Comprehension Instruction: Research-based best practice
Cathy Collins Block and Michael Pressley (eds) NY, Guildford Press, 2002.

This is a broad ranging, thoroughly solid text that attempts to inform educators of the advances in our understanding of the nature of comprehension, how these processes can be taught and what should be the dominant foci of instruction where due recognition is paid to the teaching of comprehension. It is impressive that there is so much more understanding of what is required to teach reading comprehension since Dolores Durkin (1978) severely criticized the lack of attention to this component of reading instruction. What particularly impressed the editors was the degree of consensus amongst contributors about the many areas of comprehension instruction that are worthy of attention.

The book consists of four groups of studies with an introduction and conclusion provided by the two editors. The four groups are:

• Theoretical foundations: New directions for the future

• Branching out and expanding our horizons in the 21st century

• Comprehension instruction in preschool, primary, and intermediate grades

• Intensification of comprehension instruction throughout middle school, high school and college.

In reading this book, it is very useful to start with the introduction and conclusion to clarify the issues involved. In particular, the conclusion stipulates what strategies need to be taught to promote successful comprehension. In ‘Summing up’, Block and Pressley conclude the following:

• ‘Begin teaching comprehension skills during the primary grades’…and ‘continue to teach comprehension processes for as long as students need it.

• Develop decoding skills in readers’ ensuring that students have sufficient instruction to develop fluency.

• ‘Teach vocabulary’ understanding the relationship between word knowledge and comprehension.

• ‘Have students read diverse and worthwhile texts as they perform diverse and worthwhile text processing tasks’ incorporating an awareness of prior knowledge students bring to a variety of texts – narrative, expository, web based; as well students need to engage in strategies that involve them comprehending main ideas, eliciting important details, and tracking and linking important ideas across texts.

• ‘Teach students to relate their prior knowledge to new texts when prior knowledge can increase understanding of new texts’ with emphasis on drawing students to become aware of their prior knowledge and how this links to texts. The connection is the degree of consciousness brought to the reading.

• ‘Teach students the well-validated comprehension strategies’; these may be taught as individual strategies or as a repertoire, for example in Collaborative Strategic students are taught previewing, monitoring and clarifying, summarizing, self-questioning and summarizing as a constellation of strategies.

• ‘Teach students to monitor whether they are understanding text’ and make adjustments where this is not happening.

Because this is a complex text and readers have different starting points and interests it is hard to recommend individual chapters. However, it seemed important to this reader, to consult the chapters dealing with the place of direct instruction (The case for direct explanation of strategies), the role of imaging in comprehension (Imagery: A strategy for enhancing comprehension) and the role of metacognition (Metacognition in comprehension instruction) in the comprehending process.

What is really impressed on the reader is the need for teaching explicitly comprehending processes. It cannot be presumed, as it was frequently in the past, that comprehension skills were ‘picked’ up along the way. If there is one clear message that runs through this text is that mature comprehension needs to be consciously taught over the long haul by the implementation of carefully constructed strategies. Such attentive teaching presumably requires careful planning amongst teachers.

As I have indicated this text requires considerable commitment to glean the essence and significant details. Consequently, I presume it would be most welcome by students of teaching but I would it suggest that it could be an excellent basis for professional development in school contexts where teachers as a collective are reviewing their approaches to teaching comprehension. Such a commitment would, I suggest, result in teachers’ scrutinizing critically ‘lighter’ texts that seem at first glance more closely connected to the daily curriculum.

(Available through the Education Queensland Professional Collection)