a sequence something like this: 
Teacher reads a paragraph or so) Hrmrn ••• 
I think Andy rrrust be feeling sad. He has lost the 
money he was going to use to buy an ice cream cone 
(EX+, TXT), I'd certainly feel sad about that, es-
pecially if I didn't get to buy ice cream very often 
(EX+, lID). I sure wouldn't feel happy about it (EX-) 
because I like ice cream a lot (lID). How would you 
feel if you'd lost the money? Why? (Children giv:e-
responses and justify them.) Let's read some more and 
find out if Andy really is feeling sad. (Teacher 
reads aloud and stops when additional information 
has been presented in the story about Andy's feelings.) 
I may have to change my mind now. At first I thought 
Andy was sad because he lost his money. But now it 
just said~t when he got back home from the store 
he yelled at his sister and he kicked his bike (TXT). 
Now I think he's more mad than sad. I know when I'm 
feeling sad I just get quiet and want to be by my-
self (EX-, HD). That's certainly not how Andy acted 
(EX-, TXT)! But I still don't know why he's mad. 
Let's go on and see if there are any more clues 
about how he is feeling and why. 
Note that whereas sad was a reasonable (EX+) answer early in the 
story, as more clues to Andy's feelings are given, sad becomes 
an example of a wrong answer (EX-). Teachers shouldCarefully 
build into their listening lessons opportunities for themselves 
to make reasonable guesses that will late be proven wrong. In 
this way the children will feel more comfortable both about making 
guesses in the first place and intelligently changing their guesses 
as needed. 
rh-17 
As at the picture level, during the listening lessons the 
teacher should move gradually from dependence on the teacher to 
student independence, from teacher modeling through recognition 
of reasonable answers to student generation of answers. If the 
teacher carefully follows the questioning strategies oulined here 
for picture-based and listening lessons, pre-readers should begin 
to develop many of the thinking processes that they will later 
need for successful reading comprehension. They will begin to 
understand how to figure out a right answer and how to combine 
what they already know with why they learn from the page. They 
will be ready for reading comprehension. 
REFERENCES 
Cunningham, P. M. "Transferring Comprehension from Listening to 
Reading." The Reading Teacher, 29, No.2 (1975): 169-172. 
Durkin, D. ''What Classroom Observations Reveal about Reading 
Comprehension Instruction." Reading Research Quarterly, 14 
(1978-1979): 481-533. 
Moore, D. W. & Readence, J. E. "Processing M:lin Ideas Through 
Parallel Lesson Transfer." Journal of Reading, 23, No. 7 
(1980): 589-593. 


Readiness for Reading Comprehension

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy andLanguage ArtsVolume 24Issue 1 October 1983 Article 210-1-1983Readiness for Reading ComprehensionDixie Lee SpiegelUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel HillFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizonsPart of the Education CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the SpecialEducation and Literacy Studies at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has beenaccepted for inclusion in Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy andLanguage Arts by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at WMU. For moreinformation, please contact maira.bundza@wmich.edu.Recommended CitationSpiegel, D. L. (1983). Readiness for Reading Comprehension. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts, 24 (1).Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol24/iss1/2READINESS FOR READING COMPREHENSION Dixie Lee Spiegel UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL Over the last four years several students in my graduate courses in the teaching of reading have informally questioned kindergarten teachers about their reading readiness programs. The results have been rerrarkably consistent. Almost all of the kindergarten teachers surveyed did have some kind of readiness program. Generally they reported that these programs were designed to teach letter names, consonant sounds and fine motor skills. Occasionally listening skills, following directions, and interest in reading were mentioned. Only rarely. however, did kindergarten teachers report that building comprehension was part of their readiness program. My reaction to the omission of comprehension training is reminiscent of the m:m in the steak sauce corrmercial: "After all, what is reading?" Reading is not knowing the names of the letters or huffing and puffing to sound out words or staying on the lines when you write. Reading is understanding what the author is trying to tell you. It is absorbing and reacting to the author's ideas. Identifying the words is only a means for getting to the ideas. When a program designed to enhance readiness for reading does not include a strong comprehension component, that program becomes at best a decoding or word identification readiness program. It is not a reading readiness program. Fortunately, an effective comprehension component may be included in any kindergarten curriculum in a relatively simple manner. The series of lessons described below does not require expensive kits or a great deal of teacher preparation. What these lessons do require is teacher/child interaction, with careful attention given to how the child arrived at an answer, and for that reason these