Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A Handbook

by Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain, Carsten Elbro

The ultimate aim of reading is not the process but to understand what we read and comprehension can take place at many different levels. There has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of reading comprehension in recent years but despite this there is very little written on this vital topic accessible to trainee and practicing teachers.The Handbook of Reading Comprehension presents an overview of recent findings on reading comprehension and comprehension problems in children. It provides a detailed examination of the characteristics of children who have reading comprehension difficulties, and examines ways in which comprehension can be supported and improved. It is accessibly written for students and professionals with no previous background in the psychology of reading or reading problems.This indispensable handbook asks the question 'what is comprehension?' The authors consider comprehension of different units of understanding single words, sentences, and connected prose and outline what readers (and listeners) have to do to successfully understand an extended text. This book also considers comprehension for different purposes, in particular reading for pleasure and reading to learn and explores how reader characteristics such as interest and motivation can influence the comprehension process.Different skills contribute to successful reading comprehension. These include word reading ability, vocabulary knowledge, syntactic skills, memory, and discourse level skills such as the ability to make inferences, knowledge about text structure, and metacognitive skills. The authors discuss how each one contributes to the development of reading comprehension skill and how the development of these skills (or their precursors) in pre-readers, provides the foundation for reading comprehension development.Areas covered -Word reading and comprehensionDevelopment of comprehension skillsComprehension difficultiesAssessmentTeaching for improvementThroughout the text successful experimental and classroom based interventions will be highlighted, practical tips for teachers and summary boxes detailing key points and explaining technical terms will be included in each chapter

Genres: Education, Teaching

130 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Andrea Levin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is useful in that it breaks down the reading comprehension process and provides the research behind methods that improve reading comprehension. I have found other books that are more useful for classroom implementation, but this is the book that I would use to prove the efficacy of methods covered in more practical books.

[Andrew Tattersall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does what it says on the tin, a handbook for teaching reading comprehension.

I started this from the point that reading and writing are the weaker skills amongst my Cambodian students and what can I do to help them improve in reading. I thought this gives a very good overview of the process of reading, word decoding and reading comprehension, and then the components of reading comprehension. For those components of reading comprehension it then detailed problems which might arise for students and measures to deal with them. It was very thought provoking about teaching reading and very practical in things suggested to do with students. I would recommend this a sort very readable, yet thought provoking and practical book on the practice of teaching reading.

[Cassie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book on the recommendation of a colleague who read it for a graduate program. The book discusses the skills necessary for reading comprehension and why struggling readers struggle. For each deficit that poor comprehenders have, the authors suggest specific strategies that teachers can use to help struggling readers improve their comprehension skills. All of this is based in recent research on reading comprehension, and the authors do a thorough job of giving an overview of research findings and their implications. As an instructional facilitator with very little training in the science of reading, I appreciate the authors' efforts to make this book accessible. I had many aha moments when reading; I feel like the authors have a very good understanding of why some students are successful comprehenders, and why other students struggle with reading comprehension.

[Jenn Swiderski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provided a great deal of research that describes the components of reading comprehension. Rather than isolated skills, it describes many of the processes that readers go through. The authors touch on the interconnectedness of the components of reading comprehension, discuss ways to assess students to see if they are having a breakdown in a certain process, and describe why students might be having difficulties. This was a MEATY book. It took me months to get through it. I was a little disappointed in the last chapter because I thought it might move away from solely discussing reading from a research stance and give more practical, put-to-use in the classroom ideas.

[Ruthie Planamenta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book for our grammar school staff meetings, and I loved all the puzzles!! It’s very helpful to have those brief sample passages to simulate reading comprehension issues our students may struggle with.

[Cheryl Neer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oakhill's useful handbook explains and gives suggestions for improving students' reading comprehension: inferencing, vocabulary, sentences and syntax, text structures and self monitoring.

[Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a bible

[Ishaq · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read and comprehensible

Good read and comprehensible for all backgrounds knowledge .it highlights were given extra care and attention and summarizes is very well.

[Duan 端書房 · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's much more important to teach people to build meanings of their own width and depth than to merely translate a text word by word.

[Claire Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful. Will keep to pull from when planning reading small groups

[Esther B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great practitioner overview on the interplay of the main sources of struggle for poor reading comprehenders. Some initial reasons explored and teaching techniques suggested.

[Leigh Martella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was okay. It good points, and is definitely grounded in the Science of Reading, but I wanted more.