Questions, Exploration & Learning

Children ask lots of questions. Sometimes their questions don’t move beyond repetitive “Why?” questions that can be annoying. But as well as helping them to learn, children's questions can also teach us a great deal about them and their learning. 

• Children’s questions usually show us how keen they are to learn – We see that there are gaps in their knowledge, new areas of interest, & things that puzzle them.
• Questions offer us a window into children’s learning – We discover what they are interested in, their learning styles, and how well they learn best.
• Questions are also one way that children try to take control of their own learning - As they ask questions they try to set an agenda and focus for their learning.
• Questions are a way for children to test their existing knowledge - They assess what they know and test their own hypotheses.

In short, questioning is a critical tool for children’s learning, and needs to be encouraged.

Above: One of my grandchildren discovers a pistol shrimp. This stimulated lots of questions!

1. How can I ask better questions to stimulate learning?

Questioning is a vital tool for parents and teachers. As well as answering questions, we should also try to ask a variety of questions, but NOT just to test learning. The best use of questions is when they are used to stimulate curiosity, problem solving, imagination, a quest for knowledge and as a result, learning. A good tool for asking better questions is a simple taxonomy. There are many ways to classify questions but Bloom's Taxonomy is still one of the most useful frameworks for helping us to get better at it. These include:

• Questions that test knowledge or seek basic recall of knowledge – “Why might the pistol shrimp have one claw larger than the other?” “What did the first pig build his house from?”
• Questions that seek some level of interpretation – “If it was a sick or damaged claw how could we test this"? "How come Max's food was still hot when he went back to bed? (Where the Wild Things Are)"? “Why was Pinocchio sad?”
• Questions that require application of knowledge or problem solving – “Okay, we've found three pistol shrimps with one big claw, what might the claw be for?" Why didn’t the stepmother let Cinderella go to the ball?”
• Questions that require analysis – “Where did we find the pistol shrimps? Why might they be living there"? “Why do you think the 3rd little pig got up before the time he told the wolf?” “Was Fern’s father mean to want to kill Wilbur?”
• Questions that require synthesis of knowledge – "We've notice the clicking noise the pistol shrimp makes. What could this be for"? "So which animal sank the boat and how do you know (from 'Who Sank the Boat')?” “What do you think is going to happen when the 3rd Billy Goat crosses the bridge?”
• Questions that require some type of evaluation  (opinion, values, critique, judgement) – "Let's find some information on the pistol shrimp and test our answers to the last question. What is the claw all about and is their a link with where it lives?“ Was Max naughty"? "Should his mother have sent him to his room?”

You can find a more detailed overview of Bloom's categories here.

2. How can I encourage children to ask questions? 

As I have already said above, it is important for children to make good use of questions. To help them learn what good questions are you can model questioning for them. There are a variety of ways that you can do this.

• Ask questions of children that encourage learning and thinking
• Avoid over-using questions that just test learning, or that simply channel learning in directions that you want it to go.
• Try to give honest answers to children’s questions.
• Don’t be frightened to say “I don’t know”, but use this to demonstrate that not knowing the answer should lead to further learning “Let’s try to find out…”
 

In Australia we have a very funny advertisement for an Internet company that has a sequence of exchanges between a boy and his Dad. In one the boy is doing some research for school on China. He asks his Dad, “Dad, why did they build the Great Wall of China?”

His Dad suggests, “That was during the reign of Emperor Nasi Goreng - to keep the rabbits out – too many rabbits in China”.

I'll say it again, we should never be afraid to say, “I’m not sure, but I’ll think about it and let you know” (view the video HERE).

3. Here are 4 strategies to help children ask better questions
 
I wrote a whole book about comprehension strategies some years ago ('Teaching Reading Comprehension: Meaning Makers at Work') but here are just four question strategies that can be adapted for use with children of varied ages. In these examples, I'm assuming a grade 5 (10-11 year-olds).

a) Question frameworks

Make a chart that has a simple framework for questing complete with examples. The one above based on Bloom's Taxonomy is an example. An even simpler example is one developed by Nila Banton Smith and has proven helpful for many teachers:

Literal - These ask for details or facts you can find in the text, e.g. 'What was the rat's name in Charlotte's Web?'
Interpretive - These require the reader to supply meaning not directly stated, e.g. 'Why did Fern's father want to kill the runt pig?'
Critical - These require the reader to evaluate something, e.g. 'Do you think Templeton was honest?'
Creative - These require readers to go beyond the text, to express new ideas, solve a problem etc, e.g. 'What other words might Charlotte have used in her web to save Wilbur?'

Use the chart to discuss the varied type of questions we can ask about stories, use the categories at times when asking questions of the class, model the varied forms in group work, and use them for some set work. I offer further information on the above questioning strategy in my book 'Balancing the Basics'.

b) Visual Comprehension

You can use images, cartoons or a short video segment to stimulate and model questioning. The example below shows how a simple template for group work can be used to direct attention at images and generate good questions and insights (see my post on 'Visual Comprehension' HERE). The grade 4 students were looking at a series of newspaper images.
  

c) Talk-to-the-author
 
I developed this strategy many years ago and wrote about it in 'Teaching Comprehension: Meaning Makers at Work'. It is a very simple strategy designed to get young readers thinking about the implied author and meaning that is beyond the literal. The technique is applied like this:

Step 1 - prepare some passages of 300-1000 words in length (from magazines, school readers, newspapers etc), or identify a passage in a class reader or book.
Step 2 - demonstrate the technique using a smartboard and explain that the idea of this technique is to encourage us to ask questions that we might ask if we had the author in the room.
Step 3 - have your class help you with a second passage on the smartboard.  
Step 4 - provide a passage and ask them to read, making note of at least 6 questions they might ask of the author and also at least 4 comments they might offer.

d) Character Interview

I developed this strategy while working with gifted children, but it can be used in any primary classroom. It requires readers to select a character from a book and interview them. You can do this in several ways. The simplest, and perhaps the best way to start this strategy, is to ask children in pairs to come up with ten questions that they would ask of a character in a story if they had the chance. They can then act this out with one being the interviewer and the other the character.
An alternative to the above is to have one student prepare a series of questions to which another student, filling the role of the character, has to answer. Once again, it is helpful to give some guidance about the need to ask varied questions that include interpretive, critical and creative questions, not just literal ones.

