Introduction

Have you ever faced difficulty in reading comprehension and understanding it? As a student, you may have encountered it. Sometimes, students can best handle reading comprehension with collaborative reading. It is an instructional practice that helps students in reading difficult comprehension. It enhances the content area learning. Students usually work in small cooperative groups and perform their studies in collaborative reading. You can say it is a type of group study, but it is not actually a traditional group study. Now, you must be thinking about how it is different from another. What are the strategies that create this difference? Do not think much; today’s topic is all about it. Along with discussing the meaning and importance of collaborative reading, there will also be a mention of the strategies. So, let’s start our conversation with the following question:

What is collaborative reading?

            When a group of two or more students work together to learn something, it is called collaborative reading. But there is a more specific term to this reading called collaborative strategic reading (CSR). CSR is a research-based instructional practice in teaching reading comprehension to students. This type of reading allows the students to grab the text more effectively. The students read the comprehension in small groups like a group study.

            In collaborative reading, students work in the form of small groups. Teachers make groups of students and assign them different roles and responsibilities most of the time. Discussing those roles is as important as CSR. Those roles are given below:

• Leader: Every group has a leader to lead it. He leads and gives directions to the group during the collaborative reading. He also takes the teachers’ assistance if required.His main responsibility is to keep the group members on track.
• Clunk expert: Clunk sentences are common in comprehensions. There should be an individual who readily identifies those sentences.
• Gist Expert: This man guides the group to identify the most crucial ideas of the passage when reading it.
• Encourager: As the name suggests, this person’s job is to encourage all the group members. He encourages them to participate in the activity and give feedback.
• Announcer: He calls on the group members to read or share ideas during the CSR.
• Reporter:This student is the face of the whole group. He shares the whole findings during whole-class discussion. Mostly, the leader of the group also serves as a reporter.

Why is collaborative reading important?

            The importance of collaborative reading is no more a hidden thing in 2022. There are many things that students cannot figure out on their own. They need some assistance by experts of assignment writing services in academics to understand those things. Reading comprehension is also one of those things. Also, it helps the students in developing different skills, which are as follows:

• Reading comprehension: CSR is all about reading comprehension and understanding in the form of a group. Therefore, it helps in improving this ability of students. With this, they can better interpret the ideas given incomprehension in the future.
• Cooperative skills: Men are not like women who take advice from their friends. It is very hard for male students to develop cooperative skills because they do not like to get advised. So, the development of cooperative skills is a great benefit of collaborative reading.
• Performance: With the teacher’s assistance and group learning, students’ performances in the subjects increase. They perform better and improve themselves day by day.

What are collaborative reading strategies?

            Reding and understanding a passage is not an easy task. The collaborative reading can help you in this regard as you move forward in your reading. Of course, there are some strategies that you can follow to perform better. Without any delay, below is the description of those four fundamental strategies:

1.     Preview the text

The first strategy is previewing the text carefully. Previewing or skimming through the whole passage before looking deep into the sections is very helpful. It helps you gather your previous knowledge about the passage. Skimming through the lines of the comprehension simulates the students’ interests in the topic. It also gives students an overall idea of what the whole passage is about. They can also make predictions about the passage by giving a brief look.

During this step, students look at the headings, subheadings and images. The students may divide the whole passage into smaller chunks. Teachers also engage themselves with students by providing them assistance in effective previewing of the text.

2.     Click and clunk

It is the second strategy in collaborative reading. It is more like I get it, and I do not get it. Students monitor their performance and know about their understanding level. When students read a passage with understanding, they move forward smoothly. When students find a word, a concept or an idea hard to interpret, it is a clunk. Students need to identify these clicks and clunks in comprehension to better understand. In the cases of clunks, students need to use fix-up strategies to eliminate those clunks and move forward. Different clunk fix-up strategies are as follows:

• Vocabulary fix-up
• Read-Pause-Reflect strategy
• Partner retell strategy

3.     Get the gist

The strategy number is about getting the gist. Students learn to identify the most important passages in comprehension. The above two steps play a major role in this aspect. This collaborative reading strategy teaches students to use their own words to explain the ideas and concepts. So, this is another important strategy.

4.     Wrap up

Students should not just read the passage, but they should also be able to identify key points and ideas in the passage. Wrap up means concluding the whole discussion in your own words. Your teacher may ask you to provide a summary of the comprehension. So, this section can help you a lot in this.

Conclusion

            Collaborative reading was developed to help students with learning disabilities. Now, this strategy of reading has gone too far. Students like to participate in such group studies and develop their cooperative skills. Students also enhance their academic performance through this.