Tips from Your TCC - October 2008

Julie Damerell

Strategies to Help Students Improve as Readers

1. Explain and model how our own reading process varies according to material, prior knowledge, and purpose.
2. Show our own note-taking and responses to a passage.
3. Write "what it says" (topic sentence) and "what it does" statements (purpose/function) for paragraphs.
4. Find and share supplemental materials related to class texts from the Internet, newspapers, and magazines.
5. Play the "believing and doubting" game with a text. What's fact, what's opinion?
6. Create reading guides-key questions to consider before and after reading.
7. Show how we diagram, draw, or outline ideas and relationships when we read.

--adapted from John Bean, Engaging Ideas, Jossey-Bass.
http://www.engl.niu.edu/was/3-2001.html#strategies