Reading Comprehension Groups

Thanks to John for this tip:

A reading comprehension strategy that has been proven to enhance students’ abilities to read and learn text material involves four processing skills: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. Students are arranged in groups of four and given a section of text to read. They then complete the above four reading processes to understand and learn the text material.

Summarizing: the students condense the text into an expression in their own words that includes the main ideas/concepts and important details.

Questioning: this phase can be elaborate and involved. Students might raise questions about facts in the text as a means of review or test preparation. They may go beyond the text, however, to ask inferential questions that require outside the text knowledge to answer. Questions may involve application/synthesis thinking within the group.

Clarifying: this skill might simply involve developing a clear understanding of terms and concepts the students have just read. The clarifying process may also be directly related to answering questions raised. Clarifying asks the students to delve deeper into the material to achieve a thorough understanding.

Predicting: readers need to stop at some midway point to discuss what conclusions or what direction the text is headed. This process involves abstract or inferential thinking and requires a good understanding of the text up to the stopping point. Predicting outcomes raises students’ attention levels to learn if the prediction is correct or not.

Students can use this process individually, in pairs, or in small groups. The groups allow for specialization, each student being responsible for one of the four elements. The entire technique can be applied to development of general reading skills or, and more importantly, the development of a solid understanding of an assigned text.

http://www.readingquest.org/strat/rt

Also, the following website has a complete root word list, some 600 or so roots, that could be of value in many disciplines.

http://www.vocabulary.com