Using poetry to teach reading comprehension strategies to English language learners

This study explores how the use of teaching reading comprehension strategies with poetry might affect ELLs\u27 reading comprehension. Five participants read a poem each day of the study for five weeks and used one of five reading strategies to gain a deeper understanding of the text: visualizing, making connections, questioning, summarizing, and evaluating. Students wrote meaningful responses to each poem daily and shared them with the class. After the five-week study, students took the NWEA MAP reading test. Results were mixed for both grade-level reading and narrative comprehension scores. Findings show that 1) students can learn to apply reading comprehension strategies to comprehend poetry 2) evaluating and questioning were the strategies preferred by most students and 3) standardized reading tests might not reflect students\u27 gains in comprehension. To conclude, poetry can be used to teach reading comprehension strategies but whether its use transfers to better test scores is inconclusive