As we begin the 21^st century, it is important to note the responsibilities we hold as educators for building the comprehension ability of students who are a new generation of readers.  This article is based on a speech that was delivered to the Saskatchewan Reading Council on April 9^th in Saskatoon, Canada.  The purpose of this article is to report the latest research concerning the three new instructional goals that have demonstrated to significantly increase student's reading achievement.  The new Y Generation is defined as those students who are ages 2 to 18 as of September 11, 2001.

Goal 1: Provide Generation Y with the Individualized Comprehension Instruction

That They Need

As we enter a new era in which students are bombarded continuously with visual images on television, the Internet, and on the video games that they play, it is important for us to recognize the broad range of reading comprehension skills that individual students bring to our classroom.  Two new methods have been created to help us individualize comprehension instruction so that we can meet all students' needs in the 21^st century.

            The first is entitled 'Discovery Discussions'.  'Discovery Discussions' are a new form of one-to-one conferences in which students are allowed to have equal say as to the next direction in which their instruction will occur.  Conferences begin by a teacher or a student.  At any time during the conference either a teacher or a student explains something that they have now learned about that student's reading abilities or asks a specific question to gain more information about an individual student's reading abilities.   It is important that you as an educator hold no more than 3 discovery discussions a week.  This is an important procedural direction because 'discovery discussions' take an intense amount of energy and focus on your part as a teacher.  A 'discovery discussion' contains the following four steps.  After a student has asked any questions that he or she has about reading you,

1.     Ask: 'What do you need me to do to help you comprehend better?'

2.     Ask: ' What have you learned about comprehension since we last met?'

3.     Ask: 'What do you want to learn next to comprehend better?'

4.     Establish a plan-of-action with that student to individualize his or her comprehension abilities to be revisited at the end of the month.

The reason a 'discovery discussion' is important follow:

 First, the new younger generation no longer tries to please their teachers or seek to be told what to do as often as prior generations.  Generation Y knows the level of drive that they want to commit to reading and they will work hard when they are internally motivated to do so.  Also, 'discovery discussions' enable students to learn how to become more active comprehenders independently.  This is important in our new era of human history, because students are having to read and receive information at the same time as adults do without having it filtered through an adult's interpretation as had occurred for all prior generations.

            The second method to individualize comprehension instruction is a 'mid-year survey'.  A 'mid-year survey' is conducted at the end of the first half of the year, right before students leave for winter vacation.  It is composed of three questions, that each student, grades 2 and above response to in writing.  In grades pre-school to grade 2, you  can ask these three questions individually to students and they response orally.  Also, in the younger grades, if possible the results are more valid if someone else, such as an adult volunteer or an older classmate from grade 5 or 6 of the school asks the questions rather than you as the students' teacher.  This occurs because the answers that students give to you may be more positive than they would be to someone who is outside of your classroom.  The three questions to ask are as follows:

1.     What activity did we do so far this year that has caused you to learn the most and why?

2.     If we were to include this activity more in the last half of the year, what do you recommend that we eliminate so that we will have time to do so?  Why?

3.     What types of activities have we not done so far this year that you would like to have us do next when we come back from Winter vacation, and why would each of the ones that you list help you to learn?

            There are many reasons why the new younger generation needs to learn how to read non-fiction better than prior generations.  First, the majority of test items on all tests written after 1998 contain non-fiction selections.  For students to demonstrate how well they read, they have to know how to comprehend this type of expository text.  Another reason that is important for us to teach generation Y how to read non-fiction is because we need to start teaching it in a different manner than we teach children how to read fiction.  When we do so, research has demonstrated that it provides greater affective and cognitive responses not only to non-fiction, but to fiction as well (Block & Pressley, 2002; Block & Dellamura, 2001; Block, 2000; Block & Mangieri, 1995, 1996a, 1996b).  The reason this holds true is because children who always read everything using the same thought processes don't learn to appreciate the subtle format clues that authors provide when they write non-fiction, poetry, autobiographies or fiction.  When children are taught these subtle format features and characteristics of the writing style within different genre, students learn to appreciate the wide breadth of printed materials that are available to them to increase their knowledge and pleasure from reading.

