Have Students Self-Monitor and Clarify for Understanding

When readers come across a challenge during reading, they have some choices: abandon that section, reread and try again, or spend a little more time “fixing” their comprehension by using tools implicitly. Readers might quit the reading process if they are not confident about their comprehension or if they don’t have some tools in their reading toolkit to use to clarify and fix their broken comprehension.

Kelly Gallagher (2004) cites the following reasons students’ comprehension is impeded:

• [The student was] not in the right frame of mind to read . • [The student] had not identified a purpose for reading . • [The student was] not aware of the exact point when their comprehension began to falter . • [The student] had no idea what to do when they started to lose meaning . • [The student is] making a not-so-subtle plea for “reader’s welfare” (a term coined by Karen Feathers in her 1993 book Infotext)—hoping that the teacher [would] provide them with the meaning without their having to expend any real reading effort . (p . 64)

Teachers should explicitly teach and model tools to keep students going when the going gets tough. Students must learn to identify confusing words, parts, or sections that might impair their comprehension while reading a text (self-monitor), be able to explain why they are confusing, and choose strategies independently to achieve comprehension (clarify). Grade level by grade level, teachers collect, teach, and contribute these fix-up strategies for students to add to their self-monitoring toolkit.

According to Sousa (2014), successful reading comprehension requires reciprocity among the following three phases. Challenges or problems in any one of these phases can cause reading difficulties.

1. Auditory processing, phonemic awareness, and phonic phase: What do I hear? (/dawg/) 2. Visual processing (orthography) phase: What do I see? (the letters d-o-g) 3. Semantic processing (understanding context) phase: What does this mean? (the association between the word and its meaning—a furry animal that barks)

Chapter 4 (page 55) provides tools to support the first two phases. This chapter explores tools to address comprehension challenges related to semantic processing, those requiring students to relate the word to previously learned words allowing for deeper understanding. While students are struggling with a word, fixing it is very different from teaching students self-monitoring tools. Teachers should invest in instruction that helps students find and notice their errors and respond accordingly. There are three critical attributes of teaching for self-monitoring based on the works of literacy experts Peter Johnston and Marie Clay: (1) teacher observation and hypothesizing, (2) noticing and naming, and (3) teaching for strategic activity and agency (as cited in Anderson & Kaye, 2017). Cognitive monitoring, or self-monitoring, is a foundation for successful strategic reading. Clay’s book Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control, revised in 2015, gives the following definition of self-monitoring: “Self-monitoring in reading means being aware when you successfully construct the author’s message and when you notice something is amiss with meaning, structure, or graphophonic information” (as cited in Anderson & Kaye, 2017, p. 544). Many tools in this chapter will reflect these three critical components.