What happens when I read?
This metacognitive activity invites students to consider the complex processes involved in decoding and comprehending texts. Understanding the roles that background knowledge, textual details, and personal experience play when a reader makes inferences and critically evaluates a work helps students understand the concepts of “understanding” and “interpretation” more meaningfully.
Teaching Resources
PPT/Word
Preparation
- For the activity below, choose passages that are grade-level appropriate and overtly engage students’ aural processors while reading (examples are provided).
- For the activity, teachers may want to intentionally pair students based on their reading fluency.
Process
- Ask students the question, “What happens when I read?” and give them three minutes to discuss their response with an elbow partner.
- Distribute the passages to the students and ask them to silently read them. When they are finished, ask them to reflect on the silent reading experience in their portfolios:
- What is going in in your brain when you read? What are all the things you are doing to process the text?
- How are you able to make meaning from the text?
- Ask students to find a partner (or assign one).
- For each passage, ask the pairs to self-assign each person a paragraph or speaking part for each passage.
- In pairs, ask students to read the passages aloud, each person reading their self-assigned part.
- Ask students to reflect with their partner:
- How is this different than reading silently?
- What decision do you have to make when you read aloud?
- Pair Square – Discuss: Ask each partner set to join another partner set. As a group of four, discuss:
- What is going on in each of these passages?
- How do you know what you know? (i.e., How do you know what is going on in each of the passages? Is ALL the information in the text?)
- After the discussion ask student to reflect in their portfolios:
- How is reading aloud different than reading silently?
- To what extent did reading with a partner contribute to your understanding of the passage?
- What aspects of this activity were easy?
- What aspects of this activity were difficult?
- Deliver the remainder of the presentation to students, introducing them to the process of reading:
- Decoding letters into language using visual and aural processors.
- Processing meaning.
- Using context to process and infer meaning.
- With an elbow partner, ask students to discuss the following question: How did the language of the sentence, your experiences, knowledge of circumstances, or knowledge of a concept allow you to infer meaning in these passages?
References
Moats & Tolman, 2008
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