            A third reason that it is important to teach children to read non-fiction is because our world is becoming more and more rapidly paced with greater and greater amounts of information being created daily.  Because of this, students may loose a sense of stability and security as to the role that they play in their own world or in the world of others.  By reading non-fiction, they began to understand that no matter how often events seem chaotic, rapid paced or out of their control, there are certain rules of nature and laws within disciplines of the physical and human disciplines with which we interact upon which students can depend.  This sense of stability and security is growing ever more increasingly important to the new Y generation.  It cannot be gained by reading fiction alone.  In fiction, literary characters experience difficulty, after difficulty, after difficulty.  In reading about other people's difficulties, some children have expressed that it increases their anxiety about their own problems (Block, in press).  A final reason as to why it is important for us to began to teach non-fiction is because it increases children's appreciation of the breadth and depth of their literary cultural heritages.  These two lineages need to be passed down to Generation Y so that an historical perspective can be maintained by the new generation.

            There are five methods that you can use to increase student's ability to fall in love with non-fiction.  The first is that you stay abreast of the most recently published children's literature.  This is important, because it is children's authors who lead the field forward as far as helping teachers to meet the newest needs that are emerging in children's lives.  I recommend that you stay abreast of the most recently published literature by putting one person on your holiday shopping list to which you will give a book.  Because you do this, you will walk into a bookstore every year and purchase a book for someone you love.  At the same time, make yourself a promise that you will go to the back of that bookstore, to the children's section and ask the children's book clerk to pull off the shelves all of the latest non-fiction books that have been written since the prior December.  In this way you can skim and scan through those books to begin to understand what it is that is attracting children to quality literature this year.

            The most consistent finding in the research upon which this article is based is that children want a friend beside them as they read non-fiction.  This will be a rather easy instructional modification to make that will assist children to fall in love with non-fiction.  Essentially, what you will do is to insure that anytime that you read a non-fiction selection, even if it is a chapter from a text book, two students will be allowed to read it side by side from the same book silently, orally, or doing a form of assisted or repeated readings together.  Children like this method because they want someone beside them to say 'Wow' to whenever they come to something they think is really interesting.  They also need their partners help on words and concepts that are difficult for them to understand alone.

            A third method to help children learn to love non-fiction is to teach them how to read non-fiction differently than they read fiction.  I label this method ('Scamper and Scan Until I Choose to Stop and Savor.')  The most successful method of teaching children to read non-fiction is to allow them to skim and scam a book until they find something of great interest that they want to stop and pause and really learn about, so they read it more slowly than they might read a fictional book.  In this way, they do not feel that they have to read every single word in a non-fiction selection and that some sections they can read with great pausing and reflection, based on their individual interest.  When you teach students to 'Scamper and Scan Until I Choose to Stop and Savor' method, you are demonstrating how you as an adult read non-fiction.  There are few non-fiction selections that you read word for word, cover to cover, such as when you read the newspaper, a menu in a restaurant, or instructions, or a magazine. 

The next strategy is entitled 'Two Books at Once'.  This means that anytime you introduce a subject you have two trade books on that same subject that you share with children.  With the first you would use the 'scamper and scan until I choose to stop and savor' method and then with the second book, you would ask students what sections they want to read, as you slowly turn page by page.  This teaches children how to practice reading non-fiction in a format that is enjoyable and is in a different manner than they read fiction.  Then, to implement the two books at once method, you would allow children to select two books of their choice on the same topic, meet with a partner and read those books as you just demonstrated, and write a report on what they have learned.  They will then know that they don't have to read from cover to cover.

