Although substantial research has been conducted into reading strategies, the difference between the reading strategies the students think they learn in class and the reading strategies the teacher considers she teaches is given little critical attention in the academic world. This study aims to investigate the relationship between non-English major students’ application of seven reading strategies for the CET-6 test and the teacher’s formal instruction in these with a view to improving teaching practices at university level.   A reading comprehension test and a questionnaire were given to 16 non-English major sophomore graduate students to establish what reading strategies are most and least utilized by students. A questionnaire was also presented to the teacher to ascertain what reading strategies she had taught. It is established that there are differences in the students’ and the teacher’s perceptions of what reading strategies have been taught and their suitability in the CET-6 reading comprehension text.

Studien syftar till att undersöka lärares uppfattningar om läsförståelseutveckling och om hur läsförståelseundervisning. Det är en kvalitativ studie inspirerad av fenomenografisk metodansats med halvstrukturerade intervjuer som datainamlingsmetod. Resultatet visar att det finns en variation i lärares uppfattningar om vad som utvecklar läsförståelse och hur läsförståelseundervisning ska genomföras. Det som framkommer i intervjuerna med pedagogerna är att de flesta vill och försöker arbeta medvetet med sin läsförståelseundervisning men att det till stor del förekommer mest implicit undervisning. Resultatet påvisar en tendens till att eleverna blir sittande att genomföra uppgifter på egen hand eller i par och pedagogen blir instruktionsgivare och kontrollant istället för undervisare och övervakare av elevernas läsning. Det finns även en risk att de läsare som inte har några svårigheter inte får möjlighet att utveckla sin läsförståelse utan att fokus endast blir på de elever som är svaga läsare.

ABSTRACT LINKS AND DISCONNECTS BETWEEN THIRD GRADE TEACHERS’ BELIEFS, KNOWLEDGE, AND PRACTICES REGARDING NONFICTION READING COMPREHENSION INSTRUCTION FOR STRUGGLING READERS by Nicole P. Maxwell In the current era of accountability, U. S. teachers face strict demands from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to ensure that all students’ reading achievement meets the requirements of their respective grade levels (Coburn, Pearson, & Woulfin, 2011). These demands are especially stressful when teachers have students who struggle with reading. Regrettably, many students grapple with reading difficulties, particularly with comprehending fiction and nonfiction texts (Allington, 2011). The purpose of this study was to examine the beliefs and understandings three third grade teachers held concerning nonfiction reading comprehension instruction for struggling readers and how these beliefs and knowledge influenced their pedagogical practices. This qualitative, interpretive case study examined their beliefs using the theoretical lenses of epistemology (Crotty, 2007; Cunningham & Fitzgerald, 1996; Dillon, O’Brien, & Heilman, 2004; Magrini, 2009), social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), transactional theory of reading (Rosenblatt, 1994), and the sociocognitive interactive model of reading (Ruddell & Unrau, 2004). The following research questions guided this inquiry: (1) How do third grade teachers support struggling readers when navigating nonfiction texts? (2) What are these third grade teachers’ beliefs and understandings about struggling readers? (3) How do these beliefs influence the third grade teachers’ pedagogical practices with struggling readers? Data collection lasted for five months and involved interviews, classroom observations, teacher debriefs, and the collection of artifacts, including DeFord’s (1985) Theoretical Orientation to Reading Profile (TORP). Data analysis was conducted using the constant comparative approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The findings in this study revealed links and disconnects between the accommodations teachers believed their struggling readers needed and what they actually provided their struggling readers. These teachers faced pressures of time constraints and a focus on testing, which affected their pedagogical practices. Furthermore, they demonstrated a reliance on content area textbooks and dissatisfaction with the accessibility of nonfiction materials. These findings highlight the need for pre-service and in-service teachers to have access to quality nonfiction materials to use in the classroom and instruction on how to provide nonfiction comprehension instruction to their struggling readers.