Other posts on comprehension

You might like to have a look at the following posts on comprehension:

'Teaching and Supporting Children's Reading Comprehension' (HERE)
'Reading to Learn Using Text Sets' (HERE)
'Improving Comprehension: Sketch to Stretch' (HERE)
'Improving Comprehension: Map Making' (HERE)
'Improving Comprehension: Advance Organisers' (HERE)
'Emergent Comprehension in Children Under Five' (HERE)

Developing Comprehension in the Preschool Years

Introduction

I've written a number of times about comprehension on this blog (see previous posts here), written a two books about it (here & here) and published a monograph in recent times for the Primary English Teaching Association in Australia (PETAA). In these publications I describe comprehension as the ability "to understand, interpret, appreciate and critique what they read, view, hear and experience." This might not sound like the things you see a 2-3 year old doing when they pick up a book, and in one sense it isn't.  Young children begin to make sense of their world and all that is in it from birth, but comprehension as we know it in school emerges over time in these early years.

As distinguished literacy researchers Ken and Yetta Goodman said many years ago (in 'Learning to read is natural', 1979):

"The beginnings of reading often go unnoticed in the young child".

For the young child meaning making occurs from birth, but reading comprehension as we recognise it emerges over the first 5 years of life, and in fact, for most children begins before they can decode print.


Emergent Patterns

Caitlin McMunn Dooley wrote an excellent article in The Reading Teacher (Oct 2010) in which she described her observations of a group of children aged 2-5+ years in an early childhood classroom over a three year period.  Her observations suggested four broad phases in their emerging comprehension. These are not neat stages (hence the use of the word phase):

Book as prop (<2 to 3) - When choosing books children pay minimal attention to the topic and content of the book and instead use books a prop and treating them like other play things. The book symbolises story time or is used to simulate reading.

Book as invitation (2+ to 3+) - Eventually, children begin to consider the book holistically as a complete unit of meaning. They begin to recognise the topic of the book mainly through images, colour, shape etc. They start to bring books to adults and expect them to read them. They might also volunteer to 'read' the book to others.

Book as script (3+) - Eventually, children begin to show an understanding that text carries meaning, as do the many features of the book.  Dooley found that many 3 year olds begin to treat the books more like "..scripts, memorising and calling out the texts in books..".  They point to the print and attend to text content, images and sound including voice intonation and inflection.

Book as text (4+) - Most four year olds begin to attend more to the print, pointing to the words and recalling (generally from memory) word by word what is on the page. They are still just as interested in content, images and sound, but there is an emerging sense of integrated comprehension where the reader can see consistencies and inconsistencies between print and other elements such as image and sound.

Comprehension emerges with other people

What needs to be understood about emergent comprehension is that the ability to make meaning as children encounter books, films, objects and experiences, develops as they try to make sense of their world. It also happens as an extension of their relationships within families and in other learning situations both informal (play with others) and structured (a preschool classroom or playgroup).

The following description of a preschool class gives some sense of what I mean:

Even when the teacher was not initiating reading or writing, the classroom was filled with literate behaviour. In the dress-up corner several children were including story reading in creative play. Children took turns as mother reading to her baby. Genevieve was asking her pretend mum to explain why the dog in I'll Always Love You (Wilhelm, 1985) had such a sad face (this is a book about death). Mum was doing a wonderful job explaining the relationships within the story. Another group playing shops was using a receipt book to record purchases. Receipt books were often referred to in the home corner. 'Mum' and 'Dad' were reading the newspaper and later flicking through the pages of the telephone book (Cairney & Langbien, 1989).

In is in varied social settings that children make meaning and begin to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of how written language works. Over time, the foundations of comprehension are laid.

What parents can do to help comprehension emerge?

Here are 10 simple tips.

• Read regularly (at least daily) to your children and talk about the things that you read.
• Try to read the book with emotion, with invented sound effects, with different voices for characters and the narrator, changes in voice volume and tone - much meaning is communicated this way.
• Support their emerging understanding of what they read or hear by encouraging them to look at pictures and images and relate these to the words that you read. Emphasise key words or repetitive patterns in the book “But don’t forget the bacon”, “But where is the Green Sheep?”
• Encourage them to relate ideas, language and knowledge that a book introduces to other areas of learning or life – “You’ve got a teddy too”, “His puppy is like Darren’s puppy”, “We saw an elephant like this one at the zoo”.
• Encourage them to draw, sing, talk about, act out, make things, dress up and so on, in response to the things that you read to them or they read themselves (creating meaning in response to books).
• Encourage them to use other tools to make meaning (playdough, toy animals, dress-ups, Thomas trains, drawing, craft etc) and relate these as appropriate to books (creating meaning leads to books).
• Encourage them to memorise and learn things from the books they read or listen to. You can’t read “Wombat Stew” without reciting over and over again “Wombat stew, Wombat stew, Gooey, brewy, Yummy, chewy, Wombat stew!”
• Encourage them to make connections between the things they read, view and experience – “This story is like in the television show Shaun the Sheep when he…..”.
• Read varied books – different story types, factual books as well as fiction, poetry and prose, different forms of illustrations and so on.
• Watch TV shows, videos and movies with your children and talk about them, explain things, try to make connections with stories they have read, encourage response with art, drawing, play dough, puppets, dressing up, acting out and so on.

Summing Up

Comprehension is ultimately the highest goal of reading, we read to understand things, to work things out, to make meaning.  Its foundations are laid in the first 5 years of life, not through structured activities, but through the use and experience of language and in particular, story.

