BBR Chapter 6

Chapter six discusses several different strategies to help improve students' comprehension of difficult texts.  Though each strategy is a little bit different, they all help students determine the main idea and most important parts of each text.  When presented with a text, students can feel intimidated easily, and they might not even try to understand what they are reading.  These strategies give students the support they need to read a text, and they also build interest, which is sometimes overlooked.  I thought that the "text appetizers" was a great way to gain student interest before reading a text.  In the example, they made a reference to a city council threatening to close down a skate park and then related it back to the American Revolution.  By putting something historical and somewhat difficult to understand in terms that the students can relate to, students will make a meaningful connection to the material, and they will be more likely to comprehend and remember the information.

Another strategy from this  chapter that I use regularly in my classroom is the graphic organizer.  When writing a verb conjugation, I always use different colors and try to organize each verb in the same way. I have also done this when we were talking about the history of the French language.  As an in class assignment, students read a short text and made a timeline with what they thought was the most important information.  What I took from this chapter was that measuring comprehension does not have to happen in the form of a test.  These strategies work for different kinds of learners, they each build interest, and they give students the support they need to understand a complex text.  I'm definitely going to try more of the visual strategies in my classroom!