Background and Research Question

Segmenting Text (O’Shea and Sindelar, 1987)

Background and Research Question Children who have strong word identification skills are able to direct attention to the meaning of a passage. In contrast, children who have difficulty with word identification frequently are unable attend to the syntactic relationship of words and phases. Lawrence J. O’Shea and Paul T. Sindelar conducted a study to determine whether the comprehension of good and poor readers in the primary grades could be improved by segmenting sentences into meaningful phrase units.

Translating Research Into Practice 1. Present a sentence for students to read. Then present the same sentence that has been segmented into meaningful phrases. Model the reading of segmented text to highlight how meaningful phrases or thought units are read with pauses. Explain that skilled readers mentally “chunk,” or segment, what they read into meaningful phrases. Below is a sentence that could be used to model chunking:

 By the end of November the bears had returned to their caves where they were getting ready for a long winter’s rest.

 By the end of November / the bears had returned to their caves / where they were getting ready / for a long winter’s rest.

2. Prepare additional segmented texts for students and explain to them that they will be learning how to “chunk” or segment what they read into phrases. Emphasize that chunking will help them read more fluently and to comprehend more of what they read.

3. Have students practice reading together similar passages that include chunked and not chunked sentences. Ask students to compare their reading of segmented and unsegmented passages.

4. Eventually train students to segment the text into meaningful units themselves. Emphasize that skilled readers mentally segment text into meaningful phrase.

Source O’Shea, L.J. and Sindelar, P.T. (1983). The effects of segmenting written discourse on the reading comprehension of low- and high-performance readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 18(4), 458–465.