Making the text cohere involves two categories:
- Readers must connect words and phrases as they read to ensure the text sticks together and makes sense.
- Readers must use syntactic knowledge to make sense of complex phrasing or sentence structures.
If those two things are true, then teachers need to have specific understandings and lessons to show students how to do this kind of thing. Honestly, when I first read this slide, I understood what it meant in a technical way. I know what all the words mean. But as a reader, I didn't have an understanding of what I am doing in my mind to make the text cohere. Frankly, I don't ask myself or think about cohesion at all when I read. I think about cohesion when I am evaluating something that I have written or when I am evaluating something a student wrote. Cohesion is something on my grading rubric. I had not considered cohesion as an element of inference and reading comprehension.
During the reading academy here at Region 16, the participants thought the same thing. We believe there is merit here, but we know that we need to think about it more.
(It's also connected to prosody...I wrote about that here: Prosody, Multiple Meaning Words, and Lighting a Fire with Anna)
Connecting Words and Phrases: One of the solutions proposed in the Reading Academy was Syntax Surgery. Beers has excellent examples in her book When Kids Can't Read, What Teachers Can Do on pages 70-71 and 135-136.
This resource, shows a good example of what the strategy looks like with text:
While this is a great example, sometimes teachers don't know exactly what needs to be pulled from text for these kinds of conversations. My first piece of advice is to listen to students read aloud. When their prosody, or phrasing, is off - that's probably what needs syntax surgery. There's probably some syntactical, grammatical, or mechanical feature there that is tripping up comprehension.
Second, there are things in text that we know mess kids up. Here's a list:
1. Modifiers: In Reading Recovery, and some Guided Reading models, kids are taught to problem solve up to the point of difficulty. With nuanced text, that doesn't always work. Sometimes you need to keep reading to know how to phrase the text. This is particularly true with words we normally perceive as nouns that serve as modifiers. Here's the example from when I was reading Hatchet with Anna:
2. Appositives: We need to tell kids - explicitly - how appositives work. And we need to show them in multiple places in a sentence.
3. Connectives: Connections are not always apparent until they are explicitly pointed out. Noticing them significantly brings for the meaning intended by the author. In the case below, the author is making a contrast. Even though the character is experiencing the end of school - which most people think is the end of studying - he is embarking on a new journey of learning. The words "although," "finishing," and "beginning" all work together to create the contrast.
4. Pronouns and Referents: Kids lose track of characters, people, and referents to things. In the passage below, the antecedents are written correctly, yet there is still an opportunity to get confused about exactly what the pronoun "they" referenced. Drawing arrows to keep references to scientists separate from living things can help kids keep the concepts separate.
5. Subject-verb agreement: This is especially important when single/compound subjects are separated from the verb. Students need to understand the connections between the words in terms of meaning as well as how to orally phrase with the interruption indicated by the punctuation.
6. Subjects and compound predicates: These can be separated as well. Students need to realize that all three of these actions are completed by the parents -even though their daughter didn't want them to.
7. Coordinating or Correlative Conjunctions: These make distinctive differences in meaning, depending on which one of the FANBOYS or other terms are used. In the case below, there is a contrast between the characters as well as a distinction between their baked goods.
8. Subordinating Conjunctions: Illuminating conditional elements, subordinating conjunctions reveal importance and significance.
9. Modifying Phrases and Clauses: As sentences become more complex, clauses and phrases extend both subjects and predicates. Kids can get lost in what belongs with what.
10. Transitions and Connectives: Sometimes, we think kids know what these words mean. But often they don't. That's the first hurdle. Being able to segment and connect the parts they combine is the next.
11. Authors vary terms, especially when the concepts are repeated in the same sentence. Sometimes, these words are additional context to help students identify meaning. Other times, its an element of craft.
12. And sometimes...something's missing.
13. And because 13 is my favorite number. And because Paulsen is my favorite author. And because I just love the dash...
Sometimes, prosody reveals the comprehension wolf. Understanding what it reveals through Syntax Surgery makes us realize that making sense of things is just another normal part of reading.
Sentence examples come from Handout 10, Syntax Surgery: Connections to make from the Grade 5 Reading to Learn Academy Materials prepared by The University of Texas System/Texas Education Agency.
Sentence examples also come from Gary Paulsen's Hatchet.
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