Quote: "Struggling readers, in contrast, are frustrated; they don't understand what they're reading, don't like to read, and aren't likely to read in the future." Also, I liked this quote too! - "Teachers teach these skills and students practice them until they become automatic procedures that don't require conscious thought or interpretation."
Comment: I like the first quote because I am now motivated to teach comprehension skills. Before reading this, I couldn't really see their importance. However, if students don't have comprehension skills, they're going to hate reading. I just always thought that people who hated reading just simply didn't like it. But it makes sense that they don't understand what they're reading so it's not worth it to them. I like quote number two because during this reading I was thinking, "I comprehend well but I don't use any of these strategies" But then this quote popped up and I realized it's because some elementary teacher taught me these skills a long time ago and now I just do them automatically! Amazing!
Question: So, I already stated that I agree with teaching comprehension skills, but for some reason I do not see the importance of the predicting strategy. I think it is a dumb strategy. I don't pick up a book and start to predict what's going to happen, because I don't know what's gong to happen, that's why I want to read it! Also, it doesn't seem like predictions help students with comprehending the story because they're just making guesses as to what happens, then find out later if they were wrong or right. what's the point? So my question is, do you think predicting is a good comprehension strategy? If so, why? If not, why?
Whitney, you bring up an interesting point. I know that personally, I informally use the predicting strategy when I read or watch movies, etc. I think we all subconsciously predict what will happen in a movie or a book and overtime we learn and become better at predicting things/events that will happen. I think it is good to be able to anticipate things that will happen in life and it starts when children are young. There may not seem much of a point to teach predicting strategies to children when they are young, but I believe it will help them in the future because students will learn to predict from the different context clues, which will bring them a deeper understanding (comprehension) of what they are reading.
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