Getting Acquainted with Reading Strategies
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Noticing Your Own Thinking ( Listening to your Inner Voices)
When you are “reading,” you should notice whether or not you are really reading and understanding. I f you couldn’t tell someone about what you just read, you need to apply one or more of the strategies below.
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Activating and Adding to Your Schema (Background Knowledge)
Your schema is your background knowledge and experience and how they’re linked together. The more you have, the better you are able to understand and remember the new things you learn.
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Questioning
Strategic readers ask questions before, during, and after reading.
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Making Connections
Using schema, the sum total of your background knowledge and experience, helps you make connections. There are three main kinds of connections readers make:
Text-to-Self Text-to-Text Text-to-World
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Predicting
Predicting is using information from the text and your own experiences to make guesses about
what the author will say next what will happen next how things will turn out
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Visualizing
Visualizing is the ability to make words on a page real and concrete. It is making a movie in your head.
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Making Inferences (Reading Between the Lines)
Inferring allows readers to make their own discoveries without the direct comment of the author.
Clues in the text + Your background knowledge and experience = Inference
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Determining Importance and Summarizing
What is important in a text depends on your purpose for reading it. Strategic readers can identify the main idea or tell what the text is mostly about. Determining importance includes finding the main idea and the major supporting details for that idea. You have to determine importance to summarize.
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Recognizing Text Patterns (Internal Text Structures)
Text Patterns are the ways the authors organize their writing. They might organize the information as SEQUENCE, CHRONOLOGICAL, LIST, COMPARE AND CONTRAST, CAUSE AND EFFECT (Storyworks: Cause and Effect), QUESTION/ANSWER, PROBLEM/SOLUTION, or DESCRIPTION, or a combination of patterns.
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Using External Text Features
External Text Features are helps that aren’t just the main body of writing. They include headings, subheadings, pictures, captions, bolded words, graphs, charts, tables of contents, sidebars, annotations, italics, etc.
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Fix-Up Strategies include other things you can do when you’re not comprehending what you read. Fix-up strategies include rereading (in a different way), reading ahead, reading aloud, adjusting your reading rate, dealing with problem words, checking other resources, and asking for help. To deal with a problem (unknown) word, you can check it for familiar word parts (prefixes, suffixes, roots, small words), use context clues, or look it up.
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last updated by C. Dorsey 8-18-10
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Another Way to Look at Reading Strategies
Research shows that skilled or expert readers possess seven strategies toconstruct meaning before, during, and after reading a text. When skilled students read, it is an active process. Their minds are constantly processing information extracted from the text, e.g., questioning the author, summarizing passages, or interpreting images. Contrarily, struggling readers often unthinkingly read the words on the page. For them, reading is an inactive activity. Constructing meaning from the text does not naturally occur in the mind of a struggling reader.
Fortunately, the cognitive skills of expert readers can be taught. The most effective way for students to learn these skills is through explicit and direct instruction. It is important that teachers model these strategies to the class before allowing students to independently use one of them. Modeling a strategy provides students with a clear understanding of why they were given the task and how to complete it properly.
7 Strategies
Below is a summary of the seven strategies of highly skilled readers. A brief purpose for using each strategy is provided along with a corresponding protocol. The seven strategies can be used with a variety of texts depending on the discipline. Examples of text include a painting, an annual report for a business, a script for a play, a mathematical word problem, a pie chart, a recipe, or instructions for a science experiment.
1. Activating: Students use their past experiences and/or knowledge to better understand the text. (Example: text connections.)
2. Summarizing: Students restate the purpose and meaning of a text in their own words. (Example: magnet summaries.)
3. Monitoring and Clarifying: Students determine if they understand the text. If there are misunderstandings, they clarify and correct the confusion during and after reading a text. (Example: text coding.)
4. Visualizing and Organizing: Students create mental images of the text. Graphic organizers help to provide structure and allow students to generate ideas from the text. (Example: graphic organizer.)
5. Searching and Selecting: Students gather information from various resources to select that which allows them to define key words, answer questions, or solve problems. (Example: claim, evidence, and reasoning.)
6. Questioning: Students create questions about the text, ask themselves questions while reading the text, and answer different levels of questions about the text from their peers and/or teacher. (Example: question-answer relationship.)
7. Inferring: Students interpret the text and draw logical conclusions. (Example: say-mean-matter.)
(Note: These strategies are adapted from Elaine McEwan's 40 Ways to Support Struggling Readers in Content Classrooms, Grades 6-12.)
