This particular chapter was focused on building comprehension. According to Gunning, “This chapter presents comprehension as an active process in which the reader constructs meaning” (Gunning, 351). Understanding this sentence can truly help one who is struggling with comprehension. Comprehension is not something that can happen right away with all students. There are steps that are involved in comprehension, it is a process that can take time.
Fluent readers make connections to what they have previously read many times. This is activation of the schema. Lets say you look at the newspaper and on the front page you see a big picture of a basketball player. Maybe you played basketball in high school, so it draws your attention. There might be only that spark of interest with the photograph, yet when you see it many memories might rush into your head. So, before you read the article you already are incredibly interested just due to your schema. This scenario happens daily, not always to the same degree yet it is easy to bring your own thoughts and experiences into a new reading. It is important to recognize your own interests and how they affect the way you read new things.
If comprehension is understanding then who is to say what perfect understanding is? In many classrooms the teachers look for comprehension from students in regards to new texts. It is relevant to test children for comprehension yet sometimes teachers forget that not all students have the same schema and that maybe the teachers personal understanding of the text is not the only way to look at it.
When a child is in their early elementary years, testing for comprehension may seem to be an easy task. Give a child a short story, ask them to relay the events, make correlations between the text and title, and pictures and text. Have the child talk about what happened in the story and why certain events caused others to happen. This type of comprehension is sometimes easier to gauge because the students have not had much experience and usually cannot relate to all events in the stories, or they can completely relate. For young students and short texts, comprehension is somewhat easier to test for. Although, as students learn and make their way into higher grades, their comprehension should also increase. That is not to say they should not truly learn how to comprehend a text until they graduate, yet that they are able to understand more difficult texts.
I feel as though some teachers expect students to comprehend and understand all texts in the same exact way as they do. Yet, I feel this should not be the case. It makes sense for there to be an understanding of a story or a sequence of events that is shared throughout a class, although this should not mean every student feels the same way about a text. A great example of understanding and comprehension is when a class reads a poem. When children are young they are read poetry simply because it is easy to listen to and the rhyming is fun for them. Yet as students come across poetry either as young adults or even adults the focus is turned completely to comprehension. Whoever is teaching the selected work usually has an ideal interpretation of the poem in mind and expects the students to come up with that same viewpoint. This should not happen I feel, since it seems to box students in. Unless there is a place where the poet directly wrote the intention of their poem, the meaning, purpose and directed audience that the teacher has read beforehand I feel as though they can make just as good a “guess” at the meaning as the students can. Comprehension as mentioned earlier is influenced greatly by schema. It is very important for teachers to recognize this and embrace each child and their understanding. If a child is told that they are wrong and that they should only think the same as the teacher imagine what that can do to a child’s creativity in thought. Thinking is a genuine process and every person in the whole world will have a different schema. It is so very important for teachers to realize that just because a child does not have the same understanding or ideas that they are not always wrong. Taking into consideration the fact that sometimes students will be completely wrong and sometimes really will not understand a text, teachers need to allow them the chance to gain understanding in order to make sense of a reading. It is important that reading and comprehending be taught so very carefully so that students realize that their understanding is important, but also that sometimes they will not understand everything and that is okay.
EDU 344 Blog 