            The last instructional process that enables students to fall in love with non-fiction is to teach them to recognize authorial writing patterns.  Non-fiction writers will usually put their main idea as the first or last sentence of each paragraph, and then they will use the remaining sentences in each of their paragraphs to describe details.  Usually the way that they describe details will be to describe either how, what, where, when or why something occurs in the main sentence.  By teaching students the pattern that an author follows, you can increase their comprehension because authors usually follow this same pattern throughout their entire book.  For example, in the book Tree Frogs, this is the pattern the author follows:

1.     First Sentence: Main Ideas

2.     Second Sentence: How detail about Main Idea and new vocabulary word highlighted

3.     Third Sentence: How detail about Main Idea and new vocabulary word is highlighted

4.     Fourth Sentence: How detail about main idea

            The last goal of this article is to describe ongoing research that is just developing on helping students to become better comprehenders when they read silently.  It is important that we learn how to better build independent comprehension abilities because children are going to be forced to read silently without teacher prompting use comprehension processes throughout the rest of their lives.  I would like to briefly discuss three methods that we are exploring in present research studies that have assisted students to began to comprehend without our prompting.  The first is for students to use 'Comprehension Process Motions'.  A comprehension process motion is when students use hand signals to demonstrate the process that the mind is going through to comprehend a particular section.  There are fifteen different motions that are taught to children, such as summarization, clarifying, drawing conclusions, making predictions, inferring, etc.  These motions are initiated by students while they are reading silently or when you are reading orally to the total group, so that a student can show you that they have initiated and had engaged a comprehension process that improved their comprehension of what they were hearing or reading by themselves.  Teachers who are using this method in our research study are keeping a checklist to insure that all students are able to initiate each of the fifteen comprehension processes without teacher prompting. 

The second newly developed method is called Teacher Reader Groups.  Teacher reader groups are when students teach a comprehension process the day after or the next few minutes after you taught that process.  They become the leader of a group and actually re-teach what you have just taught, using either the same book or a different book.  This lesson frees you to go around and to hear what children are saying about the comprehension process.  The value of Teacher Reader Groups to you is that you understand how much the children have understood from your instructions and what you need to re-teach the on next day.  It also assists students' internalization of the comprehension process because they have to verbalize the steps in the comprehension process, answer questions, and begin to put the process in their own words.  All three of these actions have demonstrated to improve children's comprehension. 

The last method that we are exploring to increase student's independent use of comprehension processes are called 'Post-it-Note Prompts'.  These are where you write a particular strategy on a post-it note and post it at an appropriate point in a book in which children are to write what they did when they used that comprehension process at that particular point in the book when the process was necessary to reach a full comprehension.  For example, you would write, set your own purpose for reading this book on a poetic it note and post that post-it note after about page 3.  When students are reading that book by themselves and reach that post-it note, they write the purpose they have for reading that book on it.  Then about page 10, you would write the word, infer, and as you wrote the word infer, children are to put an inference they had after reading the first 10 pages of the book on that post-it before they turn the page.  Then the next to the last page in the book you would write, draw conclusions, where students are to write their conclusions about how the book swill end on that post-it note.  You can then collect every child's book and grade what they wrote on each of these 3 post-it notes to determine if they used these three comprehension processes properly. 

In closing, the purpose of this article was to report three goals that we have to improve student's comprehension ability.  As you work as an educator to improve the comprehension of generation Y, may you (1) individualize your instruction through discovery discussions and mid-year surveys, and (2) teach children how to read non-fiction more effectively by staying current with children's literature yourself, allowing students to have a friend beside them as they read, introducing two texts on the same subject together and teaching the 'scamper and scan until you choose to stop and savor' method.  The third goal is to teach children to read and to comprehend independently by using comprehension process motions, teacher reader groups and post-it notes. 

I wish you every success as you teach for the rest of this and future school years.  I want you to experience the joy of truly meeting the individual, comprehension needs of our new vibrant, and energetic generation Y student population.