Problem: How do you learn to self-monitor your comprehension?

Problem: Students have difficulty identifying places in the text that don't make sense, or, in the language of Oregon adult learning standards, "self-monitoring" their comprehension.

There are several ways that students might practice self-monitoring.

• In retrospective miscue analysis students learn to monitor comprehension by reading text aloud, then using a tape-recording (or log or transcript) to find oral miscues, where they made unexpected changes to the original text, and then analyzing the miscues to see their impact on comprehension. 
• In the Reading Apprenticeship model, students identify "roadblocks" or "puzzles" while reading silently, or when thinking aloud while reading out loud, in order to discuss and analyze them either in pairs, groups, as a class, in writing, or through making meta-cognitive reading logs.

Student difficulty with self-monitoring in practice: Experimenting with the Reading Apprenticeship model this past year I asked students to work together and also at times alone to identify comprehension roadblocks or puzzles - places in the text that caused them difficulty.

To prepare for this I gave short (less than two minute) demonstrations of finding conceptual roadblocks in text (beyond word level). I made an analogy to driving a car, where a driver slows down when there is something on the road that is puzzling, like a deer on the side of the road, an accident scene, or an unexpected group of cars ahead. I asked students to notice when they were slowing down or stopping in their reading, marking that place in the text so we could talk about it later.

Nearly all students identified words as puzzles, if they found unfamiliar names, words and especially foreign words. (Some students seemed to feel that even identifying unfamiliar words was a risk - perhaps avoiding notice of their vocabulary struggles.) Many students who did not identify unfamiliar words, would say there were no puzzles or roadblocks in the text, although discussion would reveal that they were indeed confused about meaning.

Scaffolding attempted: Building on the driving analogy, I experimented with using awareness of reading pace to help students find puzzles. I asked them to remain aware of their reading pace and mark any place in the text where they slowed down (going back to the car analogy). I had a hunch that this might encourage students to identify a broader range of text issues in a safe context, because saying that something slowed you down as a reader might seem more socially less risky than saying something confused you. The first time I tried this it immediately paid off.  A student told me she/he slowed down to think about a picture of a butchered cow lying in the sun on a table in a village in Mali. This made the student think about why someone would would leave meat lying in the sun in the open air and whether that would affect the quality and safety of the meat. When we reviewed the photo's caption as a class we found that the meat had to be sold in the local market the same day it was butchered, because there was no refrigeration or chemical preservatives available. This lead to a comparison of the quality and safety of meat sold in American supermarkets and some deeper thought about whether the Mali cow was less, or more safe to eat.