Reading

Description	Address
Reading in the Content Areas from Glencoe These resources are from M464: Methods of Teaching Reading from Indiana University	www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/tiparchive.phtml
Glencoe: Content Area Applications	http://www.indiana.edu/~m464/applications.html
Glencoe: Strategies	http://www.indiana.edu/~m464/newinfo.html
Literacy and Learning: Reading in the Content Areas. Literacy & Learning involves a cooperative effort between Southeastern Louisiana University and Louisiana Public Broadcasting to enhance reading skills in grades 5 through 8.	http://www.litandlearn.lpb.org/overview.html
Training Wheels for Literacy: Our Story - we share who we are, we acknowledge our mentors and offer a brief story on how we came to this work.	http://www.implicity.com/reading/
Reading comprehension strategies: From the Center For Advancement Of Learning at Muskingum College	http://www.muskingum.edu/~cal/database/ReadingComp.htm
Issues in Literacy Development: This document summarizes the best available research and professional expertise to help teachers provide high-quality literacy instruction for students from kindergarten through Grade 8. The information has been organized around topics that are important to literacy development. From Houghton Mifflin Company	http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/
Strategies for Reading Comprehension	http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/go/readquest/strat/
Improving Students' Understanding Of Textbook Content	http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/teaching_techniques/understanding_textbooks.html
The reading genie: (middle school) Created by Dr. Bruce Murray, associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Auburn University.	http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba/
Teaching reading, Teaching anything: article from BrainConnection.com, a Web resource from Scientific Learning	http://www.brainconnection.com/content/1_1
A Dialogue on Merging Science with Reading Instruction: article from BrainConnection.com, a Web resource from Scientific Learning	http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/dialogue-merging
Sentence Comprehension: The Connection to Reading Skills: article from BrainConnection.com, a Web resource from Scientific Learning	http://www.brainconnection.com/content/4_1
Paragraph Comprehension: The Connection to Reading Skills: article from BrainConnection.com, a Web resource from Scientific Learning	http://www.brainconnection.com/content/5_1
Beyond Root Words: Morphology and the Connection to Reading Skills: article from BrainConnection.com, a Web resource from Scientific Learning	http://www.brainconnection.com/content/6_1
Reciprocal Teaching by Julie Edwards, an intermediate teacher at Stonebridge Elementary School in Stillwater, Minnesota	http://education.umn.edu/carei/Reports/Rpractice/Winter95/reciprocal.htm
Reading to Comprehend and Learn: PSQ5R - University of Victoria Counselling Services	http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learn/program/hndouts/psq5r.html
SQ3R - A Reading/Study System from Virginia Tech	http://www.ucc.vt.edu/stdysk/sq3r.html
Strategy Instruction For Increasing Reading Comprehension from University of Kansas Center for Research in Learning.	http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/teaching_techniques/ellis_readingcomp.html
What does research say about reading? from the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory	http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/stw_esys/str_read.htm
The Effects of Independent Reading on Reading Achievement from Houghton Mifflin Company	http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/in_read1.html
American Library Association Teen Reading Site	http://www.ala.org/teenread/

Worksheet and Activity Sites	http://www.ala.org/teenread/
Worksheets for Grade 6-10 ESL	http://www.geocities.com/frankie_meehan/
Worksheets for Teach-Nology.com	http://worksheets.teach-nology.com/language_arts/reading_comp/
Beyond Worksheets -- Making Reading Make Sense	http://home.netcom.com/~fmaxsc/research.html

Articles: to print an article - highlight the text you want to print; click file/print and change from print all to print selection.
Who should teach reading through the grades?
Strategies for teaching reading in the content areas.
Content area comprehension.

During the last few decades, a greater emphasis has been placed on improving reading instruction in North American schools. Through Reading Recovery[R], Success for All, and similar programs, early reading intervention has been addressed, mainly in primary grades. Additional personnel have been employed in some districts to teach reading to at-risk children on a one-to-one basis, while in other districts parent volunteers provide regular reading practice help to young children.

These solutions address the early school years, but students may also have reading difficulties in their adolescent years. Students in middle and senior grades whose reading ability is not at their designated grade level have poor comprehension of many subject textbooks.

Reading instruction per se is not readily available for students in the higher grades because it is assumed that students acquired basic literacy by the end of Grade 3. At the secondary level, learning assistance teachers (who

work with individuals and small groups of students to help them with the regular classroom program) are often obliged to focus on supporting students to pass grades through a tutoring emphasis rather than on a diagnostic or developmental model.

Who should be instructing students in reading? The obvious answer is the teacher. But which teacher? A Grade 1 teacher? A Grade 6 teacher? A Grade 9 science teacher? A Grade 12 PE teacher? Are all these teachers equally equipped to address classroom literacy problems? Should they be? Whose responsibility is literacy anyway?

