Teacher Acceptance of Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction

Ontario teachers rated the acceptability of 7 basic reading comprehension strategies, reciprocal instruction, and 6 sets of published materials aimed at promoting use of comprehension strategies. They did so in response to a questionnaire consisting of 21 numerically rated items. In addition, open-ended follow-up comments were solicited for 11 of these items. There were clear differences in the acceptability of the various interventions. Among the basic strategies, prior-knowledge activation, representational imagery, and question generation were favored over other procedures. All basic strategies were rated well within the acceptable range, however. That one reading series received a very high acceptability rating makes obvious that publishers can create acceptable products, and 4 of the 6 publications studied were rated in the acceptable range. Qualitative analyses of the open-ended responses were especially revealing about teachers' reservations concerning the published materials. This investigation made obvious that acceptability of reading comprehension is an important factor to consider in designing comprehension strategy instruction but that traditional approaches to assessing acceptability fail to capture the many dimensions contributing to teachers' reactions to reading comprehension strategies. Issues that should be considered in future work on reading strategy acceptability are emphasized in the discussion.