| Literacy Training: Building Comprehension Through Questions |
Context: |
| This activity asks tutors to practice and model questioning skills about books and stories in three specific ways. Such questions help children make connections with what they read and build comprehension skills, while deepening the tutor/tutee relationship. Introduce this activity after tutors have established a relationship with their tutees and have discovered some mutually interesting topics to share. The strategies are useful for reading at any grade level. |
Goals: |
Comprehension questions allow reading tutors to:
- Learn how children connect their own experience to stories and topics (text-to-self)
- Help children make broader connections between stories, prior knowledge, and world events (text-to-world)
- Help children compare, contrast, and make connections between books on similar topics (text-to-text)
- Build literacy and comprehension skills through discussion
- Model enthusiasm for reading
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Materials/Preparation: |
| Ask tutors to bring two or three good books on the same topic — books they think their tutees might enjoy. Sample topics might be pets, sports, heroes and heroines, travel adventures, magic, the circus, etc. |
Activity: |
Point out that good readers ask themselves questions while reading in order to make connections to and between the text, their own lives, the world around them, and other texts. Introduce three specific modes of questioning:
- Text-to-self: connections between the story and personal experience. Example: Do you have a pet, too?
- Text-to-world: connections between the story and the broader world. Example: Do you know what happens to pets when they get lost?
- Text-to-text: connections between this story and other books. Example: Have you read any other stories about someone who has a special pet?
Ask tutors to work in pairs, with one playing the role of tutee and the other playing the tutor. Tutors ask tutees to select two of the books they brought and then read the books to or with them. As they read, tutors practice asking and modeling questions. Have tutors change roles halfway through the exercise. |
Key Questions and Points to Remember: |
Debrief the activity by discussing the following questions:
- What worked best (for building relationships, creating interesting discussions, etc.) in the questions you asked?
- What good strategies did you observe or experience?
- What was difficult about this activity? How can we make it easier?
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Developed by LEARNS, a partnership of the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (1-800-361-7890) and Bank Street College of Education (1-800-930-5664). For additional activities or assistance, please call. |
