About Teaching Reading
Teaching reading is a complex process. The best teachers develop an extensive knowledge base and draw on a repertoire of strategies for working with struggling students, many of which are included below. To dig deeper, please see other sections of this website including Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension.
« Return to topic list
Sort by: Date Title
Teaching Writing to Diverse Student Populations
Writing is a complex operation requiring knowledge of text structure, syntax, vocabulary, and topic, and sensitivity to audience needs; so it is not surprising that many teens find writing challenging. This article identifies the qualities of strong writing instruction, and offers advice to teachers for incorporating writing instruction into their practice, using tools like notebooks and journals, and sharing strategies that reinforce the importance of pre-writing and revision.
Provide Models, Examples and Nonexamples
Similar to expert craftsmen teaching their trades to apprentices, teachers can model thinking and problem-solving skills to their students. Read more about various classroom modeling techniques.
Five Areas of Instructional Improvement to Increase Academic Literacy
How can content-area, non-reading-specialist teachers contribute to academic literacy? They can incorporate these five techniques throughout their lessons: (1) provide explicit instruction and supported practice in effective comprehension techniques, (2) increase the amount and quality of reading content discussions, (3) maintain high standards for text, conversation, questions, and vocabulary, (4) increase student motivation and engagement with reading, and (5) provide essential content knowledge to support student mastery of critical concepts. Find out why these strategies, and the literacy areas they represent, are so important.
Word-level Interventions for Struggling Adolescent Readers
This article, excerpted from the report Academic Literacy Instruction for Adolescents: A Guidance Document from the Center on Instruction, advocates that teachers spend less time focusing on specific reading fluency and accuracy targets, since those vary significantly depending upon the purpose of the reading, and instead use reading interventions with demonstrated impacts on adolescent fluency and accuracy.
Expect Students to Activate, Connect and Summarize Daily
The activate, connect, and summarize daily routine can help struggling adolescent readers acquire new content. It consists of asking students to activate (what did we learn yesterday?), connect (draw a connection between your life and the topic that we'll discuss today), and summarize (give me a keyword or phrase that describes today's lesson) in the classroom everyday.
Use Easy Nonfiction to Build Background Knowledge
A Texas librarian shares his strategy of using nonfiction picture books to introduce new concepts to struggling adolescent readers and to build their background knowledge. Once students have been exposed to academic content in easy reading material, they are more confident in making the transition to textbooks.
Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers
To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one.
Writing Next
How can thousands of low-achieving adolescent writers develop into the flexible and fluent writers required by colleges and employers? This report recommends and details eleven fundamental elements of writing instruction and suggests ways to implement them in the classroom.
Use and Teach Content Vocabulary Daily
Copying definitions from the dictionary and memorizing words for tests is not sufficient work for students to master and retain new vocabulary. This article helps teachers choose which words are most important to teach, and suggests ways to teach those words that will bring them to life for students.
Use the Cooperative Learning Model
Cooperative learning fosters group accountability and provides struggling readers with the opportunity to work with stronger academic role models. Learn how to introduce this strategy in your classroom.
