On the secondary level, there is no literary element more central to proper reading comprehension than the understanding of metaphor.  It is used in many texts, and virtually all of poetry.  The technical definition is:

Metaphor-the identification of one thing with another even though they are not literally identifiable. 

This could clearly be an aread of confusion for struggling readers.  For many readers, the idea that what is literally on the page is not what the author is trying to actually say can be frustrating.  Metaphor is a difficult thing to teach to students as well.  One of the best ways for them to learn it is through extended practice.  Intermediate novels such as William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies or George Orwell’s Animal Farm, can provide extended practice with metaphors because they are allegories on their own.  Allegory is another important term for students to be aware of. 

Allegory- saying one thing but meaning another.  A metaphor is an example of an allegory.  An allegory can be extended to take place over an entire narrative

Since an allegory is simply an extended metaphor, introducing these types of texts to your students can get extended repeated practice with the concept of metaphor.  To teach an allegory, you should provide students with a reference table of some sort so they can differentiate between the literal meaning of the text and the intended meaning.  Students’ understanding can be easily checked by a survey such as a matching worksheet.  Here is an example of one such sheet for the novel Animal Farm. 

(with answers)Matching Worksheet for Homework

Directions:  Match the animal characters and settings from George Orwell’s Animal Farm in the column on the left, with the people, places and concepts they represent from the Russian Revolution.

Animal Farm                                                                                                   Russian Rev.

1.___  Boxer-the hard-working horse (i)                                               a.  Russia

2.___Napoleon-The tyrannical leader of Manor Farm               b.  The Russian

                                                                                                                        newspaper       

            After the revolution; a boar (e)

3. ___ Manor Farm-setting of the novel            (a)                                c. Karl Marx

4. ___ Moses- the Raven, spreads the notion of                                    d. Communist propaganda

            “Animal Heaven” (g)

5.___Mr. Frederick- the cruel ruler of a nearby                                     e. Joseph Stalin

            Farm (k)

6.___ Mollie- a spoiled, pampered horse (h)                                         f.  Stalin’s secret police

7.___Old Major-dreams up the idea of an “Animal                               g.  Religion in Russia

            Farm” (c)

8.___Squealer-the mouth of Napoleon   (b)                                          h. the upper class

9.___Snowball-Squealers rival, sent into exile(l)                                    i.  the working class

10.___Pigeons-spread the “glorious news” of Animal                j.  critical intellectuals

                                                                                                                        of Russia

            Farm across the land (d)

11.___Benjamin-the wise old critical Donkey (j)                                   k.  Adolf Hitler

12.___The Dogs-loyal bodyguards of Napoleon (f)                               l.  Leon Trotsky- a

                                                                                                            Rival of Stalin

As you can see, instruction and assesment on a concept such as this does not take very long, but can be an intergral part of unlocking understanding of a text for the student.

Activate Prior Knowledge

Monitor Comprehension

Repair Comprehension

Determine important ideas

Synthesize

Draw Inferences

Ask Questions

Some of these steps are the same as POSSE, but that is to be expected if both strategies are supposed to be effective.  These are 7 steps that you can have students use every single time they read a text.  This can be taught to students in a way as simple as a checklist that can be used while reading.  Here is a graphic organizer with elaborated definitions of the steps.

 Why is this important?

-First off, use of a resource like Connexions would provide more practice with internet literacy.

-collaboration is always an effective teaching strategy.  What better way to collaborate than to create a database that all teachers all across the world can access?

-with a system like Connexions, teachers can easily contact teachers all across the country.  This would be extremely useful, for example, with a teacher getting a new student in their classroom from transfer.  They could contact this students previous teacher, get a feel for the student’s reading level, as well as the reading comprehension strategies that student has been taught in the past so the new teacher can align their teaching to those standards.

 Anyway, without further ado, here’s the smart guy…(video would not post, please follow the link)

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/25

“Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?”

There’s a boy who fogs his world and now he’s getting lazy
There’s no motivation and frustration makes him crazy
He makes a plan to take a stand but always ends up sitting.
Someone help him up or he’s gonna end up quitting

Also, just to provide the resource to play it for auditory learners in the class, heres a you-tube version:

Think about it.  Today’s teens are walking around with cell phones, iphones, laptops and a million other internet-capable gadgets and gizmos.  People say that this, along with television, is a detriment to the literacy rate in this country.  To a great extent this is true, but part of this is the fact that so far we have not utilized these resources in the proper way.

The internet and all its usual teen-trappings, such as Facebook, Myspace, Instant Messager and email is actually a great tool for fostering literacy.  Via these mediums, students are dealing with text and words on a daily basis.  The internet opens opportunities to get intstruction to students in a variety of ways, such as fostering discussion through chat rooms and wikis, or using blogs (wow!) as teaching tools.  But dont take my word for it, take the word of some smarter people.  Namely, Betty J. Sternberg, Karen A. Kaplan and Jenifer E. Borck.  They discuss the ways the internet has been misused, and the potential ways it could be implemented in the classroom.  Here’s the article:  http://www.adlit.org/article/19806

So the next time you take a student’s cell phone away for texting, think about it first.  They might just be learning something.

 Also, be aware of the many sources available to you online to purchase materials for your classroom.  For example, this website, (http://catalog.teachercreatedmaterialscatalog.com/language_arts_reading_comprehension-c-40_54.html?osCsid=21ef62cc89e92629ea70ff6cb85b079f) provides a variety of sources that teachers can buy online for their classrooms.  (I geared the search towards reading comprehension, providing some looks at DBQ questions for reading comprehension)

 One final example of a resource available to teachers is this site, (http://catalog.teachercreatedmaterialscatalog.com/language_arts_reading_comprehension-c-40_54.html?osCsid=21ef62cc89e92629ea70ff6cb85b079f) which is California Reading First.  This site has videos by professors of Education, giving extensive talks on ways to teach reading comprehension in the classroom.

1.  Reading comprehension is a lifelong learning process.  Children begin it at a young elementary school age but this is continued on for the rest of their lives.  Some of the practices used with smaller children work well with older learners as well.

 2.  The methods presented in the video are sound.  Although the methods are being applied to a children’s book, they can be used with older learners as well. Pay particular attention to the way the teacher makes her questions student centered, and praises them for their answers.  Also, the teacher lets the students know what types of assignments they are going to be asked to complete at the end of their reading.  This strategy aids reading comprehension in that when students focus their attention to produce material after reading, they will be more focused as a whole during that reading.  Take notes!

What does this mean for reading comprehension?  Well, it means that if a student is having trouble extracting meaning from a text, they might need to be presented the information in some modality other than textual.  For some students, seeing or hearing the text being acted out or performed can be a huge aid to helping them understand.  Luckily, the content area of English is wonderful for this.  Many novels and plays over the years have been re-produced or fashioned into televion shows and movies.  Using these as an aid to teach text in the classroom can give visual and auditory learners a better frame of reference for their memory.  Just for an example, here is a You Tube clip from To Kill a Mockingbird, a text commonly read in many High Schools.  Showing students this video could give them a visual memory for re-call about the text. 

How can this be implemented in a fun way in the classroom?  Well, as long as your classroom is computer equipped, one method you could try is Text Twist.  ( http://games.yahoo.com/games/texttwist.html)  This game is a great way to get kids thinking about letters.  It gives them practice with prefixes and suffixes and is also a lot of fun.  This would be a great way to give students a break from instruction, while still getting them doing an activity that will help their literacy.