The ability to understand what one reads is fundamental to much school learning and is part of the school curriculum. The processes used by expert readers to comprehend text can be analysed and used as a basis for comprehension instruction. Such expert readers use particular mental strategies such as rereading, paraphrasing, and predicting, and adapt these to assist them in understanding various texts. This study investigated whether the implementation of reading comprehension strategy instruction to classes of Year 4 students would result in significant gains in metacognitive abilities, standardised reading comprehension, and reading self-efficacy. The quasi-experiment involved a treatment group of 48 students in two classes who were taught by one teacher, a treatment control group of 61 students in three classes taught by three teachers, and a non-treatment control group of 41 students taught in three composite Year 3 and Year 4 classes taught by three teachers. In total, 150 Year 4 students from eight classrooms in three suburban primary schools were involved in the study. Results from 2 x 3 analyses of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures revealed differences between the treatment group and control groups in several aspects of reading comprehension ability. The treatment group performed significantly better than either control group on the Jacobs and Paris (1987) measure of metacognitive awareness of strategies (Index of Reading Awareness). Treatment group students were also more confident about their ability to perform tasks related to reading comprehension than one of the control groups. Though they also made greater gains in confidence than the other control group, these gains were not statistically significant. Gains in reading comprehension as measured by a standardised reading comprehension measure (Progressive Achievement Test of Reading Comprehension) were marginal in comparison to one of the control groups, and not significant in comparison to the other. Secondly, this study also investigated whether intensive teacher training would result in successful implementation of reading comprehension strategies. Teachers need to know how to model their own mental processes for students so that students can see the strategies being applied. They then need to demonstrate for students when and how to adapt the strategies to various texts. In addition, teachers need to know whether to target instruction to only the struggling readers in their classrooms, or to students of varying abilities. A two-year professional development programme was developed and implemented to assist primary school teachers with the implementation of reading comprehension strategy instruction in their classrooms. During the first year a group of 14 teachers participated, and during the second year one teacher remained to implement the programme. This teacher, who taught at the Year 4 level, was provided with additional professional development in the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies to her entire class of mixed ability students. Results from analysis of qualitative data indicated that the teacher had made significant progress in becoming competent in the teaching techniques needed for teaching reading comprehension strategies. These results suggested that the teacher moved from modelling process into content to being creative and inventive. By the end of the intervention, interviews conducted with the teacher and the students, as well as lesson observations and field notes, suggested that she had a good knowledge of the components of strategy instruction and was incorporating these in her classroom practice. Her students became increasingly aware of the teacher's central lesson aims regarding what she was teaching, why she was teaching it, and how it could be applied to the students' learning. The findings of the present study indicate that students of varying ability may improve their reading comprehension through instruction in reading comprehension strategies, though the marginal gains in standardised reading comprehension do not support this conclusively. Findings also indicate that a teacher can successfully be trained to implement reading comprehension strategy instruction in an entire class of mixed-ability students. Such findings have important implications for teacher and student education.

This study focuses on inferential comprehension instruction in the classroom. The overall aim is to study the way in which four teachers are designing their lessons to develop their students’ ability to make inferences in literary text in the Swedish subject. The main focus is to explore what teaching modules may look like to promote students’ ability to make inferences (e.g. text choice, group size and method) and how the teachers motivate their didactic work. The study is also focused on the opportunities and challenges associated with inferential comprehension instruction. The methods used are qualitative studies using observations and interviews. The material consists of observation notes and interview recordings. The concept of inference and reading comprehension is consistent in the study and focuses on the importance of explicit instruction to improve the students’ inference comprehension. The models of inferential instruction are used to analyze the empirical material. The results show that teachers prefer to teach their students in groups of approximately 12 students, and they choose texts that are close to the students’ everyday life and in which a lot of inferences can be made. The majority of the teachers in the study demonstrate how they use the inference strategy by the method think aloud, to show their students examples of how to think and for them to use the strategy on their own eventually. All teachers remind the students of their own background knowledge, which is proven to increase the students’ ability to make inferences. This study shows that the possibilities with the teachers’ inference instruction lead to a deeper understanding among the students when reading. The challenges are lack of time when preparing, impatient students, and if the students do not activate the right background knowledge from the beginning, which will lead to misunderstandings while reading the text.