Training variations

With these questions in mind, the British Columbia Literacy Council of the International Reading Association (BCLCIRA) began investigating the degree to which preservice teachers in British Columbia are required to take reading courses for certification. Ideally, every teacher should be a teacher of reading, but certainly all English teachers need to have such training as a base line.

Data was collected primarily from the University of British Columbia (UBC), the University of Victoria (UVic), Simon Fraser University (SFU), and Okanagan University College. Although a range of literacy courses is available in these institutions, a minimal number is prescribed for certification, particularly for middle and secondary education teachers.

UBC professor Jim Anderson notes that elementary teachers take two courses called Reading and Language Arts and Curriculum and Instruction. But secondary teachers in training have no such requirement! They may choose related topics: Language Across the Curriculum, Oral and Written Language Development, English as a Second Language, and Content Area Reading, but exposure to theories of the reading process is minimal.

A reading specialist himself, Anderson has been part of a teacher education program review committee. He would welcome an essential reading component in the secondary program. Some teachers in the middle and senior grades state that they are not trained in basic reading techniques and therefore do not feel competent to address the reading difficulties that occur in their particular subject areas.

Whose responsibility?

The teaching of reading beyond the primary grades increasingly becomes the domain of learning assistance teachers and reading specialists, for whom additional literacy courses are mandatory. As numbers of students needing assistance increase, other solutions are attempted by classroom teachers, e.g., programmed instructions such as Corrective Reading or packaged learning such as SRA kits. Such programs are often administered by teachers who have had no previous training in basic reading instruction. Furthermore, the classes are often taught in other rooms, not in the subject area classroom where the actual reading difficulties occur.

Have any other solutions been attempted? It was reported in the British Columbia College of Teachers Report to Members, Winter 1999-2000, that UBC has put together a proposal to revise its entire teaching education program. To this end, a program approval team, consisting of various members of the community, would be charged with reviewing the changes to the program and making recommendations to the college council.

While this review of teacher education programs seems long overdue, a more alarming development could eclipse the current reading education issue. The Spring 2000 Report to Members refers to the "aging of the teaching force in B.C. (creating) a teacher shortage," which could result in "an individual without teacher qualifications (being) placed in the classroom." The implications of that scenario don't bear thinking about.

Whose responsibility is reading education? Should all efforts go toward educating more reading specialists, or should all teachers be trained to teach reading, regardless of their subject area? IRA has established the Commission on Adolescent Literacy. The Association has also produced a policy update advocating more reading specialists. They are considered vital.

Across Canada, the diagnostic reading centres, from McGill to UBC, who used to train specialists have an integrated model of contextual literacy. While acknowledging that literacy levels in general have been improving, our preliminary review shows an imbalance between the reading demands in British Columbia schools and the number of reading courses mandated for preservice teachers.

So what can the colleges, school boards, professional development departments, and the Ministry of Education do?

* Assign mandatory reading courses in theory and practice for all teachers in training.

* Establish partnerships with universities and schools so that both institutions can be better informed about current reading problems and solutions.

* Design reading courses for middle and secondary school teachers (especially basic reading and content areas). Locate these in schools or district offices convenient for travel.

* Invite teachers from different subject areas to plan team teaching projects that would include classroom reading.

* Offer incentives other than credit points, since many teachers have finished formal training.

* Consider class time release for planning and project completion.

* Develop suggestions for working together with adolescents and their families.

Rosaleen MacFadden teaches at Lord Tweedsmuir Secondary School, Surrey, and Nola Godinovich is a retired teacher from Central Okanagan, British Columbia.

Article A78256493

The Clearing House, Nov-Dec 1993 v67 n2 p121(2) Strategies for teaching reading in the content areas. G. Thomas Baer; Barbara L. Nourie. Brief Summary: Teaching reading in the content areas can be improved by evaluating the difficulty of the reading materials and the ability of the students to comprehend the materials. Some strategies such as lecture, rewriting content material and keeping in-class vertical files can help teachers who teach content areas.

As students enter the intermediate- and middle-level grades, increasing expectations are placed on their abilities to read and comprehend content from expository textbooks. Unlike developmental reading instruction in which multilevel texts are often available, content teachers are generally expected to teach from a single textbook. Unfortunately, experience has shown that this approach to teaching content subjects frequently fails.

The longer children of the same age attend school, the wider their range of reading achievement becomes. For example, a widely used formula estimates the range of reading achievement to equal two-thirds the expected chronological age in a particular grade. In a typical seventh-grade class the range is from third to eleventh grade. Even in homogeneously grouped classes, the range of student achievement in reading often spans several grade levels. Under these conditions, effective teaching becomes, to a certain degree, a matter of being able to manage the achievement differences among children successfully.

