Reading Instruction

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Fluency Methods

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Fluency is the ability to read with expression and ease, without halting to sound out words or figure out the text's meaning. English teachers can promote fluency by using methods such as echo-reading (repeat-reading after another capable reader), choral reading (performing a text simultaneously with other readers), and readers' theater (performing parts of a text, much like a play, with emphasis on reading with expression rather than on props, scenery, or movement).

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Vocabulary Instruction

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Middle- and secondary-school students benefit from direct vocabulary instruction in addition to reading quality books. Effective vocabulary instruction methods include concept mapping (defining a vocabulary word its related words), teaching word origins (prefixes, suffixes, and root words), and using vocabulary words in context.

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Comprehension Strategy Instruction

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In most teaching circumstances, the majority of students will know how to read at grade level but may need to learn strategies to help them read to learn, particularly when reading nonfiction texts. English teachers can facilitate student comprehension by explicitly teaching comprehension strategies using a variety of texts. Key comprehension strategies include identifying important information, summarizing, sequencing, comparing and contrasting, envisioning character change, and predicting/verifying.

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Writing Instruction

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English teachers provide students with the opportunity to express their thoughts through writing in a variety of forms, such as argument, persuasive, creative, and research.

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Speaking and Listening Methods

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Middle- and secondary-school students have multiple opportunities to practice speaking and listening in the English classroom. For example, students engage in discussions, participate in literature circles or debates, analyze famous speeches online, and make presentations to the class.

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Teaching Literary Response and Analysis

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Students have multiple opportunities to respond to quality literature and analyze the meaning of what they are reading. English teachers often ask students to provide both an efferent (factual) response and an aesthetic (emotive) response to what they have read.

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Metacognition

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A person's ability to think about his or her own thinking, metacognition (meta = between; cognition = thinking) requires self-awareness and self-regulation of thinking. A student who demonstrates a high level of metacognition is able to explain his or her own thinking and describe which strategies he or she uses to read or solve a problem.

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Scaffolding

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These are instructional supports provided to a student by an adult or a more capable peer in a learning situation. Scaffolding might take the form of a teacher reading aloud a portion of the text and then asking the student to repeat the same sentence, for example. The more capable a student becomes with a certain skill or concept, the less instructional scaffolding the adult or peer needs to provide.

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Schema

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These are concepts in the mind about events, scenarios, actions, or objects that have been acquired from past experience. The mind loves organization and must find previous events or experiences with which to associate information, or the information may not be learned.

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Transfer

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This is the ability to apply a lesson learned in one situation to a new situation -- for example, a student who has learned to read the word the in a book about cows and then goes home and reads the word the successfully in a note that a parent left on the counter.