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Strategies for Helping Students with Reading

From Moi Fulton: "Students often feel powerless when they read. We use these strategies to allow them to feel powerful when they read material."

Challenges:
(click on the underlined challenge to go to teaching suggestions on it)

• Getting Students to Read
• Helping Students Process and Understand What They Read
• Moving From Summary of a Reading to Analysis
• Tackling difficult issues like tone and inference
• Assessing our students' reading levels
• When students have difficulty reading material because of the complex sentence structure

Teaching suggestion: Teach students to use a Reading Process (just as we teach them a writing process)…Prereading, Reading, and Postreading.

Prereading activities: Building background material
(These activities can help break the mental "I have to read something unfamiliar" barrier that often results in students not doing the assigned reading.)

• Give students a sense of the "rhetorical map" for the reading and discuss text markers (headings, etc)
• What do they already know about the topic of the reading: Ask students, "How much do you know about ______? What do you know about ____?  What do you want to know about _____?" Share and discuss.
• Isolate key vocabulary or use the vocabulary they will need to know before they read
• Provide necessary contextual information (Pat noted that if students don’t understand key information about context and purpose, they misread or don’t understand key aspects of a reading.)
• Read the first paragraph of an essay in class out loud with students (before they read the whole thing for homework).  Discuss tone or purpose or introduction strategies in this paragraph.  Raise questions about he rest of the essay, get students to make predictions and ask questions.

Reading activities: Providing a Purpose to Reading

• Model how you read a text. Read part of a text out loud to students, stopping to ask questions, comment, model your confusion about key ideas. In other words, show students how you work with a text. (Inexperienced readers assume that good readers read something smoothly from beginning to end and understand it all). Could have students read parts of a text out loud in groups, interrupting themselves in the same way.
• Give them something to do as they actually read: look for _____, underline_____, make notes on ______.

Post reading Activities: Creating a "rehearsal" for how they use information

• Repeat the prereading activities after they’ve read
• We (writing instructors) often use writing as a post-reading activity (e.g. summary and response)
• Divide a difficult reading into sections/paragraphs and have students in groups paraphrase the key information and share with the rest of the class.
• Highlighting key points: Give students two copies of a reading. Have them read it once and highlight key points. After a discussion of the reading, have them read it again (w/ a new copy) and again highlight the key points. Students will invariably highlight less the second time around, showing themselves that they are working toward learning to prioritize key points.

Moi stressed that teaching the reading process is in itself developmental. At the beginning of the course, an instructor should teach and discuss prereading activities (in class and through homework), but by the end of the quarter, students should be doing much of this prereading work on their own.   If at the beginning of the quarter you are leading the discussion, "What do you already know about this topic," you are training students to ask these questions of themselves when they read --"What do I know? What do I want or need to know?"--by the end of the quarter.

Challenge: Moving from Summary of a Reading to Analysis

Rosemary commented that once she teaches students how to summarize a reading, it seems that they can’t move beyond summary to analysis.

Teaching suggestions:

• Show students Bloom’s Taxonomy and discuss how summary fits into this hierarchy of critical thinking skills. Label and discuss ways to get at the other levels of thinking and have students consciously practice these skills.
• Have students bring in six questions about what they read: one question for each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Challenge: Getting Students to understand complex concepts like tone and inference

Teaching suggestion: When trying to teach students a complex concept like tone, deliberately teach them this concept in stages:

1. Take a reading and give them the answer to your question. In other words, tell students what the tone of a reading is, rather than making them guess. Then show them how you arrived at this conclusion -- show them key word choices and phrasing that contribute to tone.
2. Next, give students another reading, tell them the tone of the reading, and have them (in groups or for homework) find "evidence" – word choice, etc. – that supports the tone you indicated.
3. Finally, ask them to look at the word choices and phrasing and label* the tone of another reading on their own.

* Wendy had the idea that we should create a "wheel of tone" --similar to a wine-tasting wheel--that labels possible tones (ironic, sarcastic, mournful, nostalgic) to give students more options (and vocabulary) than mad, sad, and glad. She’s going to patent this idea and make millions. J

This same process could be used to teach students a number of reading skills:

• How to make margin notes on what they read.
• How to find the main point
• How to read inferences

Challenge: Assessing Students’ Reading Levels

There are tests that will assess reading level, but the quality of the information they provide is questionable – often with these tests, students don’t read more than a few passages. And given the problems with standardized testing, sometimes these tests do not accurately assess a student’s knowledge/skills.

Because many of us want students to self-assess their strengths and weaknesses around reading (for the same reasons we have them do this with writing), it seems we need to get creative if we want to use a reading assessment mechanism to show students "where they are"…

Teaching suggestions:

• Have students use a rubric that lays out and describes various aspects of reading (understanding vocabulary, understanding inferences, getting the main points, understanding tone, seeing the structure of the reading) after they’ve read something to assess where they are in terms of their reading skills (analogous to what many of us do for writing)
• After students read a specific essay, give them a "quiz" that tests their understanding of different aspects of the reading: main points, tone, inferences, vocabulary, rhetorical structure. Then have students compare how they did on the quiz to a quiz with the "right" or "high standard" answers. They should be able to see some of the skills they might need to focus on learning.

Challenge: When students have difficulty reading material because of the complexity of sentences

In this situation, students seem to get lost in the complexity of clauses and phrases and thus become confused about meaning.

Teaching suggestions:

• Put a sentence on the board and cross out phrases and clauses – get to the root meaning/sentence and then build it back up.
• Get students to break sentences apart into different statements of meaning in order to understand what has been layered together.
• Angi has her students do three things with a reading when they journal: 1) summary, 2) response, 3) cool or confusing technique. With "the cool or confusing technique," they must focus on an aspect of the writing technique that is unusual or difficult and analyze it – this is a creative way to get students to examine complex sentence structures.

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