How to Teach Reading Strategies

Why Reading Strategies?
When comprehension breaks down, especially in a foreign or second language, students need to repair their comprehension. This is where the importance of reading strategies come in so as to facilitate the reading process and give students a clear sense of what they are reading.

When reading strategies are not readily available, students become easily frustrated because they do not understand what they are reading and as a result, become demotivated. A teacher needs to design and teach different reading strategies in order to help students close the gaps in their reading. The ultimate challenge for the teacher is knowing exactly which strategy is useful and most beneficial to teach, since each student needs different strategies. This article in this respect, will focus a few general strategies and general pointers for how to teach them.

A Few Types of General Reading Strategies

The award winning website www.readinga-z.com has a wealth of activities, games and articles on reading strategies. There is enough here to for beginner readers but, some can be adapted to fit the needs of more advanced readers as well.

In addition, here are a few others.

zooming in on the text. Students go back and reread a sentence or part of a sentence that was confusing. What it a word, a phrase or an entire sentence that casued a breakdown in understanding? Once they have identified the part or parts, they can refer to other sources such as guessing from context or using a dictionary.

Jump back and reread. Encourage the students not to get stuck too long on a confusing part of the text. They can always go back, reread and guess.

Try and try again. If a student cannot understand, s/he should be encouraged to try and try again using all available sources such as guessing using contextual clues such as using the knowledge of parts of speech,

What's the secret to teaching reading strategies?

The key to teaching reading strategies is to teach it without bringing it to the forefront of the lesson. It is recommended to teach them the strategies (without naming them) only after the students accomplish some task based on the reading strategy. Students of Junior High school age are still too young to understand and remember the names of the strategies and it is pointless in lecturing and naming reading strategies. Once they have processed information, the teacher can mention the reading strategy in a by-the-way manner in terms of what they used and how it may help them in the future.

If a teacher gets a positive reaction, a teacher can use this opportunity and expand on it. However if not, it is a good idea to leave it as a learning experience until the next time when the teacher can remind them of having used it already when working on a particular text and how it helped them understand the text better.

Using the Visual Aid Method to Teach Reading Strategies

A helpful way to teach and reinforce reading strategies is through a pictorial context. Using funny caricatures such as the ones in this site can help younger students see the connection between what they see and what they have done in terms of using reading strategies in the lesson.

Final Words
By finding indirect methods of teaching strategies, a teacher will have "taught" them something and gave them the impression of learning. Homework on reading strategies should serve as a further reinforcement and should be logically connected and come out naturally from the lesson.