Through the use of multiple texts, all students have the opportunity to learn new information and make meaningful contributions to discussions. Moreover, varied texts provide multiple perspectives that help students rethink events and issues that impact everyone and deepen their knowledge of literary genres.
Textbook previewing strategies focus not only on the structure of the text — such as the table of contents, index, chapter introductions, and so forth — but on a content overview, which focuses on the concepts and questions covered in the chapter and their interrelationships.
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.
The read aloud, read along, and read appropriately strategies involve three phases of reading instruction. As the teacher thinks aloud about what he or she is reading, students begin to understand the connections between the words on the page and what they mean; in the read along strategy, teachers provide needed word prompts and cues, as well as fluency in the reading act; and the read appropriately strategy promotes the policy of reading
material at an appropriate instructional level for greatest individual gains.
To help students comprehend expository text structures, teachers can acquaint them with the signal or cue words authors utilize in writing each of the structures and use the graphic organizers offered in this article
Millions of today’s adolescents lack the reading skills demanded by today’s world. The impending crisis — millions of under-literate young people unable to succeed economically and socially — requires an immediate response. This report outlines 15 key elements of effective adolescent literacy programs and recommends that schools use a mix of these elements, tailoring the combinations to the needs of individual students.
In its practice guide Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices, the Dept. of Education offers five recommendations for increasing the reading ability of adolescents. Those recommendations are summarized in this checklist.
The push to ensure all students engage in challenging classes in high school has created new demands on high schools, including a demand to providing extra help for students who are behind in reading, mathematics, and advanced reasoning skills. This report looks at the nature of the extra help schools must provide and argues that the old model of offering only three types of extra help — functional skills for students deemed to have limited futures, remedial instruction in elementary skills; or tutoring for students struggling to pass a course or improve their test scores — must be abandoned and replaced by interventions that support and accelerate the development of intermediate and even more advanced skills.
Comprehension strategies are conscious plans — sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension. The seven strategies here appear to have a firm scientific basis for improving text comprehension
