CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension.
The core reading strategies that underpin the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and provides consistency of understanding and instruction for students and teachers alike.
The twelve reading strategies progress from simpler, lower-order thinking skills such as Finding the Main Idea and Recalling Facts and Details to more complex, higher-order concepts such as Identifying Author’s Purpose and Summarising. Initial questions determine students’ mastery of the text at a literal level, while later questions build on this understanding to get to the heart of their conceptual understanding. In this way, in every reading passage across every reading level, students are being asked to perform the same essential tasks – with their difficulty and complexity increasing as the student progresses through the reading levels.
The ability to derive meaning from words is the heart of reading comprehension. At the simplest level, students reading text should be aware that they can work out the meaning of unfamiliar words by either looking them up in a dictionary or asking the teacher to define them. In this way, at the beginning levels of comprehension, students are aware that there are definitions and meanings that they do not recognise but are not cowed by this and can display a willingness to find out about words that they do not know yet.
This relationship to securing definitions is a simple one – the student reads a word, perhaps sounding it out due to its unfamiliarity, but is drawn to resources beyond the text to find out its meaning. In a more advanced level of reading comprehension, a student will display the skill of finding out the meaning of a word themselves by looking at its place in the text and inferring possible meanings from its relation to the rest of the passage.
In this way, Finding Word Meaning in Context is a fundamental skill in the evolution of a student’s comprehension journey, because it illustrates not just a willingness to learn unfamiliar concepts to better understand text, but also the realisation that textual relationships within stories presented can be used to engage with text and promote thinking that allows students to use what they know to arrive at what they don’t.
Finding Word Meaning in Context is a crucial skill that develops as students move from lower-order to higher-order thinking about the texts that they read and illustrates the development of comprehension from rote learning to critically and creatively engaging with text. Where once students were simply aware that definitions could be located outside the text, Finding Word Meaning in Context gradually develops a student’s ability to carefully and informedly find the knowledge of unknown concepts themselves within the text they’re reading.
In this way, Finding Word Meaning in Context is a pivotal strategy among the twelve that form the heart of CARS & STARS Online. Students who master this strategy demonstrate an ability to think deeply about information provided in a text, both directly and indirectly, and draw their own conclusions as to its meaning. Questions about Finding Word Meaning in Context in CARS & STARS Online encourage students to think about several possible meanings for a word and arrive at what they think is the most likely based on the wider context in which it is presented.
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
