Ideas for helping readers visualize text to promote comprehension at deeper levelsMuch of the writing we assign our students is public writing: writing to communicate with others. Writing-to-learn is personal writing, writing that helps students increase comprehension of texts—fiction and nonfiction—in all disciplines. Reader response compels readers to interact with the text and makes visible for readers and their teachers the depth of text comprehension. This is the sixth in a series of columns on scaffolding writing-to-learn by teaching a variety of reader response strategies before, during, and after reading. Show Good readers visualize as they read a text. They use the words from the text, in combination with background knowledge and prior experiences, connections from their lives and other texts, and inferences made, to construct mental images. When readers create images in their minds that reflect or represent the ideas in the text, they comprehend text at deeper levels and they retain more information and understanding. The most effective way to teach students to visualize is to teach readers to draw images as they read a text as a during-reading response strategy—visual response or “drawing through the text.” When drawing through text, readers draw the important details, images, people, places, and events they are reading, noting the words from the text that helped them, as readers, form the image. Advantages for ReadersThere are a variety of advantages to guiding readers to create sketches of what they read as they read. All these advantages lead to an improvement in comprehension for struggling to proficient readers.
Directions for Drawing through the TextThis during-reading response strategy is a very simple technique as long as students connect what they draw to what they are reading and realize that they do not have to be artists. Students can be encouraged to draw people as stick figures and not to worry about how elaborately they draw.
A 6th grade student draws through an article in Social Studies class. Students commented on the advantages of trying this response method: Drawing through the article is a lot of help to me because it shows how it happened. I can comprehend the information better by illustrating it. Not only does it help me understand it a bit more, but it helps me figure out what happened based on key terms and details. Sketching through the article helped me visualize what was happening in the article. It was a good reading strategy because not only can it help me visualize an image, but you can use a picture to help you comprehend or understand the meaning of a word. This helped me because there were words in the article that I didn’t know.
A 6th grade student draws through an article in Social Studies class. Their teacher commented, “This assignment allowed me to check what my students knew from reading the article. It was beneficial for the students as a reading strategy because they were able to form images in their minds. They were able to replace written annotations that we typically use, with illustrations. As the students drew, they used their margins as a miniature storyboard to explain the information from the text.” In lieu of drawing on a photocopied article, an adaptation of the double-entry journal form [see April 2018 AMLE Magazine for an article on double-entry journals] can be substituted. Teachers can direct readers to copy words, phrases, or sentences that are important to the understanding of the novel or textbook they are reading on the left side of the journal and sketch what they visualize on the right side. Advantages for Teachers7th grade English-Language Arts students create visual responses to NEWSELA articles. Page 2 of each article is shown. The purpose of during-reader response in general and drawing through the text specifically are twofold: (1) readers increase comprehension, especially of complex text and (2) teachers can “see” how their readers comprehend text. Readers’ pictorial response is as varied as their verbal reflections, which gives the teacher more information about students as readers. Using drawings to retell a story, a chapter, or a section of a book—whether fiction or nonfiction—is more than a simple summary of events. It is synthesis, and from the drawings the teacher can recognize and evaluate how and if the reader comprehends the text. 7th grade English-Language Arts students create visual responses to NEWSELA articles. Page 2 of each article is shown. A teacher can observe when readers have difficulty making inferences or misinterpret what they read. For example, in Jewell Parker Rhodes’ novel Ghost Boys, if a reader draws Jerome as a traditional ghost connected with hauntings rather than his invisible (to most) 12-year-old self, the teacher might question whether he comprehended the role of the character and the other ghost boys as black boys who were killed but haven’t left, maybe fulfilling a purpose for the living. A reader may not realize that a word has multiple meanings. If a reader reads that a character was “intoxicated with power” and draws a figure that appears drunk, the teacher knows he does not realize there are multiple meanings for the word intoxicated. Teachers can note miscues. Readers may misread actual words or miss parts of phrases. One student drew a casket for a character’s funeral when the text actually said, “James felt like he had died.” Likewise some students, especially non-native English speakers, may take idioms or metaphors literally, which become apparent through their depictions. ConclusionReader response ensures that reading becomes an interactive activity; constructing meaning from text begins with readers’ unique connections with text. Visual response, or drawing through the text, is yet another form of during-reading response that expands readers’ writing-to-learn toolboxes so that response becomes effective for each individual reader and each reading experience. What are the 4 types of reading strategies?4 Different Types of Reading Techniques. Skimming. Skimming, sometimes referred to as gist reading, means going through the text to grasp the main idea. ... . Scanning. Here, the reader quickly scuttles across sentences to get to a particular piece of information. ... . Intensive Reading. ... . Extensive reading.. What are the strategies in beginning reading?How to Read with a Beginning Reader. Give them time to read. Reading is a skill, and like many other skills, it takes time to develop. ... . Let them reread the same books. Rereading the same words over and over again helps build fluency. ... . Encourage attention to the print. ... . Take turns reading. ... . Have realistic expectations.. What is visualization as a reading strategy?Visualising is the reading strategy that helps your students create a picture in their head of what they're reading. It's almost as if your students are making videos or movies in their heads, all built from their background knowledge, their imagination, and the content of the text.
What are the 5 reading strategies?There are 5 separate strategies that together form the High 5 Reading Strategy.. Activating background knowledge. Research has shown that better comprehension occurs when students are engaged in activities that bridge their old knowledge with the new. ... . Questioning. ... . Analyzing text structure. ... . Visualization. ... . Summarizing.. |