Jen, Dee, Clara, and Treasa are joined by Professor Timothy Shanahan in this 4 hour recorded symposium to discuss comprehension and complex texts.

Here’s what is covered:
👉🏻Comprehending Informational Text
👉🏻Active Self-Regulation in comprehension
👉🏻The place of comprehension strategies
👉🏻Inference skills for developing readers
👉🏻The place of complex texts in the classroom

You will have access to the recording for 30 days from the date of purchase. Slides and resources are also provided.

Insights on Informational Text

 The ability to comprehend informational text is crucial to students’ overall literacy success (Zimmerman & Reed, 2020). Ireland's results in PIRLS 2021 continues to reflect the need for increased use of informational text in the Irish primary classroom. This presentation unpacks the role of informational text in supporting comprehensive reading and writing instruction across the primary years.

 Active Self-Regulation in Comprehension

The Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tunmer 1986) proposes that Reading Comprehension is the product of Word Recognition and Language Comprehension. However, even when both of these are strong, some can still struggle with reading comprehension. Duke and Cartwright (2021) outline other contributors that play a role, such as motivation and engagement, and executive functioning skills. This presentation will explore why active self-regulation affects some children and what can be done about it.

Comprehension Strategies: To teach or not to teach?

 How can we plan comprehension strategy instruction to make sure that it is effective and meaningful? In this session we will examine potential pitfalls, how much focus is needed and how to integrate strategy instruction with knowledge building.

Young Detectives: Cultivating Inference Skills in Early Learners

 In this session, we will explore strategies to help young children develop inference-making skills, a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. Even at a young age, children are capable of understanding simple inferences with the right support. Using age-appropriate texts and interactive activities, this session will offer practical tips to foster children's ability to read between the lines and understand implicit meanings, preparing them for more complex analytical skills in the future.

Teaching reading with challenging texts

For decades reading educators have insisted that the most successful way to teach reading is to match student reading levels to the demands of the texts they are to work with. This approach includes fealty to the idea of there being an instructional reading level – a level of reading ability if matched by appropriate books placement will facilitate learning, differentiating reading instruction by placing students in books of differing levels, and small group lessons. This presentation challenges those beliefs by examining the research which shows that students make greater learning progress when placed in texts that in the past would have been designated as frustrating. Practical examples of the kinds of instructional support to use to allow students to learn more from reading instruction.