Teaching Strategies Reference Guide

The PRAXIS II is a series of tests designed to assess the professional knowledge and skills of beginning teachers. A number of states have identified specific PRAXIS II series tests and established minimum scores as licensure requirements. The typical examinee has completed a teacher education program or must demonstrate competency through an alternative certification process.

The following are strategies that currently reflect “best practice” in reading instruction. Questions about them often appear on specialty tests designed to assess both knowledge of principles and familiarity with the processes. These strategies supplement or re-emphasize many of those more fully discussed in this edition of Teaching Reading in Today’s Elementary Schools.

Chunking
Reading Level: Intermediate and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with narrative or expository text.
• Choose a passage at the student’s instructional level.
• Tape-record the student reading the passage before instruction.
• Chunk the sentences into meaningful phrases.
(Chunking of the material can be modeled orally or can be visually displayed by drawing lines between specific words of text, providing visual cues for the meaningful phrases. The passage may also be cut into segments and mounted on index cards to provide manipulatives to support the chunking of the material.)
Chunked example: The family’s beloved pet / was / a brown and tan / basset hound.
• Model the reading of the passage, noting the chunked phrases (orally or with supporting manipulatives).
• Tape-record the student reading the passage.
• Repeat until the student’s fluency improves.
Cloze Procedure
Reading Level: Primary, Intermediate, and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with content area reading or literature selections for comprehension instruction, matching reading materials to specific students, or testing
For comprehension instruction:
• Choose a selection of text approximately 200–250 words in length.
• Leave the first sentence and the last sentence of the passage intact.
• Beginning with the second sentence, delete every fifth word or select key terms or sight words.
(If the procedure requires a written response from the student, blanks may be substituted for the deleted words. If the required response is oral, sticky notes may be placed over the target words as they appear in the text.)
• Instruct the student to read the entire passage and then to reread inserting each of the missing words.
• Students respond by writing words in the blanks or by responding orally to the deleted terms. Oral responses should be tape-recorded.
• Upon completion, the responses may be compared to the original text.
Directed Reading Activity
Reading Level: Primary, Intermediate, and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with textbooks, basal readers, or literature selections.
• Prior to instruction, introduce new vocabulary.
• Activate or establish background knowledge, using techniques such as discussion or webbing
• Offer strategy or skill instruction as needed.
• Provide time for students to read the selection silently.
• Conduct follow-up activities for review and application.
Directed Reading-Thinking Activity
Reading Level: Primary, Intermediate, and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with textbooks, basal readers, or literature selections.
• Begin with development of background concepts, if necessary.
• Before reading, prompt students to make predictions on the basis of the title and any available pictures.
• During reading, model reading aloud or instruct students to read to strategic points; then stop to confirm or revise previous predictions. Continue this process throughout the text.
• After reading, discuss the selection as a whole and relate it to students’ background knowledge and experiences and to the author’s intended purpose. Discuss the strategies used throughout the process and review key vocabulary terms.
Echo Reading
Reading Level: Primary and Intermediate levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Easiest to use with literature selections
Chapters: This is an additional technique for the development of oral reading fluency
• Select a text that is approximately 150–200 words in length.
• Discuss the importance of fluency when reading.
• Read the first sentence of the text, modeling intonation, phrasing, and expression.
• Prompt the student to read the same line of text, imitating your intonation, phrasing, and expression. Tape-record student and teacher reading.
• Continue until the entire passage has been read.
• Play the tape, and discuss strengths as well as skills that need improvement.
Graphic Organizers
Reading Level: Primary, Intermediate, and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with textbooks, basal readers, and literature selections.
• Select key concepts or vocabulary terms.
• Arrange the concepts or vocabulary terms visually so that the relationships among them can be viewed or the reader’s background knowledge can be activated or established.
• Graphic organizers may be used before, during, or after reading.
K-W-L
Reading Level: Intermediate and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with expository text.
• Before reading a selection, introduce the students to the following organizer:
What I Know / What I Want to Learn / What I Learned
• Introduce the topic of the text and prompt responses from the students.
• Complete the organizer by recording the students’ responses related to the first heading: What I Know.
• Before and/or during reading, record students’ responses under the second heading: What I Want to Learn.
• After reading, record responses under the third heading: What I Learned.
• To summarize, conduct a class discussion reviewing responses related to the three headings in the diagram.
Language Experience Approach
Reading Level: Primary, Intermediate, and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use to create students’ own text.
• Create or lead the students through a shared experience, such as a field trip, class visitor or demonstration, or class project.
• Lead the class in a discussion about the shared experience. Prompt with questions, as needed.
• Record the authentic language used by the students to document their observations and reactions to the shared experience.
• Read the story together with the students.
• Conduct follow-up activities or minilessons, using the story as print material.
QAR
Reading Level: Intermediate and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with textbooks, basal readers, or literature selections.
• Select appropriate material.
• Introduce students to the following guides for locating information in the print material:
• “Right There”—Information is in the print material, explicitly stated.
• “Think and Search”—Information is distributed throughout the material. The student must combine information to identify the answer.
• “Author and You” — Information from what the readers know and what they believe the author intended them to understand from the printed material is used to provide the answer.
• “On My Own” — Information is related to the text, but the reader’s own knowledge must be used to identify the answer.
• Discuss and model relationships between different types of questions.
Repeated Readings
Reading Level: Primary, Intermediate, and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with material at the appropriate instructional reading level.
• Select a text of interest to the student.
• Make a copy of the text.
• Discuss the importance of practice in developing a skill.
• Prompt the student to read aloud; tape-record and document miscues as they occur during the student’s oral reading.
• Record the speed.
• Enter the miscues and the speed data on a graph.
• Provide scaffolding during minilesson sessions to address miscues.
• Prompt the student to reread the material.
• Record the new data and compare to the earlier performance.
Rate and word recognition accuracy should increase while maintaining comprehension.
Retelling
Reading Level: Primary, Intermediate, and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Easier to use with literature selections, although students can also “retell” informational text by summarizing it.
• Before reading narrative selections, prompt students to identify the following information as they read: Characters, Setting, Plot, Conflict, and Solution. If the students are reading expository material, they should create a list of key concepts. Ask students to identify the most important concepts in the selection, those that are supported by subordinate ideas.
• Following the reading of the material by you or the student, ask the student to retell the story or summarize the information, identifying the story elements or the key concepts as they appeared.
SQ3R
Reading Level: Intermediate and Middle levels
Appropriate Reading Material: Use with subject matter textbooks and readings.
• Select expository material at the appropriate readability level for the students.
• Introduce and demonstrate the SQ3R steps:
• Survey: Model skimming the passage to locate important terms and headings.
• Question: After skimming the passage, model questions about the material that might be answered in the passage. Prompt students to create questions of their own that they expect to be answered.
• Read: Provide time for the students to read the material for the purpose of locating the answers to the questions posed during prereading.
• Recite: Discuss orally the responses to the questions located in the chapter. Encourage the students to summarize and use their own language to express the answers.
• Review: When the entire selection has been read and the questions and answers located, guide the students through an overall summary of the information.

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