Reading Comprehension Courses

Note: The reading comprehension courses are under construction and only the first courses have been released. The rest will be completed in sequence and released in future updates to all paid users.

Quick Instructions🔗

Reading comprehension courses teach the student to read and understand real texts of varied genres, topics, and complexity. The general procedure is the same as for all lessons. For details on that procedure, see the general instructions or the full instructions below. This section contains quick instructions for reading comprehension courses.

Each lesson contains multiple reading passages. Unlike the word and sentence courses, the intervention is performed after each example rather than after all examples, because the passages are longer and more complex.
To determine whether the student understood the passage, consider their reading fluency (speed, prosody, errors) and whether they can answer the comprehension questions or explain the passage in their own words. Halting reading suggests decoding difficulties; trouble answering questions after fluent reading suggests a need for language comprehension support.
Tier 0: If the student reads the passage fluently and demonstrates comprehension, no intervention is needed. The tutor can move to the next example immediately.
Tier 1: If the student struggles to read the passage or does not demonstrate comprehension, the tutor can perform some or all of the following actions, ordered from word-level issues to passage-level comprehension:
- For specific words the student struggled to read, perform the Tier 1 intervention for those words.
- Explain the meaning of specific words or concepts using the footnotes or the built-in dictionary.
- Search for an image or diagram if a visual explanation would help.
- Read the passage aloud to model fluent reading, pronunciation, and prosody.
- Model how to answer any questions the student struggled with by reading aloud and reasoning through the passage.
Tier 2 and above: Reading comprehension courses do not have separate Tier 2+ interventions. Comprehension depends on decoding and language comprehension. If the student struggles with these courses, they either need more practice with decoding through the word and sentence courses, or more reading comprehension practice, either through more practice in the reading comprehension courses or through independent or guided reading outside the program.

Full Instructions🔗

Reading comprehension courses progressively introduce students to real texts of varied genres, topics, and complexity. The design of these courses is based on the Simple View of Reading, which states that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension. The word and sentence courses are designed to develop decoding skills and reading comprehension courses are introduced only once the student has mastered sufficient decoding skills to read real texts with little to no difficulty. The courses develop the language comprehension component by exposing students to a wide variety of texts that are curated and annotated to progressively develop their vocabulary, background knowledge, and comprehension skills.

The general procedure for conducting reading comprehension courses is as follows:

Each lesson contains multiple examples, which start as hidden. Reading comprehension courses contain only Reading and no Dictation lessons.
The tutor starts by revealing the first example, showing it to the student, and asking them to read it aloud.
After the student finishes reading, the tutor determines whether the student understood the passage. If the student understood, the tutor clicks on the "✗" button to mark the example as correct, which turns into a "✓". Unlike the other courses, the criteria are not as simple as determining whether the student read or wrote a word or sentence correctly. The tutor must use their own judgment, and while there is no strict criteria, some of the factors include:
- The speed and fluency of the reading. Students that struggle to read have not developed the sufficient decoding skills for this passage.
- The flow and prosody of the reading. This includes taking appropriate pauses at punctuation, reading sentences fluidly, and using appropriate intonation. This is especially important for poetry and similar genres.
- The number of errors and self-corrections. A small number should be tolerated.
- The amount of words not in the footnotes that the student struggled to read. Words specifically tagged in the footnotes are expected to be unknown by the student, so they should not be counted against them.
- Whether the student can answer questions about the passage. All passages except the simplest ones include a set of questions that the tutor can use to check the student's comprehension. It is not required to ask all the questions or to only ask the questions included in the lesson. As a general guideline, the tutor can pretend to not understand the passage and ask the student to explain it to them.
Before moving to the next example, the tutor performs the intervention procedure described in the next sections. This contrasts with the other courses, where the intervention procedure is only performed after the student goes through all the examples because the examples in reading comprehension courses are longer and more complex.
The tutor reveals the next example and repeats the process for all the examples in the lesson.

Tier 0 Intervention🔗

If the student reads the examples and demonstrates comprehension based on the criteria described above, no intervention is needed, and the tutor can move to the next example immediately.

