Showing posts with label Comprehension. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Comprehension. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

How Audiobooks Can Make People More Literate ▬ Medium

How Audiobooks Can Make People More Literate
Professional audiobook narrators help bridge the ‘understanding gap’
AudioFile Magazine

Medium: 9.08.2018 by AudioFile Magazine *

Educators and cognitive scientists recognize that “reading” is a very broad term. In the audiobook community, we already know that “reading” can and does mean critical listening as well as visual understanding of printed text. Pushback still comes from some who believe that“to read” is to decode visually. I like to call them reading “print-bound purists.” As most long-established “eye-readers” know, assumptions about characters, plot direction, and capacity to grasp how facts in chapter one will be required in chapter seven, can and do miss the mark on any first complete reading of a book. How many of these print-bound purists re-read texts — silently, of course, as 20th century pedagogy taught many of us to be a requirement of “skillful” reading?

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Professional audiobook narrators, in fact, are the people who do that essential pre-reading for us before we sit down to acquire the author’s work by listening to interpretive choices that make sense the first time around as listening readers. Professional narrators, having familiarized themselves thoroughly with the book before the recording session begins, know and impart appropriate pacing and alterations in inflections that we can have from the get-go when we hear their reading. Passages dense with significant and complex information are delivered in a manner that allows us to concentrate point by point instead of rushing by without collecting what we need for understanding the next stage of the work. And when personal names may be too close for eye comfort, narrators introduce specific tones — if not outright voices — that allow us to distinguish between speakers readily.

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Try these audiobooks as examples of how reading comprehension can receive significant boosts from hearing skilled narrators:

What do I need to understand about this character? The War that Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, read by Jane Entwistle

How can I make sense of all these technical explanations when I’m not even sure which clause is important? Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, read by Dion Graham

Who’s who when I see a cavalcade of character names that I can’t distinguish among quickly? Death Notice, by Zhou Haohui, translated by Zac Haluza, read by Joel de la Fuente

 
* AudioFile Magazine
reviews and recommends good listening, top-notch performances and dynamic listening experiences. We do not sell audiobooks.

READ MORE ➤➤

 
Based on 7 readability formulas:
Grade Level: 14
Reading Level: difficult to read.
Reader's Age: 21-22 yrs. old
(college level)


Monday, December 18, 2017

The Only Reading Comprehension Tools You Need Are Right Under Your Nose

The Only Reading Comprehension Tools You Need Are Right Under Your Nose
Fluent U: by Susan Verner

Less is more.

Simple is best.

Apply this wisdom to your English teaching, and you’ll have the recipe for success.

That’s because to teach reading comprehension effectively, you don’t need to look any further than your own classroom for three seriously valuable teaching tools.

Yes, you heard right—the key you’ve been searching for has been right under your nose!

And putting these simple tools to use, we’re sharing 12 phenomenal, tested-and-approved reading comprehension activities below that require nothing more than a few bare essentials: pencil, notebook, post-its. Let’s get started!

Reading for Comprehension: 3 Simple Tools That Are Right Under Your Nose

1. Writing in the Book
2. A Reading Notebook
3. Off the Page


Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Carlsbad Library :: Literacy Services :: Comprehension Strategies

Comprehension Strategies
Think-Aloud Strategy by Dr. Pat Campbell
Learning Connection: Nov/Dec 2016

The think-aloud strategy is intended to help readers examine and develop reading behaviors and strategies.  Studies have shown that poor readers are weak in five areas related to comprehension: making predictions, visualizing, linking with prior knowledge, monitoring, and self-correction.  Good readers do these strategies automatically.  New readers need to be taught how to do them.

The following are “active reading” skills you can teach your learner to help them improve their comprehension.  Model these skills by thinking aloud as you read, then have the learner try it.

What do active readers do when they read?
 Monitor their comprehension: Ask yourself questions as you read.
 Relate information to prior knowledge: Make connections with what you already know.
 Make inferences: Figure things out based on experiences.
 Made Predictions: Ask yourself what do you think will happen next?
 Visualize: Picture the story in your mind.
 Identify main ideas and highlights: Ask yourself what is the story about?
 Note important details: Write down meaningful items from the story.
 Skim and scan: Look through the text to find important information.

Ask the Help Desk for a handout on other comprehension ideas. READ MORE @

Saturday, August 13, 2016

CLOZE Activities :: ESL | Comprehension | Songs | Jokes | Vocabulary

Tweet – Tweeter – Tweetest
Superlatives from SCLLN

10 Clever Cloze Activities for Any English Classroom




Suzanne by Leonard Cohen
– a gap-fill listening comprehension exercise








Quick Cloze Passages for Boosting Comprehension 2



FREE Cloze Reading Worksheet:
http://ow.ly/pzk0303c9tr



5 ESL Cloze Activities to Make Vocabulary Stick All Year Long






This app constructs open cloze tests
and vocabulary lists from Wikipedia articles.
My students really like doing...



Tuesday, July 26, 2016

SCLLN Tutor Workshop :: August 4 :: Commerce Library READS Center

SCLLN Tutors!
You are invited to attend a special workshop
just for you!

August 4th, 2016
9:30 am – 1 pm
Presenter
Jerry Edwards
Commerce READs Center
Commerce Library
5655 Jillson St

Join us to increase your skills in the following topics:

Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan
Using a lesson plan can help you organize and strategize your approach to adult literacy. Do you run out of time or are not sure where you are going with your lessons? Do you find yourself spending an hour on just one component (sight words, reading practice, word attack, etc.)?

Intonation and Speed -- The Road to Better Comprehension
Do your learners read word for word? Do they disregard punctuation? Do they struggle through (but finish) a sentence and wonder what they read?

DEADLINE :: Monday, August 1st
Evelyn Diaz
Literacy Program Manager
Thank you to SCLLN for sponsoring this event!

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area :: Teach Thought

25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area
Teach Thought: 3.14.2016

Reading is reading. By understanding that letters make sounds, we can blend those sounds together to make whole sounds that symbolize meaning we can all exchange with one another.

Without getting too Platonic about it all, reading doesn’t change simply because you’re reading a text from another content area. Only sometimes it does.

Science content can often by full of jargon, research citations, and odd text features.

Social Studies content can be an interesting mix of itemized information, and traditional paragraphs/imagery.

Literature? Well, that depends on if you mean the flexible form of poetry, the enduring structure of a novel, or emerging digital literature that combines multiple modalities to tell a story. (Inanimate Alice, for example.)

This all makes reading strategies somewhat content area specific. Stopping (maybe the most undervalued strategy ever) and Rereading might make more sense in science, while Visualization and Text Connections may make more sense reading literary works. Questioning the Text may make equal sense in both.

But if you’d like to start with a basic set of strategies, you could do worse than the elegant graphic above from wiki-teacher.com. (Useful site, by the way. Check it out.) It lists 12 basic reading comprehension strategies.  READ MORE @