Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide evidence-based instruction in how to use comprehension strategies.
It’s important to teach children how to monitor their comprehension, how to identify when there has been a breakdown, and how to use a repertoire of fix-up strategies.
Source: Lane, 2014; Shannahan et al., 2010; Glass 2020; Biancarosa & Snow, 2006
Effective Practices
- Teach how to activate and connect to background knowledge.
- Teach how to make connections to the text.
- Teach how to refer to prior experiences.
- Provide opportunities for students to build knowledge to support their understanding of the text.
- Teach comprehension monitoring or "fix-up" strategies.
- Teach students to be aware if they are or aren’t understanding the text.
- Teach students “fix-up” strategies to resolve confusion. Specific “fix-up” strategies include rereading text, clarifying words that aren’t recognized and words that are not understood, and/or asking for help.
- Teach students how to ask themselves relevant questions as they read.
- Teach students strategies on how to find answers to teacher questions.
- Teach students different types of questions:
- Right There Questions: The information needed to answer the question is written in the text.
- Think and Search Questions: The information needed to answer the question is in different parts of the text, so the student needs to “think and search” to find the answer.
- Author and Me Questions: The student must connect information in the text with information they already learned to answer the question.
- Teach inferencing and visualizing.
- Teach students how to evaluate or draw conclusions using information from the text.
- Teach students how to use background knowledge and information from the text to make inferences.
- Elaborate on what the author provides and connect information to background knowledge when information is only implicitly mentioned in the text.
- Teach students how to construct mental images to represent the text content. Utilize graphic organizers and think-alouds to help support students in constructing mental images.
- Teach summarizing or retelling.
- Teach students how to synthesize information in a text and restate the information in their own words.
- Teach students how to use story structure questions to summarize a story.
- Teach identifying and using text structure.
- Expose students to a variety of texts containing a range of text structures (e.g. storybooks, historical fiction, fables, poetry, etc.).
- Teach students how to identify the story structure of a text: Narrative or Expository.
- Teach students narrative structure has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
- Teach students how to identify narrative story elements (characters, setting, themes, problem/solution, sequence of events) and support students in comparing story events and characters to their own experiences.
Source: Lane, 2014; Shannahan et al., 2010; Glass 2020; Biancarosa & Snow, 2006; Texas Educational Agency, 2002; Adler, 2023; Vaughn et. al, 2022
Tools and Activities
Story Map (Graphic Organizer)
Story maps are a type of graphic organizer that students can use to show the elements of a narrative text and after reading a text students can use this graphic organizer to assess their understanding of narrative text elements.
Download from Iowa Reading Research Center
Making Inferences (Graphic Organizer)
The Making Inferences graphic organizer supports students as the combine clues from the text with their own knowledge to make connections and inferences in a text.
Download from Iowa Reading Research Center
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.