Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies

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Literacy teaching strategies: VELS 1 & 2 | VELS 3 | VELS 4 | VELS 5 & 6

VELS level 1 & 2 – Students generating questions

Comprehension strategies are specific cognitive procedures that guide readers to become aware of how well they comprehend as they attempt to read and write. (National Reading Panel 2000)

Effective comprehension instruction is instruction that helps students use both cognitive strategies and text content to arrive at deeper understandings of what they read. It does so in ways that motivate students not just to read but to want to read.

Effective instructional approaches vary in emphasis across the stages of learning. (National Reading Panel 2000)

Resource: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (http://www.nationalreadingpanel.org)

Students generating their own questions

Young students can be taught to generate their own questions.

As part of a reciprocal teaching program, students in their first year of school were able to generate their own questions (Palincsar and David 1991).

Their success reflected models that provided support and were concrete and easy to use. One such model involved having students combine question signal words ( who, what, where, when, why, how) with question stems, or frames (How are ____and ____ alike? What caused ___? Why is _____important?).