@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; line-height: 200%; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoNormalCxSpFirst, li.MsoNormalCxSpFirst, div.MsoNormalCxSpFirst { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; line-height: 200%; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoNormalCxSpMiddle, li.MsoNormalCxSpMiddle, div.MsoNormalCxSpMiddle { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; line-height: 200%; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoNormalCxSpLast, li.MsoNormalCxSpLast, div.MsoNormalCxSpLast { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; line-height: 200%; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; font-family: Cambria; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; } @font-face { font-family: "Times"; }@font-face { font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria Math"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; font-family: Cambria; }.MsoPapDefault { margin-bottom: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; } The central goal of elementary reading instruction is to teach students to make sense of the range of texts that they encounter during their school careers and lives. The issue of interest in this study is to better understand educational practice for upper elementary reading comprehension instruction. Using a case study design within the framework of symbolic interactionism, I studied four upper elementary teachers and examined the nature of their experiences with organizing, carrying out, and learning about reading comprehension instruction. Three weeks of classroom observations of each teachers’ language arts instruction and three interviews of each teacher constitute the major sources of data for this study. Results suggest that each teacher provided her students a different type of instructional experience around reading comprehension, despite having access to same kinds of instructional materials and assessment information. The instructional experiences offered by the teachers were contingent upon the teachers’ perspectives on the construct of reading comprehension and the factors that weighed most heavily in their individual decision-making processes about reading comprehension instruction. Several additional patterns emerged across the teachers. All four teachers made adaptations to their core reading program, utilized a small, consistent set of instructional routines in day-to-day instruction, and identified working with struggling students as an area of concern with which they felt unprepared to handle well. None of the teachers were observed or reported consistently employing direct, explicit, accountable ways of talking with students about texts or about ways of thinking through texts. These findings suggest future research and professional development efforts to improve reading comprehension instruction should begin with the ways in which teachers think about reading comprehension and the kinds of decisions teachers make as a result of their working definitions. In addition, more attention needs to be paid to supporting teachers in making thoughtful adaptations to their curriculum materials, in expanding the range of instructional routines employed on a regular basis, and in learning how to meet the needs of students struggling with comprehension. Finally, greater emphasis needs to be placed on fostering the kinds of talk amongst teachers and students that leads to the most robust reading comprehension development.

In the secondary school situation, a pupil needs to read to learn, therefore it is imperative to comprehend what is read. Reading comprehension is one of the two functions of reading and it is dependent on the abilities of the reader, the reader's interpretation of the text and the context in which the text is read. In examining reader characteristics, it is evident that it is very difficult for learning disabled pupils with a reading comprehension deficit to comprehend successfully. Their · unique problems can be exacerbated by such external factors as text components and the context in which the reading takes place. Reading comprehension has been instructed to learning disabled secondary school pupils using reading methods and strategies, to facilitate reading comprehension. From this practical experience and the literature studied, guidelines have been formulated for teachers to use to improve the reading comprehension skills of learning disabled secondary school pupils. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Orthopedagogics)

In the secondary school situation, a pupil needs to read to learn, therefore it is imperative to comprehend what is read. Reading comprehension is one of the two functions of reading and it is dependent on the abilities of the reader, the reader's interpretation of the text and the context in which the text is read. In examining reader characteristics, it is evident that it is very difficult for learning disabled pupils with a reading comprehension deficit to comprehend successfully. Their · unique problems can be exacerbated by such external factors as text components and the context in which the reading takes place. Reading comprehension has been instructed to learning disabled secondary school pupils using reading methods and strategies, to facilitate reading comprehension. From this practical experience and the literature studied, guidelines have been formulated for teachers to use to improve the reading comprehension skills of learning disabled secondary school pupils. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Orthopedagogics)