Using Graphic Organizers to Teach Reading Comprehension - Essay Example

? Learning has been a challenging activity. This activity formerly starts when a child is registered into a school where she is expected to begin her journey of learning. However, this journey of learning, with the passage of time, brings new learning and academic challenges. Among the leading challenges faced by intermediate or college students are the issues related with the comprehension, understanding and development of contextual understanding of the topics taught during the class period. In addition, there is an assumption that in reading that all text have structures (Jiang & Grabe, 2007, p.34). And at the same time, “students in most class rooms are at different mental levels” (McMackin & Witherell(a), 2003, p. 11). In this regard, Hughes, Maccini, & Gagnon, (2003) argue that students at the upper-elementary, secondary and intermediate grades receive less individual attention than in primary grades. As a result, these new expectations and demands give more challenges in the process of learning and comprehension. And the required skills to comprehend become more challenging particularly for students with Learning disabilities (LD). And this becomes more challenging when a class does not represent a one particular type of students rather it is occupied with the students having different understanding abilities, comprehension power and retention. A class of students represents diversity and this diversity provides more challenging time for teachers who are expected to identify each student’s learning level and the teacher is expected to provide the targeted instruction (McMackin & Witherell(b), 2005). Additionally, with the passage of time as students progress, reading and comprehension increasingly incorporates expository text; from which the students are required to learn and comprehend. However, learning through expository is not easy a task for many students rather they are challenged with the reading assignments such as fiction (Kim et al., 2004). For instance, the material of expository text is of more informative nature and most of the time it is included by unfamiliar technical vocabulary terms and expressions. And these terms and expressions considerably differ from those expressions and terms that students had read in their primary classes. In addition, such text material is not organized properly rather poorly. This puts more pressure on students to use some additional complex cognitive tasks with an aim of comprehending the expository material (Lapp, Flood, Ranck-Buhr, 1995). With this added pressure from expository material, students face pressures and retention capabilities are directly hit or they become more exhausted; putting more psychological pressure to ensure learning the context of expository material. Additionally, some authors on the topic, suggest that there is a strong reason to believe that the students would under perform or may not be able to comprehend the context and material inside the expository text, for that purpose, they put forward their assertion that much of the expository material is filled with the huge amount of information. And this piece of information is not limited nor in its context, nor in its implications. Aggregately, there can be no boundary to determine the extent of expository material given a particular subject or topic. As a result, the students do not perform as they are expected to. Constantly, they under-perform and their aggregate graph of learning does not seem to be moving upward rather downward. In this regard, more innovations have been made in order to assist those students who are less equipped to face or manage the challenges of the expository material. Different learning strategies have been developed to assist students with LD (Dexter & Hughes, 2011). They need explicit content enhancements to assist in verbal (e.g. text or lecture) comprehension and graphic organizers (GOs) have often been recommended as an instructional devise to assist these students in understanding increasingly abstract concepts (Dexter & Hughes, 2011 quoting Bos & Vaughn, 2002). Graphic organizers GOs are spatial and visual displays making relationships between concepts and related facts more apparent (Gijria et al., 2007). The main function of graphic organizers is to promote more meaningful learning and at the same time, they facilitate understanding and retention of new material by converting abstract concepts with previous knowledge. This definition of GOs is clearly highlighting that the use of graphs makes a relationships between different facts and concepts. And this making of relationships conveys a concept and understanding more simple and understandable in comparison with the traditional way of learning. At the same time, the use of graphs serves the required and much needed aspect of learning that is retention. Without retention, the entire process of learning and comprehension would be unable to serve the purpose of teaching and learning. In addition, there is no single type of graphic organizers but more than one type is used to facilitate the entire process of comprehension. Cognitive Mapping Cognitive mapping helps in developing major relationships and ideas by using lines, spatial arrangements, arrows with an aim of describing a particular structure, text content or a relationship between concepts (Darch & Eaves, 1986). By graphically displaying information, cognitive mapping may develop and support some organizational strategies necessary for both writing and reading of content context. Basically, cognitive mapping can better be used and serve the purpose of learning and comprehension is by using certain keywords or making simple drawings. In addition, Boyle and Yeager (1997) argue that the important component of cognitive mapping is to minimize sentences as much as possible as they would help