Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies
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VELS level 3 – Reading strategies
A summary of the four reading strategies
Reading to students is a strategy for collaborative learning and teaching. The three types of collaborative, social learning are:
- Apprenticeship: a community process of learning
- Guided participation: an interpersonal process of learning
- Appropriation: a personal process of learning
Reading to students is a form of "apprenticeship"
Throughout the day, there are many opportunities for reading to students. These include during a whole class focus and small group focus on reading and other learning contexts.
Reading to students
Teachers read a wide variety of texts to students from a range of text types; for enjoyment and information, to increase students’ contextual understandings, and to extend the students’ knowledge of language. When reading to students it is essential to model effective reading strategies including phased and fluent reading, and to demonstrate how more complex texts work.
The four reading strategies for teachers are:
Predicting
The teacher introduces the text by predicting the content from the title. All available knowledge is used, with the teacher briefly outlining the reasoning behind the predictions including clues from the text and prior knowledge. Students may be invited to make their own predictions.
The teacher indicates a section of text to be read silently. Predictions are checked against the text, with thoughts and opinions being confirmed or modified at the end of the independent reading time.
Possible teaching focuses:
- hypothesising what the author will discuss next in the text
- linking new ideas to prior knowledge
- confirming or modifying thoughts and opinions
- using text structure
- monitoring own understanding.
Clarifying
The teacher seeks to clarify areas of uncertainty, any unfamiliar vocabulary, phrases or concepts in that section of text or links to sections of text previously read.
Ways of clarifying the meaning of words or phrases through the use of content, known words, references (such as dictionaries and atlases) and discussion are demonstrated. Other group members are encouraged to seek clarification of words, phrases or concepts in the text that are unclear.
This occurs at any time during the session to provide the opportunity for all students to maintain their understanding of the text.
Possible teaching focuses:
- focusing on the meaning of a text
- being alert to unfamiliar vocabulary, phrases and complicated concepts
- restoring meaning through the use of context, known words, references, rereading and asking for help.
Question generating
The teacher formulates a thought-provoking question regarding an aspect of the text. By modelling the strategy of asking and answering one’s own questions, the teacher stimulates a discussion through engaging the group with the text on a deeper level, bringing a critical eye to the text and stimulating thinking at a critical level. Other group members are encouraged to ask questions for the group to answer.
Possible teaching focuses:
- formulating and answering questions
- demonstrating deeper engagement with the text
- developing skills to think critically.
Summarising
The teacher summarises the passage, highlighting the main ideas, purpose and audience of the text. Other group members are then encouraged to add to the teacher’s summary or to review what they have read by outlining their own summaries.
The procedure then continues in a cyclical way with the teacher selecting a further segment or passage of text and modelling the procedure by predicting what the next segment might contain.
Possible teaching focuses:
- organising and integrating the information from the text
- showing understanding of the main idea, information and purpose of the text
- reviewing what has been read.