The Contexts of Comprehension: The Information Book Read Aloud, Comprehension Acquisition, and Comprehension Instruction in a First-Grade Classroom

In this article we embed a case study of 1 teacher and her first graders' interactions around information book read alouds within a discussion of the research on reading comprehension instruction and language acquisition. The case study revealed that the comprehension strategies the teacher modeled within the context of the read alouds reflected the same categories as those suggested by more systematic but decontextualized research. We suggest that there may be a developmentally appropriate time to begin formal comprehension instruction and that prior to that an interactive use of informational texts may support a stage to be thought of as comprehension acquisition, which would foster conceptual development, comprehension strategy formation, and text structure familiarity.

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