Tier 1 Intervention🔗

If the student struggles to read the passage or does not demonstrate comprehension, the tutor can perform some or all of the following actions to help them out:

For specific words that the student struggled to read, the tutor can perform the Tier 1 intervention procedure from the word courses for those words (i.e. explicitly teach the student how to read those words).
Explain the meaning of specific words or concepts that the student struggled to understand, using either the footnotes included in the lesson or the dictionary functionality for words not included in the footnotes.
For words or concepts that benefit from a visual explanation, the tutor can search for an appropriate image or diagram using a search engine and show it to the student.
Read the passage (or the parts with which the student struggled) aloud to the student, modeling fluent reading, and correct pronunciation and prosody.
For questions that the student struggled to answer, the tutor models how to answer them by reading and reasoning aloud about the passage, showing how to find the relevant information in the passage, and how to use it to answer the question.

Tier 2 Intervention🔗

Unlike the word courses, reading comprehension courses do not have a Tier 2 intervention or above. Because reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension and reading comprehension courses are only introduced once the student has mastered sufficient decoding, most students should be able to fluently read the passages in the lessons, even if their comprehension is still lagging.

Many common reading comprehension methods are based around teaching students general-purpose comprehension strategies: summarizing, finding the main idea, making predictions, using graphic organizers, and the like. These approaches rest on the assumption that comprehension is a set of transferable skills that can be practiced independently of content. The research, however, shows that strategy instruction produces only small, inconsistent gains because reading comprehension is not a set of general-purpose strategies but rather the product of decoding and language comprehension. This does not mean such strategies are entirely useless, but Pictures Are For Babies teaches some overlapping strategies, as well as syntax, as part of the writing courses.

Therefore, students who consistently struggle with these courses either need more decoding practice through the words and sentence courses, or additional exposure to real texts to develop their language comprehension. This additional exposure can happen either through more practice in the reading comprehension courses or through independent or guided reading outside the program. The tutor can use the available course filters in the interface to practice these skills before returning to the reading comprehension courses.

Independent Reading🔗

The deliberate practice at the core of Pictures Are For Babies is essential for developing reading skills, but requires small and repeatable exercises that can be easily tracked and measured. For that reason, the reading comprehension courses only include passages that are relatively short.

Independent reading outside the program is essential to provide students with the additional exposure to real texts of full length needed to further develop their skills. Most examples in the reading comprehension courses are taken from real texts and properly sourced, so that tutors and students can find the full text and read it on their own or make it part of the reading break.

Example lesson🔗

Below is an example of a fragment in a reading comprehension lesson. It consists of a passage, followed by a source citation, some comprehension questions, and footnotes for background knowledge. Tutors are not required to ask all the questions or to force the student to read all the footnotes if the student already knows the meaning of the relevant words.

In a village of La Mancha (1), the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler (2), a lean hack (3), and a greyhound for coursing. An olla (4) of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a doublet (5) of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays, while on week-days he made a brave figure in his best homespun (6). He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece under twenty, and a lad for the field and market-place, who used to saddle the hack as well as handle the bill-hook (7). The age of this gentleman of ours was bordering on fifty; he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured (8), a very early riser and a great sportsman. They will have it his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for here there is some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject), although from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was called Quexana. This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

Source:

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Translated by John Ormsby, Project Gutenberg, 2004.

Questions:

What kind of gentleman is being described in this passage? What does he spend most of his income on?
What does the narrator say about the gentleman's surname, and why does he say it is not important?
List three items found in the gentleman's house that tell you something about his social class or lifestyle.

Footnotes:

La Mancha: A region in central Spain, largely arid and rural, famously the setting of Cervantes' novel.
buckler: A small, round shield worn on the forearm or held by a handle.
hack: A horse that is available for hire, or a general-purpose riding horse; not a warhorse.
olla: A traditional Spanish stew, usually cooked in an earthenware pot of the same name.
doublet: A close-fitting padded jacket worn by men in Europe from the 15th to the 17th century.
homespun: Plain, coarse cloth made or woven at home, as opposed to fine store-bought fabric.
bill-hook: A cutting tool with a hooked blade, used for pruning or chopping wood.
gaunt-featured: Having a thin, bony, or hollow-cheeked face.