Reading Guides help students navigate reading material, especially difficult textbook chapters or …
Reading Guides help students navigate reading material, especially difficult textbook chapters or technical reading. Students respond to a teacher-created written guide of prompts as they read an assigned text. Reading Guides help students to comprehend the main points of the reading and understand the organizational structure of a text.
Selective Highlighting/Underlining is used to help students organize what they have read …
Selective Highlighting/Underlining is used to help students organize what they have read by selecting what is important. This strategy teaches students to highlight/underline ONLY the key words, phrases, vocabulary, and ideas that are central to understanding the reading.
The Semantic Feature Analysis strategy engages students in reading assignments by asking …
The Semantic Feature Analysis strategy engages students in reading assignments by asking them to relate selected vocabulary to key features of the text. This technique uses a matrix to help students discover how one set of things is related to one another. It improves students' comprehension, vocabulary, and content retention. This strategy helps students to examine related features or concepts and make distinctions among them. By analyzing the completed matrix, students are able to visualize connections, make predictions, and better understand important concepts.
Story Maps are used for teaching students to work with story structure …
Story Maps are used for teaching students to work with story structure for better comprehension. This technique uses visual representations to help students organize important elements of a story. Students learn to summarize the main ideas, characters, setting, and plot of an assigned reading.
Structured Notetaking is a strategy that helps students become more effective note …
Structured Notetaking is a strategy that helps students become more effective note takers. Using graphic organizers specific to a particular text, structured notes assist students in understanding the content of their reading.
Summarizing teaches students how to take a large selection of text and …
Summarizing teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for a more concise understanding. Upon reading a passage, summarizing helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them. It is a technique that enables students to focus on keywords and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering. Downloadable graphic organizers are linked to the lesson.
This article describes eight cognitive strategies - including monitoring, tapping prior knowledge, …
This article describes eight cognitive strategies - including monitoring, tapping prior knowledge, and making predictions - to help readers develop their comprehension skills.
Reading complex literary texts offers unique opportunities for students to wrestle with …
Reading complex literary texts offers unique opportunities for students to wrestle with some of the core ethical dilemmas that we face as human beings. The growth of ethical reasoning is one of the most compelling reasons for schools to develop students' capacities to read complex works of literature. Students who enter high school as struggling readers are quite capable of engaging with such texts, in part because these same students are often wrestling with complex challenges in their own lives.
Of all the academic disciplines taught in middle and high school, the …
Of all the academic disciplines taught in middle and high school, the one we least expect to entail reading extended texts is in mathematics, but math texts present special literacy problems and challenges for young readers.
Engaged, accountable reading requires students to interpret, and respond, often creatively. This …
Engaged, accountable reading requires students to interpret, and respond, often creatively. This article suggests several personalized ways to hold students accountable for their reading.
Fluency is the missing piece of the reading puzzle for many older …
Fluency is the missing piece of the reading puzzle for many older students. They can decode, but they cannot do it automatically and accurately enough to comprehend text. Here are some fluency-building activities to complement content delivery. See also Teach Students How to Fluently Read Multisyllabic Content Vocabulary.
Students should learn specific vocabulary and academic language to comprehend content text, …
Students should learn specific vocabulary and academic language to comprehend content text, but they should also become independent in understanding and owning vocabulary. This article offers tips for developing students' "vocabulary ownership."
Comprehension strategies are routines and procedures that readers use to help them …
Comprehension strategies are routines and procedures that readers use to help them make sense of texts. Struggling adolescent readers need direct, explicit instruction in comprehension strategies to improve their reading comprehension.
This article summarizes a study that evaluated the effectiveness of intensive instruction …
This article summarizes a study that evaluated the effectiveness of intensive instruction in the Word Identification Strategy, a learning strategy for decoding multi-syllabic words. Results indicate that intense strategy instruction within a relatively short time period can boost students' decoding skills by several grade levels.
Use explicit strategy instruction to make visible the invisible comprehension strategies that …
Use explicit strategy instruction to make visible the invisible comprehension strategies that good readers use to understand text. Support students until they can use the strategies independently. Recycle and re-teach strategies throughout the year.
Vocabulary instruction is an important part of reading and language arts classes, …
Vocabulary instruction is an important part of reading and language arts classes, as well as content-area classes such as science and social studies. By giving students explicit instruction in vocabulary, teachers help them learn the meaning of new words and strengthen their independent skills of constructing the meaning of text.
Teachers should provide opportunities for students to engage in high-quality discussions of …
Teachers should provide opportunities for students to engage in high-quality discussions of the meaning and interpretation of texts in various content areas as one important way to improve their reading comprehension.
Writing enables students to process, organize, formulate, and extend their thinking about …
Writing enables students to process, organize, formulate, and extend their thinking about what they have been learning. In addition, teachers can also assign writing to help students evaluate what they know and understand about a topic. These writing-to-learn strategies help foster students' abilities to make predictions, build connections, raise questions, discover new ideas, and promote higher-level thinking.
How can content-area, non-reading-specialist teachers contribute to academic literacy? They can incorporate …
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.
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