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Teaching Metacognitive Reading Comprehension Techniques to Gallaudet University Freshmen Robert E. McDonald The reading difficulty of college textbooks is a challenge faced by all college students. However, in facing this challenge, many deaf college students lack the comprehension strategies they need to make textbook study profitable and efficient. A recently developed reading-comprehension course for Gallaudet University freshmen gives them practice in using a set of comprehension techniques that they may immediately apply to their textbook study in other courses. The reading comprehension of students entering Gallaudet's English program is tested using the Degrees of Reading Power Test (DRP). Mean InstructionalLevel scores for that group have recently ranged between 62 and 64. The reading difficulty of textbooks is about 70 DRP units, a level at which many Gallaudet freshmen experience frustration. Although students take the DRP test again at the end of the new course, it is not specifically aimed at improving performance on this test. At present, scores on the DRP have no bearing on course grades. Instead, the new course is seen as a cornerstone for future programs promoting improved reading comprehension and learning throughout undergraduate studies. Planning is already under way to train tutors to help students apply this course's reading-comprehension techniques to studies across the disciplines. Plans are also being made to help instructors across the disciplines to exploit metacognitivecomprehension techniques in the work required in their courses. In other words, developers of the course believe that wide application of these techniques should be valued over short-term improvement in test performance. 400 Teaching Metacognitive Reading Comprehension Techniques 401 Description of the Course The course is designed around the assumption that reading is not so much a process of decoding text as it is a process of constructing meaning-by drawing together the reader's relevant prior knowledge, the cues of the text, and its context. To promote active construction of meaning, students are given frequent opportunities to predict meanings, to ask teacher-like questions, to summarize, and to explain relationships between ideas. These four essential devices of comprehension derive from the work of Palincsar and Brown, and were selected for this course because the four processes entail most of the major skills of comprehension. To these the designers of the course have added vocabulary management techniques. Predicting, questioning, summarizing, and explaining are practiced within the context of two overarching class activities: the Multiple Reading Strategy and conceptual mapping or graphing, usually instructor-led activities. The Multiple Reading Strategy The Multiple Reading Strategy (MRS) is essentially a way of getting students to read a text several times, each time with a different purpose. It leads the students through several processes: predicting the contents of the text; a timed reading to discover the main idea and perhaps the main supporting points; an untimed reading for fuller comprehension, and validation of the predictions. Prediction of the contents of the text is intended to activate students' schemata and prepare them to read actively. The object of the timed reading for main and supporting ideas is a mental or graphic outline of the text (some instructors may use the activity as the basis for a conceptual web that can later be elaborated by students). Following the untimed reading, the class returns to the predictions to see which were accurate, and here it is intended that students recognize that they were able to make valid predictions, that predictions improve engagement with the subject and therefore promote better comprehension, and that even irrelevant predictions help one attend to new information. Conceptual Graphing Conceptual graphing or "mapping" is an opportunity for students to create a new schema for the information of the reading material. To the linear dimension of outlines and summaries, graphing adds a spatial dimension that is thought to involve deeper mental processing of the information. The practice has obvious links with the architectural metaphors used by ancient orators in the process of memoria, the memorizing of the arguments of a speech, and it has long been used as a recall technique by test-takers and writers. But the full importance of ideas and their relationships has yet to be fully understood. Students who are new to this activity or who have done conceptual mapping in lower grades tend to begin with simple web or wheel graphs, arranging supporting ideas around a central subject or main idea. However, faced with complex text structures and the models of the instructor, they soon recognize these early [3.15.5.183...

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