Post-reading Story Comprehension

Hi friend!

Here's an overview of step three in the literacy-based therapy framework: 🌟 Post-story Comprehension 🌟

During this phase the clinician asks questions about the text.

The goal of this task is to help students understand the story and concepts presented in it, rather than testing them or looking for a certain number of correct answers.

Comprehension questions may be literal or inferential, and they may focus on story grammar. Here are some examples:

• Who are the most important characters in the story?

• What do we know about the characters? Describe them.

• Where were the characters?

• What did the characters do? Why?

• What was the problem?

• How did the characters solve the problem?

• What was the story about?

If the student provides the desired response, the best positive feedback you can provide is active listening (e.g. nodding along, smiling, facing the student) and recasting (Cleave et al., 2015).

If the student doesn't know the answer or their response is missing information, there are a variety of ways you can provide support:

1️⃣ Corrective feedback

2️⃣ Two-step prompting

3️⃣ Visuals cues

4️⃣ Refer back to the text in the story

💬 Corrective Feedback - should focus on what the student should do/say and minimize attention to the incorrect response. It should also be immediate and specific.

💬 Two-step prompting - a time-saving prompting technique that ensures the child is successful by providing them with the answer. (read more about two-step prompting in this blog post)

💬 Visuals cues - point to pictures in the book or use book companion visuals (e.g. preposition visuals, story grammar visuals, adaptive book visuals).

💬 Refer back to the text in the story.

Once we know students comprehend the story, we can move forward with semantic, syntactic, and narrative tasks (the next step in the literacy-based therapy framework)!

References:

Spencer, T. & Peterson, B. (2020). Narrative Intervention: Principles to Practice. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 51(4).

Ukrainetz, T. A. (2006). Contextualized Language Intervention: Scaffolding Prek-12 Literacy Achievement (1st ed.). Pro Ed.