The Effects of the Paraphrasing Strategy on the Reading Comprehension of Young Students

Abstract

Reading comprehension is an important component of academic success and a skill required for many activities in school. However, little is known about effective reading comprehension interventions for younger students. This study investigated the effects of the paraphrasing strategy taught using the self-regulated strategy development model. Participants were six third grade students identified as fluent readers who experienced difficulty with comprehension. All instruction for the six participants was one on one. Results indicate that the use of the RAP paraphrasing strategy increased reading comprehension as measured by the percentage of text recall and short-answer questions (RAP is a three-step strategy: Read a paragraph, Ask myself “What was the main idea and two details?” and Put it into my own words). Ideas for future research and implications are discussed.

RAP: A Reading Comprehension Strategy for Students with Learning Disabilities and Concomitant Speech-Language Impairments or ADHD

“…Previous researchers demonstrated improvements in answering multiple-choice or open-ended comprehension questions similar to the present study with the RAP strategy (Ellis & Graves, 1990;Hagaman et al, 2012;Hagaman & Reid, 2008;Katims & Harris, 1997;Lauterbach & Bender, 1995;Lee & Von Colln, 2003). Of those studies, only the Hagaman and Reid and Hagaman and colleagues' studies addressed positive treatment effects for both literal and inferential questions.…”

“…Unlike previous researchers who found improvements when students answered multiple-choice or open-ended comprehension questions (Ellis & Graves, 1990;Katims & Harris, 1997;Lauterbach & Bender, 1995;Lee & Von Colln, 2003), the present study also produced positive results for inferential comprehension such as those obtained by Hagaman & Reid (2008) and Hagaman et al (2012) but extended to students with learning disabilities.…”

“…It also has been effective for increasing reading skills for adolescents in middle school and high school with and without LD (Ellis & Graves, 1990;Hagaman & Reid, 2008;Katims & Harris, 1997;Lauterbach & Bender, 1995;Lee & Von Colln, 2003). Hagaman, Casey, and Reid (2012) found the RAP strategy increased reading comprehension of third grade students who were fluent readers but experienced difficulty with comprehension. However, no study to date has investigated the efficacy of RAP for improving the reading skills of elementary-level students with learning disabilities and either concomitant speech-language impairments or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).…”

Teachers’ teaching practices and beliefs regarding context-based tasks and their relation with students’ difficulties in solving these tasks

“…In agreement with Antonius et al (2007) who argued that teaching context-based tasks requires more than telling what students should do and offering exercises to practice, we argue that the observed teaching practice in the investigated Indonesian classrooms cannot be considered to be supportive for providing students OTL to solve context-based tasks. More specifically, our observation that in the comprehension stage the teachers did not give their students opportunities to paraphrase the tasks, might contribute to students' difficulty in comprehending a context-based task (see Hagaman et al 2012). Paraphrasing would help students to understand the text of a task and to get access to what they already know about the task (Kletzien 2009).…”

“…Several studies (e.g., Hagaman et al 2012;Karbalei and Amoli 2011) have shown that the so-called three-step Read-Ask-Paraphrase (RAP) strategy can stimulate students' active involvement in getting to know what is asked in the problem and can improve reading comprehension. The first step of this RAP strategy is in agreement with the suggestion of Blum's (2011, p. 24) to ask students to "read the text precisely and imagine the situation clearly."…”