Comprehension emerges over time as children are encouraged to encounter and use written language and to integrate this with other avenues they have for making meaning.

Other blog posts related to this topic

'Teaching and Supporting Children's Reading Comprehension' (HERE)
'Reading to Learn Using Text Sets' (HERE)
'Improving Comprehension: Sketch to Stretch' (HERE)
'Improving Comprehension: Map Making' (HERE)
'Improving Comprehension: Advance Organisers' (HERE)
'Why Kids Re-read Books' (HERE)
'Making Books Come Alive' (HERE)
'The Power of Literature' series (HERE)
All posts on 'Children's Literature' (HERE)
All posts on 'Comprehension' (HERE)


References cited in this Post

Cairney, T.H. (2010). 'Developing Comprehension: Learning to make meaning'. Sydney: e:lit (formerly Primary English Teaching Association).

Cairney, T.H. (1995). 'Pathways to Literacy', Cassell: London.

Cairney, T.H. (1990). 'Teaching Reading Comprehension: Meaning Makers at Work', Open University Press: London.

Cairney, T.H. & Langbien, S. (1989). Building Communities of Readers and Writers, The Reading Teacher, Vol. 42, No. 8, pp 560-567.

McMunn Dooley, C. (2010). Young children's approaches to books: The emergence of comprehension, The Reading Teacher, 64, 2, pp 120-130

Goodman, K.S and Goodman Y.M. (1979) Learning to read is natural. In L.B. Resnick and P.A. Weaver (Eds), Theory and Practice of Early Reading (Vol 1),  Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, p 137-154.

* This is a revised version of a post I wrote in November 2010

Improving Comprehension: Using Routines or Strategies

There are many ways to think about instructional approaches to reading comprehension. One approach is to distinguish between Content-based approaches and Strategy-based approaches. Content-based approaches use varied activities to focus student attention on the content or meaning of the text. For example, previous posts on 'Sketch to Stretch', 'Reader Response' and 'Map Making' are very much content-based. There are many other approaches that try to help readers understand the content of a text and demonstrate this by recalling lots of information, being able to summarise the passage, answering varied questions and so on.  I also use some of the above as part of what many would call strategy-based approaches that was the focus of a lot of research in the 1980s. So using categories to describe comprehension is tricky.

The approach commonly referred to as 'Strategies' involves teaching children procedures or routines that can be re-used and applied in varied tasks by the reader or writer.  This approach arose from the work of psychologists like Ann Brown and Annemarie Palincsar and was related to the study of 'Metacognition' (a term first used by James Flavell in 1976).  In simple terms, metacognition is thinking about thinking, including mental activities like reading comprehension. Taylor (1999) has defined metacognition as “an appreciation of what one already knows, together with a correct apprehension of the learning task and what knowledge and skills it requires, combined with the agility to make correct inferences about how to apply one’s strategic knowledge to a particular situation, and to do so efficiently and reliably”.

As a result of metacognitive research a number of researchers began to explore the type of strategies that could be taught to children that would improve reading, writing and learning.

Reciprocal Teaching

'Reciprocal Teaching' developed by Palincsar and Brown (1984) was an early example of a strategy-based approach (Annmarie Palincsar's photo opposite). It involves teaching students four key comprehension strategies: prediction, questioning, seeking clarification and summarising. This technique has some basic steps:

Step 1 - The teacher begins by discussing the topic of the reading or study and calls for predictions of the content based on the title. If they have read it before the teacher (instead of the initial prediction) asks the students to recall the main points of the material read last time.

Step 2 - The teacher breaks the class into pairs (although you could use groups of 3 or 4) and then assigns one of the students to the role of teacher. They then read the first paragraph silently. After this, the student assigned as the teacher poses a question about the passage and then tries to answer it themselves. He or she then predicts what might be going to happen next or seeks clarification from others if confused or if they need help. Students then take turns as teacher or student for about 30 minutes.

Step 3 - The students then seek to clarify their understanding. This involves helping each other or asking questions of each other. At any stage, if the student in the 'teacher' role is having problems, the classroom teacher can intervene to offer support. As the lesson proceeds the students are reminded that the strategies that they are using (questioning, summarising, predicting and seeking clarification) will help them to understand what they are reading.

Step 4 - Students are finally encouraged to summarise or make sense of what they have learned. This step requires the reader to decide what was important and what was not.

The above is just one example of an approach that attempts to model strategies, teach them to readers and then have them apply them to real reading and study. What distinguishes Reciprocal Teaching is its highly structured nature and the way the teacher scaffolds support and effectively trains the students to think about the way they think about (and process) text, and use this understanding in future independent reading activities.

An approach that I've used

Once you have a framework in mind you can vary the nature of the tasks within each of the steps. Here's how I have used a strategy approach based on a piece of literature with children aged 9-12 years.

I always commence by demonstrating a full cycle of the strategy lesson to the class. Using a text that all students can see, I put myself in the role of the reader.  I would then explain each of the following steps. Once this has been done once I repeat it again with at least 2 other examples, inviting student help as we work through the process as teacher/reader. Here is the framework I have used. To make it more relevant I have based it on the hypothetical use of the picture book 'Fair's Fair' by Leon Garfield. I will share the first paragraph to give a greater sense of how the process works.

Jackson was thin, small and ugly, and stank like a drain. He got his living by running errands, holding horses, and doing a bit of scrubbing on the side. And when he had nothing better to do he always sat on the same doorstep at the back of Paddy's Goose, which was at the worst end of the worst street in the worst part of town. He was called Jackson, because his father might have been a sailor, Jack being a fond name for a sailor in the streets round Paddy's Goose; but nobody knew for sure. He had no mother, either, so there was none who would have missed him if he'd fallen down a hole in the road. And nobody did miss him when he vanished one day and was never seen or heard of again. It happened when Christmas was coming.....

