Understanding How Fourth-Grade Readers Monitor for, Identify, Clarify and Justify Unknown Words and Phrases

Abstract

Before students read social studies informational text passages, it is a common practice among elementary school teachers to present fourth-grade readers with lessons that build prior knowledge of the content and vocabulary that appear in the text. For some fourth-grade readers this approach, before reading, may not adequately support their comprehension. The research in this study explores the effects of teaching fourth-grade readers to monitor for, identify, clarify, and justify the meaning of unknown words and phrases during reading. The findings in this study show that the successful comprehension of social studies informational text passages may be supported by the reader’s ability to: monitor for unknown words and phrases; strategically use a resource to clarify the passage textbase; and use prior knowledge, new knowledge from a resource, and information from the passage textbase, to understand the passage situation model.