Integrating Reading Comprehension in Social Studies Classes

One of the major problems that social studies teachers often encounter in the classroom is the students’ lack of reading comprehension skills. Many students, regardless of grade level, are hard put to digest the meaning of texts that they are reading. This is a serious obstacle to the students’ understanding of concepts and skills in social studies (especially skills specific to the discipline),  inasmuch as many instructional materials in social studies are in textual form. 

For this reason, social studies teachers must come up with a viable strategy to integrate the teaching of reading comprehension skills in their lessons. A Reading Teacher journal article, How to Teach Expository Text Structure to Facilitate Reading Comprehension by Masoumeh Akhondi, Faramarz Aziz Malayeri, and Arshad Abd Samad, discusses one such strategy, and this involves the teaching of the different text structures to students. 

Said strategy is premised on the idea that there is a connection between reading comprehension and text organization and structure, and that students’ knowledge of the different text organization and structure gives them the ability to develop a reading plan with which to approach a particular text and connect ideas contained in the text. This ability, in turn, facilitates comprehension. 

The strategy proposed envisages the teaching of one type of text organization and structure to students per lesson. By the end of the year, the students shall have been introduced to different types of text organization and structures. Specifically, this strategy consists of a series of steps. First, the teacher introduces one type of text organization and structure to students. He chooses one from the following types of text structure: a) description; b) sequence; c) compare/contrast; d) cause/effect; and d) problem/solution. He then asks his students to read some passages, and teaches them the different signal words and phrases that could aid them in recognizing the type of text structure used by the author of the passages. 

As the students go through the reading exercises, they gradually develop the ability to identify the text structure and organization used in a paragraph through analysis of the signal words and phrases. Once they have achieved mastery of this skill, the teacher begins to ask them to write short paragraphs utilizing the type of text organization and structure taught during the current lesson, and which make use of appropriate signal words and phrases. 

The teacher then introduces the use of different graphic organizers to facilitate understanding of texts. During the first sessions, it is advised that the teacher supply completed graphic organizer to students to aid the latter in their reading. Once the teacher is certain that the students have already achieved sufficient understanding of the use of different graphic organizers, he will start giving them blank graphic organizers on which to list important details from the text they are reading. 

I understand teaching reading comprehension to students—a skill which they ought to have acquired back in the elementary grades—is a cumbersome task to most social studies teachers. But since the only alternative to this is a wholesale demotion of students to earlier grades—which is anathema to our education officials—it behooves us teachers to set aside sufficient time to plan activities—such as the one I have described above—to teach students reading comprehension skills. Ω