Essential Elements of Fostering and Teaching Reading Comprehension

Abstract

If learning to read effectively is a journey toward ever-increasing ability to comprehend texts, then teachers are the tour guides, ensuring that students stay on course, pausing to make sure they appreciate the landscape of understanding, and encouraging the occasional diversion down an inviting and interesting cul-de-sac or byway. The evidence for this role is impressive. In one study, some teachers of first-grade students in a high-poverty school district got 80% of their students to grade level in reading comprehension by the end of the year, while others in the same school district got only 20% of their students to grade level (Tivnan & Hemphill, 2005). In another study, Taylor, Pearson, Peterson, and Rodriguez (2003) found that second through fifth graders showed dramatically different rates of growth in reading comprehension over the course of the school year, depending on their teacher and the specific practices in which he or she engaged. Teachers can even overcome disadvantages in reading comprehension that students bring to school. For example, Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, and Hemphill (1991) found that students whose home environments were poor with respect to promoting reading comprehension development nonetheless made adequate progress in reading comprehension if they had strong teachers of reading comprehension for two consecutive years. If otherwise similar students had a strong comprehension teacher for only one year, only 25% made adequate progress, and none of the students who experienced two years of poor comprehension instruction overcame the effects of poor support for reading comprehension development at home. In sum, teachers matter, especially for complex cognitive tasks like reading for understanding.