Reading Comprehension
Reading isn't really reading if students don't understand what they have read. Many struggling adolescent readers can recognize and pronounce words from print, but cannot understand or answer questions about what they have just read. This section includes information on methods to improve students' comprehension. See About Teaching for additional techniques to use in the classroom.
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Pre-Reading Activities for ELLs
Pre-reading activities may be designed to motivate student interest, activate prior knowledge, or pre-teach potentially difficult concepts and vocabulary. This is also a great opportunity to introduce comprehension components such as cause and effect, compare and contrast, personification, main idea, sequencing, and others.
English Language Learners in Middle and High School
In this 45-minute video, Dr. Deborah Short, a Senior Research Associate for the Language Education and Academic Development division of the Center for Applied Linguistics, discusses how to teach content to late-entry ELLs and how to ensure reading comprehension for success in the content areas.
Expect Students to Activate, Connect and Summarize Daily
The activate, connect, and summarize daily routine can help struggling adolescent readers acquire new content. It consists of asking students to activate (what did we learn yesterday?), connect (draw a connection between your life and the topic that we'll discuss today), and summarize (give me a keyword or phrase that describes today's lesson) in the classroom everyday.
Teach the 7 Strategies of Highly Effective Readers
To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one.
A Theory of Adolescent Reading: A Simple View of a Complex Process
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.
Reading Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners
Explicit teaching of reading comprehension skills will help students apply these strategies to all subject matter.
Cognitive Strategies Tool Kit
This article describes eight cognitive strategies—including monitoring, tapping prior knowledge, and making predictions—to help readers develop their comprehension skills.
Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?
Learning "critical thinking skills" can only take a student so far. Critical thinking depends on knowing relevant content very well-and thinking about it, repeatedly. Here are five strategies, consistent with the research, to help bring critical thinking into the everyday classroom.
Why Students Think They Understand When They Don't
Very often, students will think they understand a body of material. Believing that they know it, they stop trying to learn more. But, come test time, it turns out they really don't know the material. Can cognitive science tell us anything about why students are commonly mistaken about what they know and don't know? Are there any strategies teachers can use to help students better estimate what they know?
