Layering Text to Support Understanding and Discourse

Possible Reading Strategies from Reading Rockets

Before reading:

• Motivate students through activities that may increase their interest (book talks, dramatic readings, or displays of art related to the text), making the text relevant to students in some way.
• Activate students' background knowledge important to the content of the text by discussing what students will read and what they already know about its topic and about the text organization.
• Establish a purpose for reading.
• Identify and discuss difficult words, phrases, and concepts in the text.
• Preview the text (by surveying the title, illustrations, and unusual text structures) to make predictions about its content.
• Think, talk, and write about the topic of the text.

During reading:

• Ask questions that keep students on track and focus their attention on main ideas and important points in the text.
• Focus attention on parts in a text that require students to make inferences.
• Encourage students to return to any predictions they have made before reading to see if they are confirmed by the text.
• Determine and summarize important ideas and supportive details.
• Make connections between and among important ideas in the text.
• Integrate new ideas with existing background knowledge.
• Ask themselves questions about the text.
• Sequence events and ideas in the text.
• Offer interpretations of and responses to the text.
• Visualize characters, settings, or events in a text.

After reading:

• Guide discussion of the reading.
• Refer student back to thinking before or during reading.
• Ask students to recall and tell in their own words important parts of the text.
• Offer students opportunities to respond to the reading in various ways, including through writing, dramatic play, music, readers' theatre, videos, debate, or pantomime.
• Evaluate and discuss the ideas encountered in the text.
• Apply and extend these ideas to other texts and real life situations.
• Summarize what was read by retelling the main ideas.
• Ask questions that may require more inquiry.