Since PISA 2000 and other tests there has been extensive discussion of the teaching of reading in European countries, including Norway. A key component in this discussion is teacher knowledge about comprehension instruction and comprehension strategies. The present paper investigates to what extent upper secondary teachers have an implicit knowledge of comprehension strategy instruction that through an intervention can be activated and made explicit. This paper reports on such an intervention study, involving a qualitative research design comprising teacher pre- and post-interviews, an in-service course, teaching practice and written teacher narratives; giving a data-set of two group interviews and 24 narratives. The study set out to investigate whether teachers’ implicit knowledge of comprehension strategies and comprehension instruction, would be made explicit through a 4-week intervention. The intervention involved 19 upper secondary teachers in 14 schools in a Norwegian county.

Objective: The present study aims to identify how conscious teachers are of their instructional practices, and whether written narratives capture instructional practices among teachers of reading.

Research questions: What knowledge do participating teachers express about reading comprehension strategies and the instruction of such strategies? To what extent will a 4-week intervention combined with written narratives help teachers make their implicit comprehension practices explicit?

Theoretical framework: Reading can be conceptualized as an activity where the reader actively engages with the text, as a parallel interaction between the text content, the readers’ prior knowledge and the readers’ use of reading strategies (Hellekjær & Hopfenbeck 2012, Grabe 2009, Bråten 2007, Magliano et al 2007). These processes are described as a combination of lower and higher level processing; the bottom-up processes of automatic word recognition (decoding) and the top-down process of a more holistic text interpretation. However, students are not either bottom-up or top-down readers, they are always bottom-up and top-down readers depending on the reading situation (Grabe 2009; Bernhardt 2011). Researchers seem to agree that a good reader is a strategic reader and that the least effective readers are those who fail to exhibit a range of strategic reading behaviors (Bernhardt 2011; Anmarkrud 2009; Grabe 2009; Koda 2005), suggesting that a good reader integrate lower and higher cognitive processes to support comprehension. Studies indicate that skilled readers understand more, use strategic processing across comprehension situations to a greater extent than less-skilled readers, and reflect on their use of strategies while reading (Bernhardt 2011; McNamara & Magliano 2009). As emphasized by Grabe (2009), reading comprehension is much more and much wider than mastering technical skills. In order to understand reading comprehension, we need to understand how students read. When readers have knowledge that they bring to bear on a text, they still have to build coherence in order to comprehend. Having the knowledge does not mean they use it. According to Bernhardt (2011) comprehension strategies are part of an unexplained variance in reading comprehension. This means that understanding comprehension in the classroom in terms of strategic processing implies a conceptualization of teachers’ implicit practices and what makes effective instruction (Bernhardt 2011).

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