Blogger ate my response, so this is a re-do. Grr.
Okay, I found this article interesting...ish.
I can't imagine why teaching comprehension of expository texts or content literacy or whatever you want to call it would be a novel idea. Inspiring children to love to read is a separate (although equally fantastic!) goal from teaching them to learn from texts. The article mentions the assumption that students will somehow transfer the ability to decode and find meaning in narrative fiction to the ability to comprehend and retain knowledge from expository text without any instruction, and I guess that would be an easy assumption to make.
I think specifically because in this program from the beginning I have had instructors and classes where teaching comprehension with non-narrative fiction was it's own thing and something that got plenty of attention, the idea that this is a problematic issue is surprising - but - then I remember that I don't think anyone ever taught me comprehension skills and that, in doing research on comprehension instruction methods, I have learned new practices that improve my own comprehension, so I don't think anyone ever really did teach me comprehension strategies or it wasn't something harped on frequently.
Last spring, I observed in a first grade classroom that frequently worked with expository text. Every Thursday they had a center that focused on comprehension strategies; the teacher introduced the strategy, the students read the text (from a series of leveled readers that were largely non-narrative and content-focused, though some of them were narrative non-fiction), then applied the comprehension strategy to answer questions about the text. Granted, they were the advanced literacy group and were admittedly performing at a higher level, but they had no problem generalizing this ability to other subjects (in a limited capacity, they weren't using "textbooks" for science or social studies yet).
In the article, the definition of being successful in comprehension is expanded to the ability to write about your knowledge and THAT I found really interesting. I hadn't thought about that aspect or how big a role that could play in comprehension skills and strategies.
Comprehension strategies, in my experience, tend to be a little dry. I hate a KWL chart, I really do. I would love to find interesting strategies for improving student outcomes with regards to comprehension.
