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VELS Level 5 and 6 – Reading Strategies for all VELS Domains

Following are some reading strategies that can be adapted to a single VELS domain or for programs that have multiple domains to support students in meeting the literacy demands of their learning in:

  • Physical, Personal and Social Learning: Health and Physical Education, Interpersonal Development, Personal Learning, Civics and Citizenship.
  • Discipline-Based Learning: The Arts, Economics, Geography, History, Mathematics, Science
  • Interdisciplinary Learning: Communication, Design, Creativity and Technology, Information and Communication Technology, Thinking.

The examples provide a structure for supporting students to read and comprehend texts in all domains of the VELS.

Strategies for reading to learn

Literacy to Learn: Getting students knowledge ready for literacy learning

Literacy to Learn: Getting students knowledge ready for literacy learning
Secondary teachers working in Northern Metropolitan region with Associate Professor John Munro have trialled and developed a series of literacy teaching procedures to support literacy learning in all learning domains.

Describe the characteristics of texts and how well the texts achieve their purposes

  • describe, identify, compare and explain how writers use language techniques such as evidence, humour or suspense to engage readers
  • identify and compare how language is used in different ways by different writers to represent events in different ways - compare two reports about the same topic
  • suggest the author's purpose and intentions for writing the text - infer the author's point of view, dispositions or attitudes and how well the text achieved its purpose.
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Skimming and scanning

  • skim and scan the text using an abstract, introduction or sequence of topic sentences to identify the main points and relevance of the text
  • use various strategies for recording key ideas in the text they read - taking notes of opinions and arguments presented by drawing a network of meanings from the text.

Inferential comprehension

  • develop critical and personal responses, such as interpretive pieces or character profiles
  • identify and synthesise ideas and events across several paragraphs; and support their interpretations with evidence drawn from the text
  • identify the language used to present points of view from particular social, political or cultural perspectives
  • note how the interpretation of the text is influenced by the language used by the writer
  • identify how a text is organised, distinguish between particular types of informative texts and use this to assist interpretation of texts that have unfamiliar ideas and information.

Evaluative comprehension

  • interpret texts both subjectively and in more objective and critical ways to identify multiple perspectives
  • pursue and evaluate the logic of the argument presented by a writer
  • explain the ways in which a text could change if set in a different social, cultural, historical or industrial context
  • identify the key questions answered by each paragraph and use these to integrate the ideas in the text
  • note the extent to which the text uses figurative versus literal language, where it is referenced in time and place; and how this effects learning.

Literal comprehension

  • say or write the key ideas as briefly as possible
  • note the key questions answered by the text
  • answer questions about the key ideas, using several strategies to locate, select and record key information
  • follow action sequences or procedures described in procedural texts or manuals
  • implement complex action sequences described in operational texts
  • identify main ideas in more complex informational text; the use of figurative language and sociocultural perspectives in conceptually dense or extended text.

Paragraph level comprehension

  • paraphrase each topic sentence and integrate these to identify the main idea
  • synthesise to infer and evaluate the main idea of a paragraph
  • select the main idea in each sentence and sequence them
  • identify the main and subordinate ideas across paragraphs in a text, then integrate these into a summary representation and evaluate the summary in terms of the adequacy of its fit with the whole paragraph
  • select the paragraphs that answer particular questions or provide particular information, and note the main questions answered by the text.
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Sentence level comprehension

  • paraphrase to understand the meanings of particular, procedural, general and conditional general statements
  • read sequences of sentences
  • recognise figurative and metaphoric ideas in sentences
  • comprehend cultural influences in the text through identification of specific words within a sentence.

Word level knowledge

  • discriminate word meanings that have a common sense meaning, technical or subject specific meaning depending on the context in which it is used
  • describe the effect on the meaning of words when suffixes such as 'age', 'er', 'ist', 'or' are added to nouns or verbs, for example, passage, manager or chemist.

Reading plans

A reading plan supports students in focusing on what they want to learn from a text before they begin reading the text. It makes reading more efficient and supports them in their thinking as they engage with texts. Following is a generic example of developing a reading plan for online texts. As part of this process, support students to be clear on what it is they want to learn and how they will apply that learning. Reading plans can be used for any domain of the Victorian Essential Learning Standards .

Developing a reading plan for online texts

1. Open a page you have been directed to or decided to explore, skim and scan it to decide:

  • how is the information organised? Are there several sources of information, for example, tables, maps, pictorial data. What can you learn from each? How will you combine them?
  • what questions does it seem to answer?
  • how will you manage and direct your reading? What needs to be read? What can be skimmed?

2. As you read through the text, decide how you will:

  • summarise each paragraph, table etc and identify the question/s it answers
  • keep track of key information, for example, write down key ideas
  • review and consolidate each paragraph, table etc
  • link up ideas across paragraphs and pages
  • decide when to pursue other (new) links.

3. When you have read a page, review and consolidate what you know now:

  • decide whether you need to re-read parts of it
  • decide whether you will pursue particular links provided
  • decide which information you will save.