Reading Roles Based on Research-Backed Reading Strategies

In the blog post Reading Roles: Teaching Metacognitive Reading Comprehension Strategies I outlined the Reading Roles resource. If you've not yet read that, read it now before continuing with this blog post.

Student – clarifying/monitoring

This Reading Role encourages children to stop and think about things that they don’t immediately understand. Some children are content to skip over what they don’t understand which can lead to holes in their understanding – this strategy helps to avoid that happening.

Children should be taught to identify and parts of text that they need to clarify and then to do something to help their understanding. To do this they can:

• Ask questions of themselves, such as: What does this word mean? How can I find out its meaning? What does this phrase mean in this context?

• Re-read the parts they didn’t understand (sometimes reading out loud or hearing it read aloud will help them to understand something better)

• Read ahead to see if it brings clarity to the parts they didn’t understand

• Ask others for help

• Begin to read more slowly and carefully

Professor - using prior/background knowledge

As this article points out ‘We've had our share of lively debates in the field of reading, but not on this particular topic: background knowledge. There is a virtual consensus that background knowledge is essential for reading comprehension.’ When we read we need background knowledge of word and phrase meanings, text type and for making inferences.

D.T. Willingham gives good examples of how having background knowledge is essential to comprehension. Look at the following excerpt:

“John’s face fell as he looked down at his protruding belly. The invitation specified ‘black tie’ and he hadn’t worn his tux since his own wedding, 20 years earlier.”

Of this he writes:

‘…. [having] background knowledge …means that there is a greater probability that you will have the knowledge to successfully make the necessary inferences to understand a text (e.g., you will know that people are often heavier 20 years after their wedding and, thus, John is worried that his tux won’t fit).’ (https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/how-knowledge-helps)

This strategy can be employed easily in the classroom by asking questions such as:

• What information do you already know about…?

• Where have you seen something like this before?

• What prior knowledge do you have that has helped you to understand? Where did this prior knowledge come from? Experience? Another book? A film?

Encouraging children to think deliberately about connections they are making should eventually lead to this strategy being an automatic skill.

There is an overlap with this Reading Role and others, most notably Translator – vocabulary and Interpreter – authorial intent. It helps to have prior knowledge of words and phrases in order to exercise these skills. The use of prior knowledge is also a significant component in making inferences (Detective – inferring).

Quiz Master – questioning

Questioning is a key part of other reading strategies which goes to show how important this strategy is for reading comprehension. Questions help us to engage with a text and this engagement leads to greater comprehension.

‘Numerous studies have shown that training students in self-questioning enhances comprehension (Andre and Anderson, 1979; Nolte and Singer, 1985; Palincsar, 1984; Singer and Donlan, 1982; Yopp, 1987). As Singer (1978) and Yopp (1988) have argued, the process of self-questioning, or active comprehension, facilitates comprehension because it requires students to use their metacognitive capacities and activates their background knowledge.’ 

(https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1459&context=reading_horizons)

In addition to questioning their own understanding of the text (see Student – clarifying/monitoring) children should be taught to ask questions about the text as they read. Examples of these questions might include:

• What is the author hiding from me?

• What is going to happen next? Why do I think that?

• I wonder why the character feels that way?

• What would I do if I was in that situation?

• What other stories does this remind me of?

• How does the author want the reader to feel right now?

• Why did the character do that?

• How will the character solve this problem?

  
  

It’s impossible to give a definitive list of questions that might be asked as every text should provoke different lines of questioning. The best way to teach this will be for the teacher to think aloud as they read, modelling the questions that they ask themselves when reading. The classic ‘W’ words are a good starting point for the development of questions about a text.

Director – visualising

Picturebooks are brilliant for comprehension – the pictures often deliberately give extra information that the text does not. Children who learn to read with picturebooks are usually quite good at using pictures to help them with their understanding. But what happens when they begin to read books with fewer pictures? They will need to learn to create their own pictures in their head, or ‘mind movies’.

This strategy is concerned with building a good mental image – the better a text has been comprehended the better the mental image (or visualisation) will be. But the act of deliberately trying to visualise a text means that readers are paying more attention and exerting more effort into the comprehension which actually ends up improving the levels of comprehension. This Reading Role could easily have been called Artist but stories in books are more akin to stories in movies as the story moves along.

The Reading Rockets website has a good example of how teachers might develop this strategy with children: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/picture-using-mental-imagery-while-reading

Weather Forecaster – predicting

This reading role will be familiar with many teachers who use the cover of the book, the blurb or text excerpts to encourage children to make predictions.

Making predictions is easy, but making accurate, worthwhile predictions is less easy. Making predictions relies heavily on background knowledge, particularly background knowledge of characteristics of text types and examples of texts from within those genres.

Many a time will teachers have heard a ridiculous prediction about a children's story: "They all die." "Aliens show up and take them away." etc. This is just children using their imagination, not their knowledge of the kinds of things that happen in a particular genre aimed at a particular age range.

Asking children to think about books and films they've experienced before, as well as life experiences, to help them think through plausible predictions will help children make more worthwhile predictions.

The purpose of making predictions about a text is to aid with sense-checking as the reader is reading (think back to the Quiz Master and Student roles). Having made a plausible prediction, readers are then on the lookout to see if that thing happens or not, which makes them engage in the text more.

Editor – summarising

Summarising involves using one's own words to give a shortened version of what the text is about. This can be done verbally/orally or in writing, often as bullet points.

Asking pupils to summarise a text causes them to think about the main points of the text. The points that, if you stripped everything else away, would still tell the story, or provide the key information about the topic.

It can be sometimes useful to provide pupils with a summary of a text they are going to read before reading so that they can be on the lookout for those key points - a form of monitoring (see the Student role).

Detective – inferring

There is a lot to say about inference-making and it is a much-researched subject. Making inferences is difficult for two main reasons:

• It relies heavily on using background knowledge

• It requires a good understanding of the text, thus it relies on readers having been able to apply many other strategies (such as the ones already outlined in this blog post). For more on this please read the following post: https://www.aidansevers.com/post/reading-comprehension-teaching-a-metacognitive-approach-to-inference-making)

In short though, pupils must first be aware that inference-making is a thing - that authors don't make everything explicit and that readers are given clues about things such as how a character feels or why a character might act a certain way.

Once pupils are aware of this, pupils can be guided towards making inferences in many ways, for example, by giving them a quote from the text and asking them what they think the character is feeling based on the quote (for an example of this, and associated resources, linked to the KS2 reading tests, see this blog post: https://www.aidansevers.com/post/sats-2025-answering-3-mark-reading-sats-questions-an-update)

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