Teaching Reading Strategies
Elementary School Students Need Support On What They Are Reading
Dec 27, 2007
The best definition of a reading strategy is the tactics or actions teachers implement in order to approach and make sense of a reading text.
Types of Reading Strategies
For the purposes of teaching reading, these are the main reading strategies students should learn.
1. Scanning otherwise known as quick reading. Student have a specific point in mind just to understand the main ideas. Some scanning strategies involves looking for numbers and personal names and understanding their references.
2. Skimming: reading a text quickly just to understand the main idea.
3. Reading for detail: students read a whole text very carefully for specific information.
4. Prediction and anticipation: student makes educated guessing about what he or she is going to read on the basis of world knowledge and prior information about the text.
5. Inference. student goes beyond the written information and makes links.
The challenge for teachers teaching these strategies in a heterogeneous classroom is that not all students employ the same strategies and many times the reading strategies employed in a student's second language depend on second language learning experience.
In this respect, it is up to the teacher to learn this by observation and through a quick assessment from distributing questionnaires. Also a student needs different reading skills for different text types.
Elementary School Teaching Tips
1. Students should experience all reading strategies.
2. It is important to emphasize those skills students are less familiar or do not cope with as well as they would like to.
3. Each of the pre-while-post stages of teaching a reading lesson plan should involve a variety of reading strategies