lessons work best with groups of six to ten children. The activities are built around the concept of parallel lessons (Curullngham, 1975) and are a non-threatening but very effective way of guiding children toward the comprehension aspects of reading. In Cunningham's mcxiel for parallel lessons, the pro-cesses of comprehension are taught at, the listening level (which is easier than reading for most children) and then transferred to the reading task. At the listening level, the teacher reads the passage while mcxieling the thinking processes necessary for understanding while the children listen. At the reading level, the children are then encouraged to utilize these same thinking strategies while reading the materials themselves. Moore and Read-ence (1980) have extended Cunningham's suggestion for parallel 14-rh lessons to ~nclude pictures and oral reading as well as listening and silen:u reading. With each mode the teacher first models the processes, then helps the children recognize and later generate eood responsps. l"or the purposes of a kindergarten progr'arn, oIlly the lJictw'e-based and listening methods will be discussed here. The compre-hension lessons which follow are designed both to enhance teachers' awareness of the processes that lead to comprehension and to provide a framework within which they may develop their own lessons for comprehension awareness. Picture-based Lessons Beginning with pictures, the teacher goes through three strategies designed to mOve the children gradually to independent application of the thinking processes required to interpret a picture. The teacher should focus only on one specific aspect of comprehension during each set of lessons, such as identifying the main idea or determining a sequence. The example I will use in the following descriptions is inferring the characters' feelings or personality traits. The first strategy is teacher modeling. Holding up a picture, the teacher models for the children, for example, ways in which they can figure out how a particular character in the picture feels. This modeling should always include two components: 1) exploring why a right answer is right and a wrong answer is wrong, and, 2) showing the children that they always have two sources of information-what' s on the page (whether it's a picture, or, later, words) and what's in their heads ( i . e., what they already know about the world). By emphasizing how one can tell when an answer is reasonable and when it is not and what kinds of informa-tion are fair to use in making these decisions, the teacher is modeling the thinking processes necessary for arriving at answers reasonably. Too often comprehension instruction deals only with what the right answer is (Durkin, 1978-79), but doesn't show the children how to get the right answer. Actually, what the right answer is 15 not of primary importance in comprehension instruction. What is important is knowing the processes and strategies for figuring out the right answer when you are on your own. Furthermore, by pointing out to the children what it is that is right about a particular answer and contrasting that with what is wrong about another response, the teacher focuses the children's attention on the pertinent features of each answer. Without such a discussion, the children may decide that an entirely irrelevant feature is the important aspect. Showing the children what kinds of information are fair to use is also crucial. Children need to understand from the beginning that the book doesn't always gi ve the answer and that they are supposed to use what they know about the world when they listen or (later) read. Sometimes, of course, that means different chil-dren will arri ve at different answers because of variation in their experiential backgrounds. Exploration of differing answers will help children understand that there will not always be just one right answer; indeed, sometimes several different answers rh-15 llBy be justifiable, as long as each can be supported by some kind of evidence. In the sample roodeling script below, these two emphases are coded as EX + ( exploring reasonable answers), EX - (exploring wrong answers), TXT (using information from the text) and HD (using information from your head). Teacher (holding up a picture of a children's birthday party and pointing to the "birthday child"): I can tell how this boy feels right now. He feels happy and excited. How can I tell that? For one thing, I can just look at him (TXT). He is smiling and claJr ping his hands. When we're happy we smile (EX+, HD). Have you ever done that? When? (HD) I don't think I would say that this boy is being silly (EX -). If he were being silly, his mother would probably be look-ing annoyed or even angry (HD) and she's not doing that. (TXT) What does your mother do when you're being silly (HD)? --After the children have watched the teacher roodel thinking about two or three pictures, they will start to interrupt to share their own reasoning. Terrific. Now's the time to move quickly to the second strategy, recognition of a reasonable answer. In this step the teacher shows the children a new picture and asks: "Does this person feel angry, happy, or sick?" This is essentially a multiple-choice exercise in which the children have to do some of the work ( i . e., recognize reasonable answer among several wrong answers) but not all of it. The most important part of the recognition step, however, is not recognizing a reasonable answer but