How can All teachers teach reading?
1. First, figure out who your students are as readers and writers:
2. Assess Student's Abilities to Read Textbooks:
3. Teach Comprehension Strategies
Watch this video as Dr. Janice Dole explains how teaching comprehension strategies can help students understand content area text.
- Attitude and Interest Survey – Teachers can find out if and what students choose to read at home, and which topics they enjoy. ** Example survey
- Word fluency or focused listing – Implemented by Philip, an eighth-grade teacher (Angelo, 1998 in Brozo & Simpson, 2007), the students get in pairs, and one of the students lists all the words he or she can think of that they remember about a lesson. While this student talks, the other student is writing down the words until a timer indicates it is his or her turn to add to the list. In the meantime, the teacher circulates and listens to the various conversations. This activity can be adapted by having individual students create their own lists that the teacher will collect. Philip used these lists and put them in piles labeled ‘exemplary,’ ‘appropriate,’ or ‘insufficient’ (Brozo & Simpson, 2007, p. 97). This information gave him direction for teaching the next lesson.
- Double-entry journals – Students copy quotations, statements, definitions and other things that are interesting, important, or difficult to understand and teachers can see what students are thinking as readers. **See template here!
2. Assess Student's Abilities to Read Textbooks:
- Content-Area Inventory – These inventories generally consists of two parts. The first section assesses students’ skills in using book parts, reference skills, and reading illustrative material such as diagrams, charts, and tables. Students may use their texts as they deem necessary during this activity. **See this lesson on Previewing Texts in Content Areas
- Cloze Procedure – This assessment also provides feedback on the suitability of texts for your students. “The close procedure is based upon the psychological principle that individuals attempt to complete a familiar but not-quite-finished pattern” (Brozo & Simpson, 2007). Follow the steps below to create one:
- Identify a text that makes sense on its own and is reasonably complete. Many authorities recommend that you select approximately 300 words for your targeted passage, thus providing 50 deleted words and blanks. However, others point out that struggling readers may find such a task frustrating, so you may wish to reduce the length of the passage and the number of blanks (Alvermann & Phelps, 2005 in Brozo & Simpson, 2007, p. 123).
- Leave the first and last sentence intact and begin deleting every fifth word.
- Type the passage, double-spacing between the lines.
- Number each blank, leaving a uniform length so you do not unintentionally provide clues about the word deleted.
3. Teach Comprehension Strategies
Watch this video as Dr. Janice Dole explains how teaching comprehension strategies can help students understand content area text.