Step 1  'Prediction based on prior knowledge' - Using, cover image, title, and/or the first paragraph of the text predict what it might be about. At this stage the reader uses the title 'Fair's Fair' to predict what it might be about; then considers the cover, and finally the first paragraph. Demonstrate how readers ask questions of themselves to gain some sense of what this book might be about.

Step 2  'Generating questions' - Demonstrate how even just the cover, title and first paragraph can generate many questions. What might 'Fair's Fair' mean? Where might this boy come from? Where is the boy going? What might it mean, "he had no mother"? Why might he have vanished?

Step 3  'Seeking to remove confusion' - The reader then moves on. Read the next paragraph or two and refer back to some of the questions generated above. Your audible thinking might go like this: "It happened when Christmas was coming.." and it's snowing (!), so it's not Australia where it's summer at Christmas. He's sitting on the doorstep and a "big black dog" comes, "Oho", what's it going to do? Is he after his pie? Where did he get the pie anyway? Jackson tells him to 'Shove off!' and then he notices something.  'Hullo! You got a collar on! You must belong to somebody. Hullo again! You got something under your collar. What you got?' What has he got? And so on.

Step 4  'Stimulating imagery' - A well written story will be stimulating imagery already just through the power of the language (e.g. the dog was "Huge: as big as a donkey, nearly, with eyes like street lights and jaws like and oven door..."), but sometimes I try to give this a push by getting children to draw (see 'Sketch to Stretch'), talk, write or (with younger children) dramatise the scene.

Step 5  'Generating more questions' - at this point I will often use questions again to predict what might be coming next. What might happen with this do? What could the key be for? Whose key is it?
 
Step 6  'Summarisation, recall or response' - Depending on the text type I might complete the strategy cycle with summarising (verbal or in writing), free recall (remember all you can) or probed recall (where you use prompts or questions to encourage recall), or maybe just use a variety of response formats (e.g. drawing, mapping, semantic webs etc). All these are designed to recap or summarise understanding of the text, to go over the meaning they have comprehended as part of the process.

The above cycle is not strictly consistent with the metacognitive approaches that researchers like Brown, Palincsar, Pressley and Paris pioneered, but it has worked for me in varied contexts. In trials with readers aged 10-12 years I have found greatly increased recall of texts when compared with traditional question and answer strategies.

References and other resources

Taylor, S. (1999). Better learning through better thinking: Developing students’ metacognitive abilities. 'Journal of College Reading and Learning', 30(1).

Peirce, W. (2003). Metacognition: Study Strategies, Monitoring and Motivation.

All posts on comprehension (HERE).

Improving Comprehension: Advance Organizers

The need for 'deep' reading

As I said in my previous posts in this series on 'Improving Comprehension', we need to encourage ‘deep’ reading. For the reading of literature we want children not only to be able to read the words and follow a basic narrative plot, we want them to grasp the richness of characterization, the devices the author uses to create mood and tension, the intent and purpose of the writer and the language devices employed; all the while being moved by the text and able to reflect and respond critically to it. When reading non-fiction we want readers to be able to understand what it is that the author is seeking to communicate, to learn from the reading of the text, to use the text for varied appropriate purposes, and to be able to critique the accuracy and truth of its content.

The importance of prior knowledge

In any act of reading prior knowledge is important. Research on Schema theory in the 1970s by Richard C. Anderson and his colleagues and students at the University of Illinois taught us a great deal about the way in which the interplay of prior knowledge stored in memory and new knowledge given prior to reading can help reading comprehension. The origins of Schema Theory can be traced to the work of Frederic Bartlett and his classic work 'Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology' (1932).

Schema Theory suggests that readers require prior knowledge to comprehend a text. This knowledge is organized within memory and needs to be accessed during reading. Information and knowledge is stored in schemata (the plural for schema), which readers access as they seek to relate what they know about a topic to the things that they are encountering and learning from a text. In essence, the brain creates frameworks to store knowledge and information that is related.

In simple terms, if we were wishing to understand a short passage on cricket (the game) you would need to possess certain knowledge sets that help to make sense of it. To understand the sentence, 'He bowled a maiden over', the reader would need to have knowledge of the game sufficient to help them know that to 'bowl' is to take a small ball and propel it along a strip of grass in an over arm fashion to a batsman without them scoring a run from a number of balls. As well, the reader needs to know that an 'over' is the way we describe a set of 6 successive deliveries of the ball (being bowled). That a 'maiden' is the technical term for an over where no runs are scored and so on.

Schema theory suggests that such related knowledge is stored in a specific schema or more likely related schemata that relate to games, cricket, sport etc. Our brain has at least two main types of schemata for reading: content schema and textual schema, including knowledge of discourse structure and conventions. It also seems that schemata have a number of functions including: a) helping us to assimilate new knowledge; b) helping us to judge what is important; c) helping the reader to make inferences; d) enabling us to summarize information; and e) assisting our searches of memory for relevant background knowledge.

Comprehension of texts not only requires the reader to be able to read words, understand word meanings, and possess complex understanding of how language and texts work, it also requires them to possess knowledge of the world and successfully use it by activating relevant schemata. It is probably self-evident that if the reader possesses sufficient background knowledge and can access it efficiently, then comprehension will be aided.

Researchers like Bransford (1979) have spent considerable time exploring how schemata are used as part of the reading process and offering insights into how they can be activated by readers increasing their ability to comprehend texts.

The Advance Organizer

One of the most commonly used strategies for priming prior knowledge with readers is the advance organizer. An Advance Organizers is simply a device that helps the reader to access efficiently relevant knowledge (stored as schemata). The term was coined by Ausubel (1959) who believed that the most important determinant of learning is what the learner already knows or brings to the task.

