Bridge Reading Comprehension: The Importance Of Reading Comprehension

For many teachers, the following scene may sound all too familiar: on the day a major assignment is due, students enter the classroom in a flurry, toting half unzipped backpacks and the invisible weight of the emotional, social, and personal baggage that all people, particularly teenagers, must balance along with life’s many other requirements—in this case, a dreaded non-fiction reading comprehension task. Some students immediately sit down and hurriedly press pencil to paper, capitalizing on the precious final moments to finish the neglected work before the bell rings. Others sit down calmly, carefully removing homework from their neatly labeled English folder, aware of the expectation that students’ work should be ready for assessment during …show more content…
al, 2009). The practice is powerful because it not only keeps students actively engaged as they read, but also helps them to develop the metacognition to understand why they don’t understand the things that confuse them. In particular, annotation can be a gateway to helping students build the necessary background knowledge and academic vocabulary in context that is critical for reading success (Nagy & Scott, 2000). In addition, making text-self, text-text, and text-world connections helps students to process and remember what they read in meaningful ways (Wolfe & Goldman, 2010). By directly modeling these skills and having my students share their annotations with one another, I hope to both foster community and help students of varying literacy backgrounds and skill levels to see how their peers think about and evaluate the world. In doing so, students can build both empathy and reading skills that they may not have developed as I did through intuition and