under-standing how one determines that it is reasonable. Therefore the teacher should always ask: How do you know that's a good answer? What do you see that ITBkes you think that's a good answer? (EX + , TXT) Is that how you would feel? Why? (EX+, HD) What do you see that lets you know the person doesn't feel sick? (EX-, TXT) Why wouldn't you feel sick if this happened to you? (EX-, HD) After the children have become adept at selecting a reasonable answer when given a choice and supporting their decision with confidence, the teacher should move to the third strategy--student generation of a reasonable answer. In this step, the children have to come kup with an answer all by themselves; they have to produce it, not just recognize it. As with the first two strategies, the priITBry emphasis should be on process (how to get a reasonable answer), not product ( what the right answer is). After asking, "How does this person feel?" the teacher should have the children tell why they decided on that answer and rejected other possi-bilities, following the questioning format described earlier. The teacher will most likely spend several short (10-15 minutes) lessons just working with pictures in order to insure that the children really do understand the thinking processes involved. When they can deal with pictures with ease, it is time to move to a slightly more abstract level, listening. 16-rh Listening Lessons At the listening level the teacher uses the same three strat-egies that were used with pictures: teacher modeling, student recognition of a rea::;onable answer, and student generation of a reasonable answer. Although the listening level i::; more alJ::;tract than the picture level, it has one very important advantage over pictures. It is more like reading than looking at a picture because infornation is not received all at once but is received by the listener over time. As with reading, a tentative conclusion reached early may need to be altered later as additional information is processed. At the listening level, therefore, the teacher should break the listening into segments and these breaks should come as new infornation becomes available. Somehow many children think that it is wrong to change your mind when reading. They need to learn from the very beginning that reading is a gathering and sifting through infornation, and as one gathers more information and gets more clues, an earlier, very reasonable hypothesis may need to be modified or even discarded entirely. At the listening level teachers can emphasize the hypothesis-testing nature of comprehension by pausing when new infornation becomes available and asking the children to re-evaluate their answers. The teacher modeling step during a listening activity might follow a sequence something like this: Teacher reads a paragraph or so) Hrmrn ••• I think Andy rrrust be feeling sad. He has lost the money he was going to use to buy an ice cream cone (EX+, TXT), I'd certainly feel sad about that, es-pecially if I didn't get to buy ice cream very often (EX+, lID). I sure wouldn't feel happy about it (EX-) because I like ice cream a lot (lID). How would you feel if you'd lost the money? Why? (Children giv:e-responses and justify them.) Let's read some more and find out if Andy really is feeling sad. (Teacher reads aloud and stops when additional information has been presented in the story about Andy's feelings.) I may have to change my mind now. At first I thought Andy was sad because he lost his money. But now it just said~t when he got back home from the store he yelled at his sister and he kicked his bike (TXT). Now I think he's more mad than sad. I know when I'm feeling sad I just get quiet and want to be by my-self (EX-, HD). That's certainly not how Andy acted (EX-, TXT)! But I still don't know why he's mad. Let's go on and see if there are any more clues about how he is feeling and why. Note that whereas sad was a reasonable (EX+) answer early in the story, as more clues to Andy's feelings are given, sad becomes an example of a wrong answer (EX-). Teachers shouldCarefully build into their listening lessons opportunities for themselves to make reasonable guesses that will late be proven wrong. In this way the children will feel more comfortable both about making guesses in the first place and intelligently changing their guesses as needed. rh-17 As at the picture level, during the listening lessons the teacher should move gradually from dependence on the teacher to student independence, from teacher modeling through recognition of reasonable answers to student generation of answers. If the teacher carefully follows the questioning strategies oulined here for picture-based and listening lessons, pre-readers should begin to develop many of the thinking processes that they will later need for successful reading comprehension. They will begin to understand how to figure out a right answer and how to combine what they already know with why they learn from the page. They will be ready for reading comprehension. REFERENCES Cunningham, P. M. "Transferring Comprehension from Listening to Reading." The Reading Teacher, 29, No.2 (1975): 169-172. Durkin, D. ''What Classroom Observations Reveal about Reading Comprehension Instruction." Reading Research Quarterly, 14 (1978-1979): 481-533. Moore, D. W. & Readence, J. E. "Processing M:lin Ideas Through Parallel Lesson Transfer." Journal of Reading, 23, No. 7 (1980): 589-593. 

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