Tips and strategies for helping your students improve their reading comprehension skills.
Improving a student's reading skills depends on a lot of things: the level of instruction and your students, their motivation and your in-depth knowledge about reading and most particularly on the subject of reading strategies - all part of the art of planning reading lessons.
Reading strategies is one of those subjects which often goes unnoticed or is not understood to its fullest in terms of how it can actuallybhelp improve reading skills. Teachers may assume that the fact that students can read indicates that reading strategies aren't needed. Teaching students reading is not the same as facilitating the information so that he or she can learn how to become a better reader, which is where reading strategies hopefully will come into planning reading lessons.
Planning and teaching reading strategies can be challenging, especially when you are teaching your students a new text type that you have not taught previously. Often a text will determine the type of reading strategy you will use. How many of these texts have you taught recently?
- fables, stories with a plot, poems
- short articles, passages,
- posters, ads, instructions, recipes, book covers,shopping lists
- letters, descriptions, birthday greeting cards, dialogues
Using Reading Strategies to Improve Reading Skills
Stage 1
When you have already focused on a few texts you would like to teach, organize your reading lesson plan so that you know what strategy you'll use for each section of the lesson, like this:
1. Pre-reading stage of reading: reading strategies include: skimming, scanning, prediction,
2. While stage of reading: inference and summarizing.
3. Post stages of reading: can include some of all of the above.
Naturally, you will want to avoid teaching more than one type of reading strategy at a time. It is simply not purposeful for helping students absorb and process new information. Also, by using texts which are are not too challenging linguistically, students will be able to apply their understanding.
Stage 2
Now that you identified the text type and possible reading strategies for your reading lessons, flip through the textbook and extract possible reading tasks. If you are using the text from the book, weigh carefully the reading tasks you choose taking into account the students' language ability and their levels. You may need to make supplements and/or changes.
Stage 3
Develop pre-while-post reading tasks for the particular text that you chose considering the following: enough preparation and a good 'while' tasks - something that will help the students expand upon. Decide which reading strategy you think is most suitable to the reading skills you are aiming to teach.