To complicate matters, the type of reading required to comprehend content area subjects differs greatly from that which is required by developmental textbooks. This difference exists because developmental reading emphasizes process (learning to read) while content area reading emphasizes application (reading to learn). Consequently, the types of reading materials used to accomplish these differing purposes vary significantly.

The first major difference between the two types of reading materials can be found in the area of vocabulary. In developmental reading, vocabulary tends to be general in nature. It is controlled to the extent that an effort is made to introduce and reinforce new words at a rate that can be accomplished by most children. Vocabulary in content area subjects, however, is more specialized and technical in nature. It tends to be far less controlled than the vocabulary found in developmental reading materials. To further complicate matters, many of the difficult and technical words included in content area materials are introduced at a rapid pace with little time devoted to their reinforcement. This situation partially accounts for the fact that content area textbooks are often written at a reading level that is too difficult for the intended audience. Another major difference can be found in the way the two types of reading materials introduce and explore concepts. Developmental reading attempts, for the most part, to deal with concepts with which children are familiar and to introduce them at a pace that is appropriate for most children. Content area reading, however, frequently covers concepts that extend beyond the knowledge of many children and adds to this difficulty by introducing them in rapid-fire fashion.

A third difference occurs when special types of reading are required. The ability to read maps, graphs, charts, and tables becomes an essential element when working with certain types of content subject textbooks.

These differences, combined with the fact that students are often held responsible for remembering a large number of facts and details, make reading in content areas a difficult exercise at best.

Frequently, teachers fail to take these differences into account and falsely assume that students come to classes with the reading skills necessary to use the assigned content textbook effectively. No effort is made to determine either the difficulty of the reading materials or the ability of the students to read them. Certain students are thus relegated to failure from the start because they are expected to read content materials that go beyond their ability. The end result is frustration on the part of students toward both the teacher and the subject.

It becomes essential, therefore, for content area teachers to determine not only the difficulty of reading materials used in their classrooms but also the ability of students to read these materials. Changes in teaching behaviors and accommodations of materials must be made to assure that all children have a legitimate opportunity to succeed in learning the content. Following are several strategies that teachers can initiate that should assist in reducing the number of students failing content area subjects.

Lecture. Although the strategy of lecturing has received, and earned, its share of criticism, it is, nonetheless, one way to assist students in learning content. Teachers can identify the concepts they deem important and present them in an organized manner that will enable students who have reading problems to better understand the subject content.

Rewriting content material. On a limited basis, teachers may find the rewriting of certain content materials a viable alternative to difficult textbooks. If this rewriting can be drafted at a reading level appropriate to those who are having problems, it allows affected students a certain amount of independence that otherwise they might not have. Another possibility is for students who do understand the text to rewrite the materials for their peers. This reinforces reading as well as writing skills.

Supplemental textbooks--expository. Teachers can identify textbooks written at a lower level than the primary text that nevertheless cover the same content as the text. This usually requires locating several textbooks because of the unlikelihood of finding two texts with identical content.

Supplemental textbooks--narrative. Trade books can present concepts covered in the primary textbook. If students are given multiple contacts with concepts, learning is enhanced. In this situation, children have the opportunity to see that the study of content subjects does not have to be limited to school textbooks.

In-class vertical files. Often students will read a newspaper or magazine article on a topic more willingly than they will read a textbook. Teachers can begin their own vertical files on selected topics, adding current materials to supplement and update the class textbook in addition to locating shorter, more easily read materials.

Audiovisual aids. The concepts of basic textbooks should be complemented when appropriate with a number of audiovisual aids such as films, filmstrips, audio tapes, television, and pictures. These materials, in addition to being essential for those who have problems reading the basic textbook, are also helpful for those who can read the text.

Small group work. Working in small groups to complete specific tasks can benefit those children who have reading problems. Each group member can be assigned a task that matches his or her ability and that contributes to the total group effort. As group members interact, all children have opportunities to share and learn about the concepts being studied.

Oral reading. If children cannot read the textbook, part or all of the text can be read to them. It must be understood that many children can comprehend when read to, even though they may not be able to read the text themselves. Oral reading can be carried out by teachers, students, school volunteers, or parents. Recordings of texts. The reading of texts or portions of texts can be recorded on audiotape and catalogued in the library. Students then can go to the library and listen independently to the readings. The teacher or a student could do the recording.

Using these approaches does not mean that the system abdicates its responsibility to work with students who are having problems in the area of reading. It is simply not a case of one strategy replacing another. Rather, students continue to receive instruction that enables them to grow as readers, as well as receiving accommodations in the strategies that are used to teach them content. To this extent, all content teachers need to be teachers of reading--not in the developmental sense where specialized training would be required, but in a way that uses varied approaches to help students with reading problems learn content.