A number of preliminary strategies have been developed to help students relate new information appearing in a text to existing knowledge. The design of many of these reflects Ausubel's strategy of creating a specific mindset prior to the reading task. Here are a few examples:

(i) The use of structured overviews

The structured overview is one way to organize or rehearse information and knowledge to aid understanding. Used prior to reading a non-fiction text, the structured overview is a helpful way to aid comprehension. It may be used in many form including webs, concept maps, or outlines. The strategy can be used across the curriculum where reading and writing, learning and remembering are required [Example opposite courtesy of New Zealand Ministry of Education Online Learning Centre].

(ii) Spoken and written words - One of the simplest ways to offer an advance organizer is by talking about the possible content of a book. When we get children to look at the cover, read and discuss the title, and discuss the content that the story might be about, we are using an advance organizer.

(iii) Diagrams and charts - examples of this approach include Venn diagrams and 'KWL' charts. Venn diagrams are overlapping circles (as used in mathematics) that can be used in reading to provide a content overview before reading. KWL charts ask the reader to outline prior to reading what they know about the topic and what they want to know. After reading they then complete the chart by writing what they learned. The KWL chart was first used by Ogle (1986) and can be useful when starting a new book or any unit of learning. Once students have been taught to use diagrams and charts in a group, they can be encouraged to use them with other students or independently.

(iv) Discussion of related extra-textual material (e.g. photographs, music, video) - Another way to prime background knowledge and schemata is by using related material in addition to the text. This could include photographs that relate to the content, objects, music or even videos. The showing of a video version of a text prior to reading is one simple way to do this. This is particularly helpful if children are reading difficult texts that might normally be just beyond their developmental and language capabilities. If you are doing a unit of work on insects with grade 2, bring in a box of insects and allow them to observe them and talk about them prior to commencing reading and writing about insects.

(v) Using drawing prior to reading - I have already suggested in a previous post how powerful drawing or sketching can be prior to the reading task. The 'Sketch to Stretch' Strategy and 'Map Making' are two examples that can act as Advance Organizers (as well as doing other things).

Related Reading

Useful introductory article on Schema Theory from ERIC (here)

All previous posts on comprehension (here)

Improving Comprehension: Map Making

The need for 'deep' reading

As I said in my first post in this series on 'Improving Comprehension', we need to encourage ‘deep’ reading. For example, with the reading of literature we want children not only to be able to read the words and follow a basic narrative plot, we want them "...to grasp the richness of characterization, the devices the author uses to create mood and tension, the intent and purpose of the writer and the language devices employed; all the while being moved by the text and able to reflect and respond critically to it."

I also suggested in the first post (citing Corcoran & Evans, 1987) that one helpful way to do this is by using a framework that targets some of the major categories of mental activity that relate to the reading of literature:

Picturing and imaging - developing a rich mental picture.
Anticipating and restrospecting - predicting upcoming events, or reflecting on the ideas in the book.
Engagement and construction – becoming emotionally involved in the text, identifying with characters and situations.
Valuing and evaluating - making judgements about a text and its worth, as well as applying their own value judgements to the events and situations that unfold.

In this post I want to look at mapping, which I have also written about in my book 'Pathways to Literacy' (here).

The Purpose of Maps for Reading

My first post on 'Improving Comprehension' was concerned with ‘Sketch to Stretch’ (Cairney, 1990). This strategy involves asking children to sketch in response to reading, hearing or even viewing a story (here). The strategy of 'Map Making' also involves drawing and similarly helps the reader to build a rich mental picture as they read and to engage more deeply with the text. More specifically it helps the reader to:

• gain a clearer sense of the setting;
• engage more deeply with the plot; and
• establish more clearly the sequence of events and recall them in greater depth.

How to use the strategy

Mapping can occur during and after reading. Some books also include their own maps that are designed to help the reader connect the events of the story to space. For example, 'Watership Down', 'The Hobbit' (see opposite) 'The Sign of the Seahorse' and 'My Place' to name just a few. The latter uses maps on every page to help the reader build a richer understanding of the important issues that the book raise about Indigenous Australians (see my previous post on this book HERE).

Getting readers to draw maps can be done at varied points in the reading process:

You can show readers a map before they read the story and briefly talk about the story's setting.
You can ask your children to draw a map after the reading to help them recall the story and integrate elements of the plot.
You can ask your children to draw a map or plan after the reading and then have them use it to explain what the story was about.

The example below (also reproduced in my book 'Pathways to Literacy') was drawn by a year 6 child part way through the reading of Roald Dahl's biography 'Boy: Tales of Childhood'. The mapping strategy was used after my students had read the chapter titled 'The magic island' which tells of a journey by boat from Newcastle upon Tyne to Norway. After reading the chapter I asked my students to draw a map of the journey to help them recall the details. What the drawing shows is just how detailed this child's recall was and how well it enabled the reader to recall not just the setting but the journey as well.


Summing up

Mapping is a helpful way to encourage readers to gain a rich impression of the setting and in the process, to recall the essential details of the story.

Related Posts

I’ve written extensively about comprehension in my various books (for example here and here) and in articles in academic journals.

My previous post on 'Sketch to Stretch' (here).

All previous posts on comprehension (here)

How drawing 'Sketch to Stretch' Can Improve Comprension

How and why do we teach comprehension?

Some see ‘comprehension’ as an old fashioned term that has lost its relevance in the ‘digital age’. I don’t see it this way. Helping children to comprehend better involves helping them to remember, understand, enjoy, learn from and critique what they read (or see, hear or experience for that matter). It is a term that recognizes that the creators of literature, non-fiction books, film, video games, performance and so on, have meaning intent and purpose in mind when they have done so. In a previous post (here) I said:

“I think the term comprehension still has great relevance because it is a reminder that as readers, viewers and web surfers we need to be able to understand, interpret, appreciate and critique what we read, view, hear and even experience.”

As well as having written previously on this blog in more general terms about the way parents and teachers can encourage and improve comprehension, I’ve also written extensively about comprehension in my various books (for example here and here) and in articles in academic journals. Before I get to the strategies here’s a quick comment on ‘deep reading’.

