Naming Strategies

There are a number of comprehension strategies I've become aware of in the course of learning about teaching literacy to elementary children. It had never occurred to me that it might be necessary to teach some of these techniques. The most obvious of which is simply rereading, but other include making connections, visualizing, asking question, activating background knowledge. As an adult, these types of behaviors occur naturally, and I don't recall learning them. However, perhaps if I'd had explicit instruction on them, I would have been a better reader sooner.

It's the manner of that explicit instruction that I'm interested in at the moment. In the book Catching Readers Before They Fall by Johnson and Keier, they seem to suggest not naming the strategies for the students, lest the focus be placed on the strategy itself and not on making sense of a reading. In my previous readings and again, most recently in a chapter on schema from Miller's Reading with Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades, there are examples of introducing and talking about strategies by their names.

When, I first read Johnson's and Keier's reasoning, I thought it made sense. However, I also wondered whether it was so wrong to put a name to the strategies we use. I think that though their approaches differ slightly, all the above authors do try and maintain a focus on comprehension rather than the strategy. Johnson's and Keier's example about a heavy-handed approach to introducing visualizing to a class isn't less effective because the hypothetical teacher names the strategy, but rather because the teacher doesn't connect the strategy to meaning-making. Miller, in her example, names the strategy for the students, but she is always clear about how this helps to understand the story. She works with students to distinguish between connections that help understand the story, and those that don't.

That is clearly the point - the manner in which these strategies help to make meaning and aid comprehension. It is possible that naming a strategy can be a part of an instructional technique that incorrectly focuses on the strategy and not comprehension, but it is not necessarily so. Thus, I don't think I have to fear that I'm teaching strategies wrong because I explicitly name them for my students.