Reading Comprehension - Essay Example

Graphic organizers are a powerful tool to the students as it provides students with tools that they can use to show and examine the relationship between concepts in a text. The essay will delve in the teaching comprehension strategies and how the graphic organizers are used to enhance the learning of students. It will also focus on the benefits of using graphic organizers in teaching comprehension strategies. Teaching strategies are the tools that teachers use to enable students learn and understand whatever they are reading.

To help students understand comprehension easily, graphic organizers are always used. Graphic organizers like semantic maps are used in self monitoring strategy. Semantic maps are devices that help students to derive explicit and implicit meanings from concepts, ideas and details that are in a text (Sewak & Lubin, 2007). This strategy is helpful to students as it increases their understanding and helps them to acquire, organize and maintain information. This strategy can be used by providing students with semantic maps, which depict concepts from a passage and the key words (Adler, 2005).

Students should read the passage and then find out the key words which they should link to those key words that are on the map. When semantic maps are used in teaching of comprehension, they make students put much focus on the concepts and main vocabularies which will enhance comprehension reading. For example, when a teacher is teaching on the concept of “whales”, the teacher can trigger the prior knowledge that the students have, by showing them a video and then allow them to point out the key words which relate to that topic.

The metacognitive strategy can be enhanced by use of the concept diagrams. Concept diagram helps in comprehension skills and they show the relationship between concepts in a passage. Concept diagrams are graphics which describe the concepts in a passage, and their relationship from top to bottom (Boudah & Hagan-Burke, 2000). They also show how these concepts at the top support those at the bottom and they have lines that show the connections between concepts. The concept diagram makes students focus on concepts that enhance comprehension.

When teaching comprehension and teachers are using concept diagrams, the teacher is to give an explanation about the different parts of the diagram. The teacher together with his students, they highlight the main concepts in a passage. Then the teacher provides a blank concept diagram and allows students to make their own connections (Sewak & Lubin, 2007). Hence this makes the students to be actively involved as they engage themselves in writing concepts of the diagram. Other graphic organizers that are useful when teaching comprehension are the story maps.

The story maps are used by teachers to help the students to know the story structure. One way of using the story maps is when the teacher reads a story and stops at some points which are strategic to ask the students some questions. This strategy is necessary in understanding comprehension as it allows students to identify some important elements in the story such as the plot, characters and the setting (Adler, 2005). The story maps help to improve the literal, applied and interpretive comprehension skills of the students.

In fact, it is a powerful tool for making students pay attention when