Reading ‘deeply’

One of aims as supporters of children’s reading is to encourage ‘deep’ reading of any book. For example, with the reading of literature we want children not only to be able to read the words and follow a basic narrative plot, we want them to be able to read ‘deeply’. We want them to grasp the richness of characterization, the devices the author uses to create mood and tension, the intent and purpose of the writer and the language devices employed; all the while being moved by the text and able to reflect and respond critically to it. For the teachers reading this blog there are many different traditions that have said similar things to what I’m saying here (but from different beginning points) including ‘critical theory’, ‘reader response’ theory, ‘critical literacy’, ‘deep reading’ and even more recently ‘slow reading’. I can say more on this later if people want.

Bill Corcoran (in Corcoran & Evans, 1987) offers one example of a useful framework that reflects one of these traditions. It is a helpful way to pursue ‘deeper’ reading of text (he didn’t call it this).

Corcoran identifies four basic types of mental activity that relate to the reading of literature:

Picturing and imaging - a rich mental picture.
Anticipating and restrospecting - about upcoming events, or reflecting on the ideas in the book.
Engagement and construction – becoming emotionally involved in the text, identifying with characters and situations.
Valuing and evaluating - making judgements about a text and its worth, as well as applying their own value judgements to the events and situations that unfold.

So how do you help children to become deep readers? I thought I’d do a series of practical posts on comprehension strategies that work for children aged 7+. All are ideas that I’ve used with children. I’ll focus on one strategy at a time and will build the list up over time. You can find many of them in my book ‘Teaching Reading Comprehension: Meaning Makers at Work’ (1990) which while out of print is still in university libraries and used copies are available in many places on the web (e.g. here). I also intend to produce a new book in the next year or so that covers the same ground soon.

A Strategy that Works

‘Sketch to Stretch’ (Cairney, 1990) is essentially a strategy that involves asking children to sketch in response to reading, hearing or even viewing a story. It was first developed and researched by Marjorie Siegel (see Harste, Pierce & Cairney, 1985), and requires the reader to use drawing to 'stretch' or enhance the meaning as they are reading. This can occur during and after reading (there is even a place for drawing as an ‘advance organizer’ before reading but that’s another post). It can involve varied directions including:

Draw a picture to show what just happened.
Draw a picture to show what he/she [insert character name] did, lost, saw, heard etc.
Draw a picture that shows what might happen next.
Draw a picture of [insert character].

The sketches at the beginning of this post and below (all taken from my book 'Teaching Reading Comprehension'), show just some of the responses from a group of 10 year-old children I had been teaching. I had interrupted a reading of the graphic novel ‘The Wedding Ghost’ (1985) written by Leon Garfield and illustrated by Charles Keeping.

The book is set in the late 19th century, in a small village in Hertfordshire in the East Region of England. Like all of Garfield’s books it is rich in historical detail and a depth of language and mastery of storytelling that few children’s authors have ever achieved. The book tells the story of a young couple (Gillian and Jack) who are about to be married. It follows the normal sequence of events for a wedding in the 19th century, beginning with the invitation, preparations, then the rehearsal, present opening, more preparations and eventually the wedding.

Much of the story centres on a journey taken by Jack after he opens an unusual gift addressed only to him. This is the first moment of intrigue. Jack sets off armed with an old map sent by an unknown person, and the events and discoveries that lead ultimately to the dramatic events of the wedding and the outcome.

On the occasion that sketches above were drawn (a class of 10 year old children), I introduced the book by sharing the title, showing the cover and then explaining a little about the author. I told the class that Leon Garfield usually wrote what is known as historical fiction, and that this is the writing of fictional stories that are inspired by real events, setting and characters. The class was also told that Garfield spends a great deal of time making sure the details of life in different times and places are accurate.

I interrupted my oral reading after a few minutes at a point where Jack is to open the mysterious present. This is just a few pages in and the guests are gathered around watching the groom to be. People are making jokes and speculating about the gift and why it might just have his name on it.

I asked my students to quickly sketch what the gift might be. As you can see from the sample of the sketches, the responses varied greatly and included a ghost, map (an uncanny prediction), book, hourglass (suggesting time), genie’s lamp letter and so. The sketches give an insight into the level and depth of children’s comprehension of this complex picture book up to this point. As well, they illustrate that they are trying to make sense of what’s going on, where the story might go next and the extent to which they are picking up on the themes in Garfield’s book. As well, they show something of their literary history and the background knowledge that they bring to the reading and the sketching.

Even when children drew the same object there was great diversity. For example, a number of students drew ghosts presumably basing their prediction upon the book's title (there had been nothing explicit in the text to suggest this); and yet, the drawings showed a diverse range of ghosts. One student drew a genie type 'ghost' emerging from lamps, several drew 'Casper like' ghosts and others drew ghosts more human in form. Each reflected different literary histories and background knowledge.

Summing up

Sketch to Stretch does do as its name implies, it stretches children’s understanding, and their knowledge of and appreciation of literature. It also offers an alternative to word-based strategies for heightening engagement. Each response whether it is written, spoken, drawn or displayed in any form, helps children to read more ‘deeply’. The sketches also help us to understand how our children are empathizing with characters, evaluating the text, what they are predicting will come next, how they are reflecting upon earlier events, how they are connecting with life situations and so on. This gives us greater insight into our children’s comprehension as they read and it helps us to enrich the mental journey children are making as they read a book.

