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.
- Strategy 1
- Strategy 2
Instructional Strategy
Provide direct and explicit comprehension strategy instruction.
Comprehension strategies are routines and procedures that readers use to help them make sense of texts. These strategies include but are not limited to, summarizing, asking and answering questions, paraphrasing, and finding the main idea. It is important to teach students how to monitor their comprehension and how to use a variety of comprehension strategies when they don’t understand the text. Teaching students how to effectively apply comprehension strategies will give them control over their understanding of the text.
Source: Kamil et al., 2008
Effective Practices
- Select appropriate text to use when beginning to teach a strategy.
- Teach students how to apply comprehension strategies to different texts.
- 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 how to find the main idea.
- Teach how to summarize a text.
- Teach how to paraphrase a text.
- Teach how to ask and answer questions.
- Teach students strategies on how to find answers to questions related to a text.
- 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 how to activate and connect to background knowledge.
- Use direct and explicit instruction to teach comprehension monitoring strategies and provide adequate instruction in each strategy before combining the strategies in a multi-component approach.
- Model how to use the strategies by thinking aloud with a text, provide guided practice with feedback, and provide the students with independent practice using the strategies
Source: Kamil et al., 2008; Biancarosa & Snow, 2006; Adler, 2023; Vaughn et al., 2022
Tools and Activities
Summary Template
The summary template is a tool that breaks down tasks into a series of questions in order to help students generate a summary.
Download from Keys to Literacy/Joan Sedita
Asking Questions Graphic Organizer
Provide students with an asking questions graphic organizer which allows the students to record what questions they have before, during, and after reading.
Download from Iowa Reading Research Center
Theory of Adolescent Reading
How do adolescents move from reading words to applying knowledge learned from a text? See the adolescent reading model and the Strategic Intervention Model (SIM) clearly illustrated.
Learn More from AdLit
Instructional Strategy
Provide opportunities for extended discussions of text meaning and interpretation.
Educators must provide opportunities for students to engage in high quality discussions focused on the meaning and interpretation of a text. These types of discussions are effective in promoting students’ understanding of complex texts.
Source: Kamil et al., 2008
Effective Practices
- Prepare for the discussion by selecting engaging materials and generating questions.
- Select or develop questions that will require students to think reflectively about the text and make high-level connections and inferences.
- Provide a task or discussion format that students can follow during small group discussions.
- Allow students to read in pairs and practice using the comprehension strategies that have been explicitly taught.
- Develop and practice the use of a discussion protocol.
Source: Kamil et al., 2008
Tools and Activities
Generating Text-Dependent Questions
Keys to Literacy’s Generating Text-Dependent Questions template provides question stems for teachers to consider when developing questions that will require students to think reflectively about the text and make high-level connections and inferences.
Download from Keys to Literacy
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.