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Strategies
Reading Instructional Handbook
AFTER READING: STRATEGIES FOR RECONSTRUCTING AND EXTENDING MEANING
What students do after reading can be just as important as what they do before and during the process. Effective reading does not end with a reader's arrival at the last word of the text. On the contrary, to obtain a sense of closure, strategic readers engage in the three complementary follow-up behaviors of retelling, summarizing and evaluation. Retelling is a more complete recounting of information organized around key text elements. Summarizing is the condensing of the major themes and important information in a selection. Evaluation is when readers purposefully integrate information in the text with their background knowledge and then react to it. Together these strategies enable readers to personalize the meaning of a selection.
Retelling What Was Read
Retelling text enhances the oral language development of young readers by
encouraging them to detect the elements of fiction and non-fiction. (Cambourne, 1988;
Koskinen., et al 1988), Cambourne (1988) defines six types of retelling as follows:
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- Model retelling of text.
Using the elements of fiction or non-fiction discussed in "During Reading," model retelling by creating story maps of a text or chapter that was read aloud.
- Use retelling to evaluate students' comprehension of texts.
Utilizing Cambourne's retelling options, evaluate students' retellings by completing the retelling graphic organizer and applying the evaluation scales rubric. Note the elements
of text readers might be having difficulty with (events, problem, etc.). These elements should be re-taught in a small group focus lesson. (See Appendix)
Summarizing What Was Read
On the surface, summarizing would appear to be an easily acquired strategy, but
this is not true. It is a cognitively challenging response to text. Summarizing is closely
related to and may be dependent on the strategy of paraphrasing, which is the rephrasing
of the main idea of a paragraph or short passage. Summarization requires an understanding
of what was read as well as the ability to put that understanding into one's own words. It
also demands a certain amount of brevity. Readers must learn to reduce the text to its
gist--condensing without omitting key ideas, maintaining the author's point of view, and
sequencing the information in a logical way. The goal of summarization is to capture the
essence of the text clearly and concisely.
- Teach students the characteristics of a summary.
Provide numerous examples of well-constructed oral and written summaries. Through discussion, have the class evaluate those summaries and attempt to draw conclusions about why they are good ones. Explain that a good summary:
- is brief,
- describes the main topic or theme of the selection,
- includes only the important information,
- omits minor or irrelevant details,
- organizes the information in a clear way, and
- restates the meaning in the reader's own words.
Illustrate these criteria for students by using the following procedures with several easy reading selections.
- Develop students' ability to summarize.
As with the other strategies, teachers must explain and demonstrate the process used to create summaries and then engage students in these same processes. Begin working toward this goal by asking students to retell a narrative selection they have just read. Record the statements of remembered ideas on the board and discuss with them which ideas are more important than others. Show the group the teacher-created story map and compare the information in it to their retelling statements. Develop the understanding that a summary of a narrative focuses on the elements of the story grammar by using the suggestions already presented in this Instructional Handbook.
In general, when teachers provide direct summarization instruction, they should move from using short selections to longer ones and from having students produce oral summaries to producing written accounts. Also, it is recommended that writing be used as a major tool in teaching summarizing. Unlike oral retellings, writing activities give readers more time to reflect on and shape their summaries. At the same time, written summaries allow teachers to analyze content more carefully than oral retellings permit. Summarization instruction that involves writing avoids the limits of short-term memory and encourages readers to evaluate, change, reshape, and rethink with the original printed text available. Written summaries not only help students establish in their own minds what they think the text said, but written versions also tend to make the information more memorable.
Some specific techniques useful for developing summarizing abilities are described below.
- Newspaper Headlines: Remove the headlines from three or four newspaper articles of varying length. Direct the students to read each story and select the appropriate headline from a composite list. Vary this activity by having students write their own headlines and compare them to the originals.
- Frames : Use open-ended frames to guide students in creating their own summaries.
- Probable Passages : This technique uses narrative story frames with portions deleted to have students predict the major elements in the story. After reading the story, students are directed to use the story frame to create an accurate summary of the selection.
- Summary Pairs: Have students read a selection of their own choosing. Then, working in pairs, the students can orally summarize the information for their partners.
- Group Summary Writing (Moore et al., 1986): Read an interesting, informative article to the class, and then ask the students to state the important ideas in what they have heard. List the points that the students give in the form of notes on the board. Using these notes, guide the class in constructing a group summary statement. This technique is a natural predecessor to individually created summaries.
- News Reporter : Place students in the role of a newspaper or television reporter. Give them the task of writing brief summaries of articles or stories focusing on the questions who, what, when, where, why, and how. The summaries of the group can be compared and discussed.
- REAP Technique (Eanet and Manzo, 1976): The REAP technique helps students clarify and synthesize their thinking. Summarization is a part of this technique. The steps are:
- Read: students read the selection,
- Encode: students write a retelling of the selection,
- Annotate: students condense the retelling into a summary, and
- Ponder: students consider the importance of the ideas in the selection.
Practice in summarization can occur naturally after typical classroom events such as subject area reading assignments, demonstrations, laboratory observations, and field trips. Listening to stories or to a speaker, viewing a film or television program, and book sharing also provide summarizing opportunities. Refer to articles by Taylor (1982) and Pincus, Geller and Stover (1986) for additional suggestions on teaching summarizing.
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