Related Posts

Previous posts on 'Text Sets' (here)

Previous posts that relate to 'Graphic Novels' (here)

Reading to Learn: Using 'Text Sets'

A former university student, who I taught almost 20 years ago emailed me recently. She asked for some information on a curriculum idea - the 'Text Set' - that I had developed in the 1980s, and which she recalled me talking about in classes. When I tracked my only written reference to it in my book 'Pathways to Literacy' (pp 92-93) I thought I'd do a blog post on it. I wondered at first whether it might be less relevant now because the idea was developed in the 1980s when the Internet was just being conceived for mass use - 'Google it' wasn't part of our vocabulary! In a way, the text set in the hands of the teacher, offered a teacher selected Google search in a box. I have no idea who had the idea first, but the stimulus for my development of the concept was seeing something like it in a classroom linked to Professor Jerome Harste's Graduate research program when I was working with him as a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1984. My own work on 'Intertextuality' (I'll do a future post on this topic) also informed its development.

A 'Text Set' consists of a collection of texts that are usually (but not always) books that deal with a single topic that children use for research and writing. It is accompanied by instructions that students follow to guide their research and writing. The theme might be transport, war, mammals, Iceland, global warming, marine life, racial understanding, poverty, space, dinosaurs, the history of.... and so on. The books collected might include non-fiction of varied kinds, fictional narratives, pictures, maps or even poetry (sometimes we would add videos and tapes). A task for children aged 7-10 years might look like this:


Using the non-fiction books on space travel, the poem 'Outer Space' by Carole Weston, and the boy's the scrapbook ('One Small Step') included in the box, write about one of these things:

How did space travel begin? (Which countries? Which people?)
Why would you like to travel into space?
Write about one interesting astronaut (where did he grow up, why did he become an astronaut, where did he train, what has he done as an astronaut...?).
What part do animals play in space travel?

You can supplement tasks like the above with complementary skill sheets that reinforce specific study and research skills that you have been teaching your children (I've listed a helpful link for doing this below).

Children don't learn literacy in a neat serial way. While in the first few years of life their literacy acquisition (at the written word level) tends to be additive, they learn a few letters, some sounds, then some words etc, once the foundations of literacy are laid, progress explodes and development occurs in multiple directions. As well, the development of literacy and their growth as learners and laguage users becomes increasingly intertwined. As children learn about literacy and language, they learn through literacy, their world and themselves as people (see my previous posts on the 'Power of literature').

As children grow as literacy users, reading and writing to learn, not just learning to read and write, they need to acquire more complex study and research skills. These include:

Where do I find the information that I need?
How do I identify the information that relates to my topic?
How do I judge the relevance of information and its truth and accuracy?
How do I make notes in my own words not just copy slabs of text?
How do I synthesise the information and present it in a form that others can access?

Children need help with all parts of the research process and they need to learn these things as they do research. The 'Text Set' is a way to introduce children to the research process in a controlled way. It works well with children as young as 6 years. Obviously the texts that you choose will need to be appropriate for 6 year olds (which will be a challenge). I should comment that applied linguists don't necessarily like a strategy like this one that encourages children to use varied written genres (or forms), because they believe that it can lead to children writing in hybrid forms rather than (for example) a traditional expository form. My view is that you can let them use varied writing to learn and you also teach them specific written genres like exposition as well.

The great value of the 'Text Set' is that it allows you to present children with multiple written genres which then act as resource for students to explore the topic. The approach also capitalises on the natural process of intertextuality, where children make connections between the things they read, hear, see and experience. The aim is to stimulate their interest as learners and to use a varied range of textual resources to help them along the way.

Why not just do a web search?

As I've already said, the 'Text Set' is a bit like a Google search in a box, so why not just do the Google search? Couldn't you just give your students a web link that directs them to a prepared list of resources online? Yes you could and it may well achieve some of the same outcomes, but the library will have resources that you can't get online and it offers more control for the teacher of the learning process and the chance to teach study and research skills along the way.

My view is that the Google search for the young child will often have as its focus searching to find information, rather than reading to learn. As well, we know that readers behave differently online - they tend to 'bounce around' almost randomly, there are quick decisions based on a few words in a link, and the behaviour is rather volatile. The skills required for online literacy are different to traditional study and research skills. A more controlled strategy like the 'Text Set' allows a more systematic treatment of basic research skills that require careful sifting of information, considered judgments about the quality of the content, and organization of what is being learned not just cutting and pasting other people's information.

While children will learn some of these as they explore the Internet themselves, they won't necessarily acquire the research skills without teacher help.

My preference is to teach children basic research skills as they learn to use the Internet. At times this will require non-web lessons that focus on the research process. At other times, you will plan web-based tasks and you might even combine the two. For example, a good variation to my 'Text Set' idea would be to supplement the task above with some web-based resources. For the task above on 'Space', you could add the following list of links:

Lots of space poetry (here)
Check out these images from the Hubble Telescope (here)
Check out the NASA - 'Kennedy Space Center' site (here)
Phoenix Mars Mission (here) - don't miss the Kids Section (here) and Mars 101 (here)
Follow 'Diary of an Astronaut' (here)
Have a look at this video on board the Space Shuttle as it blasts into space (here)

Related links and resources

For an excellent summary of the research process for children check out 'Big6 Kids' (here)

See my previous post on comprehension (here)

Teaching and Supporting Children’s Comprehension

Introduction

Why a post on comprehension? First, because there is no more important literacy topic than helping children to understand and interpret what they read, view, hear and experience. Second, because this is one area of literacy that it is so badly supported by many teachers and parents. Third, because it has been a topic neglected by researchers and teacher educators in recent years. I may do a series of posts but first a simple introduction.

What is comprehension?

I'll offer you my own definition:

Comprehension is the ability to understand, interpret, appreciate and critique written and spoken language, images and film.

Traditionally, the term comprehension was used primarily to describe the ability to understand written and spoken language, but in recent times teachers and researchers have increasingly stressed the need to include new media as we move towards more digital and visual communication in our world. Some have even argued that the written word is no longer as important as it once was. I don’t agree with this view (see my post here on "Writing, communication and technology"), but I do believe that we have a responsibility to help children learn to comprehend more than just the written word. Unfortunately, in the debate about new ways to create meaning and communicate, terms like comprehension have been neglected.