One might legitimately ask where the time to accomplish these strategies will come from. Certainly, anyone who has taught in public schools knows that released time is rarely given to teachers for the development of instructional strategies. Most change that comes to fruition will occur because teachers have somehow found the necessary time, usually hide time, to do the task at hand. If, however, too much attention is paid to the magnitude of the perceived ideal, paralysis can and often does occur. Because of this delimiting factor, teachers need to focus on moving toward the desired changes one step at a time. This process allows teachers to regenerate their energies as they move forward. G. Thomas Baer is a professor of elementary education and Barbara L. Nourie is an assistant professor of secondary education--both in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Illinois State University, Normal.

Article A15150822

New book from IRA offers specific strategies for helping middle-grade learners

"By the time students have reached middle school, they are expected to read and comprehend grade-level texts," says author Charlotte Rose Sadler in the introduction to Comprehension Strategies for Middle Grade Learners: A Handbook for Content Area Teachers, a new book that will be published by the International Reading Association in September.

"Many middle school teachers are uncertain how to approach instructing students who have difficulties with text comprehension," Sadler continues. "They may assume that this is the job of the reading teacher, or they may feel they do not have the skills to teach reading. In reality, we are all reading teachers. If students have a problem reading or comprehending the text we have assigned, it is our job to assist them."

That's where Comprehension Strategies for Middle Grade Learners comes in. The book offers 56 specific comprehension strategies for middle-grade learners. Included are descriptions and easy-to-follow procedures for each strategy and its uses, content area examples, and suggestions for assessment. Various strategies can be used with individuals, small groups, or the entire class.

The strategies have been divided into six sections depending upon their primary goal:

1. Checking for Understanding features strategies that assist the teacher in assessing the level of students' comprehension and in helping students increase their comprehension. Examples include Get the Gist, Interactive Read-Alouds, and Problem of the Week (POW).

2. Fostering Cooperative Learning contains strategies that improve the comprehension of students as they work with partners or in small groups. Examples include Jigsaw, Silent With Support, and Skit Performance.

3. Connecting to Previous Knowledge provides strategies that allow readers to connect the information they are reading to knowledge or interests they already have. These strategies are especially useful in motivating students and creating interest in new topics. Examples include Anticipation Guide, Directed Reading Activity (DRA), and Prediction Log.

4. Improving Organization provides strategies for helping students organize material in a way that will improve their comprehension. These strategies incorporate the use of outlines and charts. Examples include Mapping, Expectation Outline, and K-W-L (Know-Want to Know Learned), developed by IRA President Donna M. Ogle.

5. Promoting Independent Learnings offers strategies the students can learn and apply independently in numerous situations. Examples include Text Lookbacks, Think-Aloud, and Vocabulary Notebooks.

6. Teaching to the Learning Style contains strategies that specifically focus on one or more modes of learning (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.). Examples include Combined Reading, Creative Dramatics, and Radio Reading.

Here is an example of one of the strategies designed to foster cooperative learning. Called Jigsaw, it can be applied in language arts, social studies, science, and math. Jigsaw is a collaborative strategy that allows students to work with their peers and to learn information from one another. It works as follows.

The teacher groups four to six students in teams and then gives each team member a topic on which to become an "expert." After that the teams split up and find the students from the other teams who are working on their same topic. After working together in the topic groups, students return to their teams and present the information they have gained.

In language arts, this strategy could be used to look at various elements in a story. For instance, teams could look at character, plot, setting, problem, and resolution. The references for this example come from E. Aronson and J.C. Hendrix.

"The strategies presented in this collection not only will assist students with reading comprehension difficulties, but they also will enhance students' learning experiences," concludes Sadler in the introduction. "This enhancement is due to the offering of a variety of modes and methods that may encourage the reluctant reader and enrich the experience of the enthusiastic reader. It gives readers the opportunity to gain comprehension through the mode or strategy that best suits them individually."

Comprehension Strategies for Middle Grade Learners: A Handbook for Content Area Teachers will be available in September 2001 and is a September Book Club selection. It can be ordered for a prepaid cost of US$13.56 for members and US$16.95 for nonmembers, plus shipping. Ask for publication number 292-448. For more detailed ordering information on this and other IRA books, see the "New From IRA" article on page 32 of this issue of Reading Today.

Named Works: Comprehension Strategies for Middle Grade Learners: A Handbook for Content Area Teachers (Book) - Reviews

Article A78256487

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Strategies for Reading Comprehension

Strategy Instruction For Increasing Reading Comprehension from University of Kansas Center for Research in Learning.