Comprehension Constructors and Text Marking

Matt mentioned in class today that it can be difficult to teach someone how to highlight or underline a text if they have never been taught how to do so. The conversation made me realize that I really don't know how I would teach my students to text mark. I've been text marking since middle school and only vaguely remember being taught how to do this crucial reading strategy. Flipping back through the Do I really have to teach reading? (Tovani, 2004), I realized that the Comprehension Constructor is an excellent tool for introducing text marking as a reading strategy. Tovani provides a very helpful example of a Comprehension Constructor on page 85. In the first column, the students write down a quote and page number from the text. In the second column, the students explain the significance of the quote by making a connection ("this reminds me of..."), raising a question ("I wonder.."), or addressing confusion ("I don't understand..."). (Tovani, 2004) The Comprehension Constructor therefore gets students thinking about why they are selecting certain quotes. This same rationale can be applied to choosing sections of text to highlight. After completing a Comprehension Constructor as a group activity during which the teacher demonstrates thoughtful quote selection, teachers can transfer this activity to a lesson on text marking. Marked sections of a text should reflect a connection that the reader has made with notes in the margin explaining the connection, a question the reader is pondering, or a section that is confusing to the reader. To me, this makes a lot more sense from an instructional perspective than simply saying, "mark the important parts."

This realization that I need to seriously thinking about how to teach text marking to students who have no experience with the startegy is reflective of a larger takeaway that I have from Tovani. That takeaway is that we need to remember that while we might be "expert readers", our students are not. Tovani (2004) writes: "It is important for students to know that you are the expert in the room, but it is also important that you model what it was like for you as a first-time reader of the piece." (p.33) This is something that comes into play when we are reading a class novel for the 2nd or maybe 10th time as teachers. We need to remember our experience of reading the book for the first time, during which we were probably just trying to get the plot straight. Tovani reminds us to look back upon this first time experience and think about what we needed to get through the reading. Did we need background information? Did we need to get to an interesting part before we were engaged? Did we need to understand something about the author? I could go on and on, but it all comes down to the fact that while we might be excited to discuss complex themes or connections that we've noticed after reading a book for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc time, our students are not ready for that level of thinking. We need to start with the basics of: who's writing this book?, who are the main characters?, what's happening?, why do I have a highlighter?...


Tovani, C. (2004). Do I really have to teach reading? Markham, Canada: Stenhouse.