Bringing Decodable Texts to Life With Comprehension Strategies - Jill Lauren...

This session was led by Jill Lauren who wrote the text Jen's Web that we used as an exemplar. I chose this session as my main objective at ISTE is to do something for the Juniors, something for the seniors and something for me. This one was for our junior team.

When looking beyond barking at print effective reading instruction must be grounded in cognitive science rather than guessing. Comprehension is calculated as Word Recognition (WR) × Language Comprehension (LC) = Reading Comprehension (RC). Reading is never just loudly pronouncing words (barking at print) without processing meaning. Reading is highly complex, requiring the simultaneous interaction of the 5 pillars of literacy, working memory, and executive function.

• Readers must build three cognitive levels at the exact same time:

  • Decoding the literal words.

  • Integrating the text with prior knowledge.

  • Generating inferences to create a complete mental model.

Early Comprehension is vital and comprehension instruction should start early alongside phonics, rather than waiting until decoding is mastered. Learning to read and reading to learn happen simultaneously.

Inference: 

• Texts are rarely fully explicit. Authors leave gaps, making inference the ultimate predictor of long-term comprehension success.

• Local Inference: Word-level connections, such as understanding synonyms and tracking shifting pronoun references (a common stumbling block for poor comprehenders).

• Global Inference: Broader text-level themes, author's purpose, predictions, and cause-and-effect patterns.

• Proven Efficacy (Dr Amy Elleman, 2017): A meta-analysis shows explicit inference interventions over 2–10 months yield a strong effect size of 0.58. It significantly increases both literal and inferential outcomes for struggling readers.

• Teachers must actively teach students how to activate their background knowledge and explicitly model how to answer inferential questions.

Follow up tasks to support comprehension:

1. Discover the Cover

• Action: Before opening a text, have students look at the title and illustration to predict the story using a prediction box worksheet or the whiteboard.

• The Twist: Ask students to share a time they felt, thought, or acted like the character on the cover. This bridges prior knowledge directly into the context of the book to keep them engaged.

• Text Selection: Use high-quality, vocabulary-rich decodable books with full narrative arcs early on (e.g., Phonics Books like Jen’s Web or Whole Phonics resources) rather than relying solely on low-word repetitive readers.

2. Prediction Playground

• Action: Write 4 possible predictions on the board at a critical point in the text.

• The Twist: After reading a snippet, students choose a prediction, physically move to a corner of the room to discuss it with peers, and then defend their choice to the whole class using text evidence.

• Benefit: Cultivates essential self-questioning and self-explanation habits early.

3. Sentence Practice (True/False Detective)

• Action: Write two true sentences and two false sentences about the text on the board.

• The Twist: Students must identify the false sentences and explicitly prove why they are incorrect by pointing directly to evidence in the text.

• Benefit: Simultaneously builds sentence comprehension, self-monitoring, oral language, active listening, and text-based justification.

The ultimate goal is intrinsic motivation. Starting early with systematic decodable books allows students to experience immediate success, which in turn drives motivation. Intrinsic motivation leads to children reading more, which directly builds a larger vocabulary and broader world knowledge, allowing for deep comprehension.

Inference: When do we use it in our learning?...

Having unpacked and explored the comprehension strategy of inference during reading lessons I wanted my target students to be able to tap into this learning and use their inferencing skills during our maths lesson. As a scaffold for these students I asked my whole class to remind me of when we use inferencing skills in our learning. What completely shocked me was that not one person could answer this question. Incase there was a confusion between inferencing and inference I asked my students what inference was. Again no one could give me an answer! I used a variety of DATS (direct acts of teaching) to prompt a response but still no one gave me a correct response. Thinking on my feet, I recited the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill then asked my learners two questions. 

1. Was Jack a boy or a girl? 
2. How old was Jack? 

When the answers were given I asked, 'How do you know?' I was told that Jack is a boy's name so we can assume he's a boy, and he's young because in all the books they have a little kid drawn. I then cast a written version to the TV and asked everyone to talk to their buddy and show them where this information was in the text. One student said 'We can't Miss because it's not there.' I then explained it isn't written in the text because there are enough clues in the words (and images) for us to logically guess this information. 

I think my learners were thrown by my question because we always talk about inference and respond to inferential questions during our guided reading sessions, but on this occasion I asked them a reading based question during our maths learning time. Unfortunately none of my learners were able to knowingly transfer learning from one context to another. 

We then looked at the maths question: 

197 adults and 152 children were on the afternoon flight from Christchurch to Auckland. If 176 of the people that boarded the plane are male, how many are female? 

In pairs I asked my learners to read the question aloud then reread it and find the maths. Once they had the numbers to work with I asked them to decided were they being asked to find a sum or an addend. When that had been established I asked them to use what they already knew to decide which number operation would be the best choice to help them find the answer. Alongside each step we revisited the fact that we were inferring (ie: using the clues given with our prior knowledge to help us find the answer). 

What began as a scaffolding strategy evolved into a deep dive into a learning experience full of rich discussion for all my learners that I hope to build on to strengthen the connections between inference in reading and inference in maths.

Collaborating and Creating...

This week are capitalising on the power being able to 'create' can bring to our learning. For the last few weeks I have used my guided reading sessions to help my groups strengthen their connections to our inquiry focus of Space. To do this we have explored new vocabulary in context, identified the main ideas in the text, summarised the key points, searched for information, made connections between ourselves, other texts and the wider world, formed opinions and made evaluations. In addition to this I encouraged my more able learners to participate in dialogic learning conversations to help move their understanding to the next level. All strategies that are embedded into our reading program and help us make sense of new learning.

What excited me were the connections made during our visit to the Stardome. The conversations around the displays were rich, and the curiosities sparked during our reading time, explored further through the many rich questions that were asked of the experts. Luckily for us the Stardome educators were very happy to engage in these conversations over and over again, especially the ones that took place around the display of Yuri Gargarin parachuting onto the farmland. 

When I saw how much knowledge and content vocabulary my students were recalling and using without any prompting from me, I saw an opportunity to build on this further by providing an equally rich platform of opportunity to create DLOs that would enable them to share their new knowledge in an authentic way. So with that in mind, our literacy sessions this week are affording us the time to do this. 

We began today by recalling facts, skimming and scanning to find the information in our texts that supported our opinions, planning our storyboards (most groups have chosen to create an animation or an explainer movie), collaboratively writing scripts and purposefully using the content vocabulary needed to make connections to the learning in our inquiry lessons. The best part... every student was focused, engaged and on task! I can't wait to see the finished products.

Update: Here is an example of one of our finished DLOs...

Link to Sakina's blog post