Comprehension is an important term because it recognizes that the authors of texts, and hence the texts themselves, have intent and purpose. They are not just words that we use to construct anything we want. This seems self evident when we talk about comprehending a timetable or a set of IKEA instructions, but even novels and poetry have been written by authors with purposes, audiences and contexts that have shaped their texts. We could say the same of images and film. As we move from factual to poetic forms, or from instructions to art, there is a greater sense of openness to interpretation, but nonetheless, every text, image, film etc has been created with an intended meaning and purpose. To assume otherwise is the folly of extreme relativism, where the relativist assumes that one thing (e.g. meaning of a poem, values, beauty of art, knowledge of something) is relative to one's particular framework or standpoint. In its most extreme form, there is no truth; no single intended meaning, no true judgment of quality and worth and so on. The relativist would claim that the meaning of a text depends on what one brings to it. They would claim the same of images (art, advertising, cartoons etc), recorded words and sounds, music, video images and multimodal texts that we see increasingly in our world, especially when using the Internet. I think the term comprehension still has great relevance because it is a reminder that as readers, viewers and web surfers we need to be able to understand, interpret, appreciate and critique what we read, view, hear and even experience.

The foundations of comprehension in the first 5 years of life

There is much that parents and preschool teachers can do to encourage children’s comprehension. Here are 9 simple tips.

• Read regularly (at least daily) to your children and talk about the things that you read.
• Try to read the book with emotion, with invented sound effects, with different voices for characters and the narrator, changes in voice volume and tone - much meaning is communicated this way.
• Support their emerging understanding of what they read or hear by encouraging them to look at pictures and images and relate these to the words that you read. Emphasise key words or repetitive patterns in the book “But don’t forget the bacon”, “But where is the Green Sheep?”
• Encourage them to relate ideas, language and knowledge that a book introduces to other areas of learning or life – “You’ve got a teddy too”, “His puppy is like Darren’s puppy”, “We saw an elephant like this one at the zoo”.
• Encourage them to draw, sing, talk about, act out, make things, dress up and so on, in response to the things that you read to them or they read themselves.
• Encourage them to memorise and learn things from the books they read or listen to. You can’t read “Wombat Stew” without reciting over and over again “Wombat stew, Wombat stew, Gooey, brewy, Yummy, chewy, Wombat stew!”
• Encourage them to make connections between the things they read, view and experience – “This story is like in Shaun the Sheep when he…..”.
• Read varied books – different story types, factual books as well as fiction, poetry and prose, different forms of illustrations and so on.
• Watch TV shows, videos and movies with your children and talk about them, explain things, try to make connections with stories they have read, encourage response with art, drawing, play dough, puppets, dressing up, acting out and so on.
  

“Texts teach what readers learn”

Simple strategies like the above actually encourage comprehension by teaching children about language, texts and the purposes of such texts. An English colleague of mine Margaret Meek (Meek, 1987) puts it this way – “Texts teach what readers learn”. She argues that children learn a great deal about written language and how texts work as part of the experience of using written language, and in particular, “by becoming involved in what they read”. Meek argues that children’s early experiences of reading and being read literature can teach them many things. Interaction with adults as they encounter books is vital to this early learning.

Meek recognises that one of the most powerful parts of the early experiences of literature for the very young is the interaction that takes place between an adult and child as part of the reading of a text (the earlier post that I did on 'Guiding Children's Learning' is of relevance here too). Many things about language, discourse and the world are learned as children engage with books, videos, music etc. They can learn simple things like vocabulary and gain knowledge of simple and complex things. Some of the more complex things they learn require them to begin to interpret, understand, appreciate and critique.

For example, how does a child learn to distinguish the hero from the villain in a story? Between real and imaginary? How do children first realise the difference in characters from one text to another? When do they first learn that a bear isn’t necessarily just a cuddly friend but a potentially dangerous animal? Let me illustrate this point. My first grandchild Jacob (who was 15 months old at the time, about the age in the photo below) learned this during a reading of Brenda Parkes simple predictable picture book titled “Who’s in the Shed”. The book has a simple plot. A truck arrives at a farm and an animal is unloaded and placed in a shed. We don’t see what is unloaded but as we turn each page a small part of the animal is revealed through a window. On each page the refrain is “Who’s in the shed?” and a little more is revealed. When the final page is reached the full image of a grizzly brown bear appears behind a barred window. Showing claws and big teeth it is fierce. On the first two readings Jacob’s interest didn’t allow us to reach the end of the story. But by the third reading I growled (loudly and dramatically) as the bear was revealed. Jacob jumped slightly and then said “again”, meaning of course he wanted it read again.

On the second reading when the final page was reached and I growled again, he jumped and ran to the door of the room looking back at the picture. The next few visits to our house he would enter my study and move tentatively towards the book (still on a coffee table), open several pages then retreat to a safe distance and make a growling noise. What had Jacob learned? First, that not all bears are cute and cuddly. Second, that books have the power to shift the emotions, to evoke emotional responses. Third, that authors have the habit of revealing their most significant insight near the end of the story. Fourth, that author’s structure and layer their meanings to tell their story. Fifth, that word and pictures have a relationship.

Books for many children offer opportunities to consider for the first time major issues such as life and death (see my recent post on this here), pain and suffering, joy and sadness, fear and frustration, truth and falsehood. As children grow older and encounter more and more language, new aspects of the human condition are brought into focus, language devices are discovered, literary devices for plot development and characterisation are observed and understood for the first time. Encounters between readers and texts have great potential to develop reading comprehension and the key is active engagement and discussion between an adult and child, as they encounter books, films, pictures, music, firsthand experiences and so on.

Reference

Teachers and educators can read a full paper on some of the issues raised above as well as discussion about technology, literacy and the challenges of multimodal texts on my website (here).

Afterword

JACOB is Six today!! Happy birthday Jake.