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Reading Strategies Good Readers Use

Reading Strategies Good Readers Use

A few years ago, educational researchers David Pearson and Nell Duke asked the question, “What kind of thinking occurs when competent readers read?” This question led to groundbreaking research results that have changed the way teachers teach children to read.

They discovered seven key strategies that good readers use during the reading process. Innovative teachers teach the strategies directly using metacognitive thinking (thinking aloud about your thinking) modeling your own thinking aloud during the reading process. Students apply the new strategies by practicing their own thinking orally and in writing. Books like Mosaic of Thought by Zimmerman and Keene, Strategies that Work by Harvey and Goudvis, and Reading with Meaning by Miller explore these ideas in great depth and apply best teaching practices to teach reading strategies.

Strategy one: make connections

Readers bring their own experiences and prior knowledge to the text. They make personal connections, connect one text to another, and make connections with the world. These connections enrich the text and help the reader understand the text at a higher level of meaning. Teachers teach these connections directly: text-to-self connections, text-to-text connections, and text-to-world connections.

Strategy two: visualize or imagine

Readers see images in their minds when they read. The best part of reading is watching the “movie in your head.” Good readers experience seeing strong visual images. Children can be taught to visualize while reading. Poor readers often don’t “see” when they read. We live in a visual world, yet it is images that many readers lack when they read.

Strategy three: question

Readers are constantly questioning, predicting, confirming their thinking, and adjusting their thinking. Good readers are meant to keep reading. The purpose lies in your ability to question and predict throughout the reading of the text. The adjustments made help readers understand the text on a deeper level. Their basic and deeper understanding is triggered when their minds constantly give meaning through questions.

Strategy four: infer

Good readers read between the lines. Answers are not always black and white, and good readers can infer meaning based on prior knowledge and clues in the text. When a reader is inferring, they are thinking, predicting, adjusting, and confirming. This leads to a deeper understanding of the text.

Strategy Five: Determine Importance

Good readers understand the main ideas of a text and can determine what is important. Readers answer questions, determine key points, and expand their thinking as they connect important ideas with their own knowledge.

Strategy six: synthesize

Good readers are able to synthesize their reading and produce their own ideas or products from their knowledge. Synthesizing is a higher order thinking skill that requires you to go beyond basic knowledge and create new thinking.

Strategy seven: repair strategies

Good readers know how to tackle difficult texts. If they come across a word they don’t know, they break it down and use context clues to determine the meaning. If they just finished a paragraph and have no idea what they just read, they reread the paragraph and focus on thinking about its meaning. They identify what they do not understand and read backwards or forwards to try to clarify the meaning. They look at images or other text features (such as graphics or sidebars) to help them understand concepts or ideas. Correction strategies can be directly taught to help students divide a piece of text and find its meaning.

These strategies are often taught separately, but must be integrated and automated in the mind of the reader. Once students are aware of these strategies and learn to apply them during their own reading process, they begin to become an automatic part of their thinking. The strategies help readers to understand the text and gain meaning by applying their own schema or prior knowledge, as well as understanding the author’s message.

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