One of my other strategies, and one that is certainly literature-based — O’Connor and Klein did a wonderful study in 2004 that showed that if you support anaphoric reference, children have better reading comprehension. Well, what is anaphoric reference? It is simply referring to something in a non-specific way.
“William had a red shirt, he really loved it,” so William’s responding — is the referent for “he.” And many times our children, because these are not definite specified words, don’t get the idea that “he” refers back to “William.” For that reason their reading comprehension might be great at a two-sentence level, but if you go through in longer and longer things, they can’t keep creating that memory because they’re not following through who exactly is “he” over here, who exactly is “they” over there, what’s this, what’s that, what’s anything.
Those kinds of non-specific words are very difficult. One thing that O’Connor and Klein did was as you were reading, they would take a little laminated index card and write three words and say, “Okay well, here’s ‘he,’ who is ‘he’ in this story?” and have them circle all along so they’re keeping that continuum.
Another thing that I do that I really like is to use tape that goes on the book — invisible tape that goes on the book, but doesn’t hurt the book. And I can use it color-coded so the “he’s” are all blue and the “she’s” are all pink and the objects are all green, so they can see how it goes throughout, and entertain the fact that this is an integrated story rather than sentence by sentence by sentence.
And truthfully, in research terms that’s one of the most powerful studies that we have — that we know that teaching anaphoric reference will increase children’s reading comprehension.