the entire process of comprehension more easy to work with. Additionally, GOs in the shape of cognitive mapping can offer a great source of help to teachers also by converting challenging text into simple drawings. Semantic Mapping Semantic Mapping is a heuristic facilitating students to identify relevant pieces of information from text or lecture. From text, the students can identify the main ideas supporting details. And at the same time, students can erase the isolated and irrelevant parts to the aggregate understanding of the concept. Additionally, semantic mapping can be applied to make better sense of reading (Little & Box, 2011, p.27).By doing so, the students would become in a position to clearly understand the concept as they want it to be. However, there are certain problems with this approach. For instance, identifying the relevant and irrelevant material is not going to be an easy task. Much more understanding of the concept is needed that would enable students to highlight the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information from the text. Further, in the semantic mapping, concepts are particularly listed and at the same time, students and teachers are required to predict about the how the concepts can be arranged in a way to develop those relationships on the GO (Bos & Anders, 1992). A well-made graphic organizer is consisted of a subordinate concept, e.g. main idea or topic. In this graphical representation, that main idea or topic is placed in an oval in the top or middle of the page. Additionally, coordinate concepts such as categories-depicting and representing related concepts-are placed in ovals surrounding or below the super-ordinate concept and they are connected by lines. Semantic Feature Analysis Semantic feature analysis (SFA) is developed in a way to helping students recognizing relevant information from text and lecture. In the SFA, conceptual characteristics are presented in the shape of matrix. Darch & Gerston (1986) contend that unrelated concepts can be inferred from the used chart. Most importantly, a relationship matrix is developed with vocabulary, which is representing the coordinate concepts that are placed at the top of the matrix and at the same time, vocabulary representing the subordinate concepts is arranged along the side (Bos & Anders, 1990). Syntactic/ Semantic Feature Analysis Syntactic/ semantic feature analysis (SSFA) is similar to SFA but it is added with the cloze-type sentences, which are written on the basis of matrix. Here, cloze sentences consist of blank spaces replacing new vocabulary. Here, students are required to use the context of the sentence and the SFA matrix in order to fill in the blanks. Visual Display Visual displays represent facts or concepts spatially with the use of computational manner. Here, relationships between concepts are developed and made apparent by their location on the display. References McMackin, M.C. & Witherell, N.L(a)., (2003), “Using differentiated activities to enhance comprehension for all learners,” The NERA Journal Vol. 39, No. 2.pp. 11-15. Dexter, D.D, & Hughes, C.A. (2011). “Graphic organizers and students with learning disabilities: a meta-analysis”, Learning Disabilities Quarterly, Vol. 34, No.1, pp. 51-72 Kim, A.H, Vaughn, S., Wanzek, J. & Wei, S. (2004)” Graphic Organizers and Their Effects on the Reading Comprehensions of Students with LD: A Synthesis of Research,” Journal of learning disabilities, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp.105-118. McMackin, M.C. & Witherell, N.L(b)., (2005),” Different routes to the same destinations: drawing conclusions with tiered graphic organizers,” International Reading Association, pp. 242-252 Jiang, X. Grabe, W. (2007),” Graphic organizers in reading instruction: Research findings and issues”, Reading in a Foreign Language, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 34-55. Little, D.C, & Box, J.A, (2011), “The use of specific schema theory strategy-semantic mapping-to facilitate vocabulary development and comprehension for at-risk readers”, Reading Improvement,48, No. 1, pp.24-31. Hughes, C. A., Maccini, P., & Gagnon, J. C. (2003). Interventions that positively impact the performance of students with learning disabilities in secondary general education classes. Learning Disabilities, 12, 101-111. Lapp, D., Flood, J., & Ranck-Buhr, W.(1995). Using multiple text formats to explore scientific phenomena in middle school classrooms. Reading and Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 11, 173-186 Bos, C. S., & Vaughn, S. (2002). Strategies for teaching students with learning and behavior problems (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon Gajria, M., Jitendra, A. K., Sood, S., & Sacks, G. (2007). Improving comprehension of expository text in students with LD: A research synthesis. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 40, 210-225. *Darch, C., & Eaves, R. (1986). Visual displays to increase comprehension of high school learning-disabled students. The Journal of Special Education, 20, 309-318 Boyle, J. R., & Yeager, N. (1997). Blueprints for learning: Using cognitive frameworks for understanding. Teaching Exceptional Children, 29, 26-31. *Bos, C. S., & Anders, P. L. (1992). Using interactive teaching and learning strategies to promote text comprehension and content learning for students with learning disabilities. International Journal of Disability, Development, and Education, 39, 225-238. *Bos, C. S., Anders, P. L., Filip, D., & Jaffe, L. E. (1989). The effects of an interactive instructional strategy for enhancing reading comprehension and content area learning for students with learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 22, 384- 389. *Darch, C., & Gersten, R. (1986). Direction-setting activities in reading comprehension: A comparison of two approaches. Learning Disability Quarterly, 9, 235-243. Read More