Winter
1995 Newsletter
Teaching Reading: New Ideas
Volume 3, Number 1
Scaffolding Reading
Experiences to Promote
Success: A Flexible
Approach to Fostering
Comprehension
by Michael Graves, professor and head of the
Literacy Education Program at the University of
Minnesota, and Bonnie Graves, a freelance writer
specializing in instructional materials and fiction for
children.
Nearly fifty years ago, Emit Betts introduced the Directed Reading Activity (DRA), a preset plan for
teaching basal reading selections, and for most of this time the DRA was the mainstay of the basal
approach. In some ways, the DRA served its purpose well, providing teachers-many of whom were not
highly trained in instructional methods-with a conventional approach to dealing with conventional basal
selections. Today's teachers, however, are highly skilled in instructional methods and are well prepared
and eager to assume the role of reflective practitioners; they are professionals who make informed
decisions to create instruction especially well suited to their students. At the same time, basal readers are
changing or being replaced with trade books, and teachers no longer are satisfied with conventional
approaches to conventional selections. Students in today's classes are diverse, the selections they read
are diverse, and the approaches necessary to foster successful reading experiences are likewise diverse. A
Scaffold Reading Experience is a flexible framework for planning reading experiences in today's
classrooms.
A Scaffold Reading Experience (SRE) is a set of pre-reading, reading, and post reading activities designed
specifically to assist a particular group of students in successfully reading, understanding, learning from,
and enjoying a particular selection. An SRE presents a set of options from which you, the classroom
teacher, choose those best suited to lead a group of students to success-to the fluent, rich, and rewarding
reading experience that produces lifelong readers who both can read and who choose to do so.
The two phases of an SRE are shown below. During the planning phase, you consider your students, the
selection they are reading, and the purposes of the reading.
Based on these considerations, you select those pre-reading, reading, and post-reading activities that will
lead to success during the implementation phase. In general, with less proficient students, more difficult
selections, and more challenging purposes,
more scaffolding is needed. The Scaffold
Reading framework, however, is designed to
suggest specific combinations of activities for
specific situations, and thus each SRE is likely
to include a unique set of pre-reading, reading,
and post reading activities.
Pre-reading activities prepare students to read
the upcoming selection. They can get students
interested in reading the selection, remind
students of things they already know that will
help them understand and enjoy the selection,
and pre-teach aspects of the selection that
students may find difficult. Pre-reading activities are important because only with adequate preparation
will the experience of reading be enjoyable, rewarding, and successful. Pre-reading options for an SRE
include motivating students, relating the reading to students' lives, activating background knowledge,
building text-specific knowledge, pre-teaching vocabulary, pre-teaching concepts, pre-questioning,
predicting, setting directions, and suggesting reading strategies.
Reading activities include both things that students themselves do as they are reading and things that
teachers do to assist them as they are reading. Reading options for an SRE include silent reading by
students, oral reading by teachers, teacher-guided reading, oral reading by students, and teacher
modification of the text.
Post reading activities serve many purposes. They provide opportunities for students to synthesize and
organize information gleaned from the text so that they can understand and recall important points. They
allow students to evaluate an author's message, his or her stance in presenting the message, and the
quality of the text itself. They allow both teachers and students to evaluate students' understanding of the
text. And they provide opportunities for students to respond to a text in a variety of ways-to reflect on the
meaning of the text, to compare differing texts and ideas, to imagine themselves as characters in the text,
to synthesize information from different
The combination of pre-reading, reading, and post reading activities suggested in this example is only one
of a number of combinations you could have selected. You would select the activities based on your own
assessment of the students, the reading selection, and the reading purpose.
To summarize, the purpose in planning and carrying out any SRE is a straight-forward one: the objective
is to do everything possible to ensure that students have a successful reading experience. A successful
reading experience is one in which students understand the selection, learn from it, enjoy it, and achieve
the goals you and they have set. Moreover, such an experience leaves students realizing that they have
been successful, recognizing that they have dealt competently with the selection. If students are to
become successful readers-adults who can and do read, both to gain information and for the pleasure and
satisfaction that reading can provide-the vast majority of their reading experiences must be successful
ones.
Parts of this article were taken from Scaffolding Reading Experiences: Designs for Student Success, by
Michael F. Graves and Bonnie B. Graves, (Norwood, Mass: Christopher-Gordon, Inc., 1994). Used with
permission from the publisher.
RESEARCH/Practice is a publication of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement,
College of Education, 275 Peik Hall, University of Minnesota, 159 Pillsbury Drive Southeast, Minneapolis,
Minnesota 55455-0208 (612) 624-0300.
©1995, University of Minnesota
CAREI Director, Geoffrey Maruyama
CAREI Associate Director, Kyla Wahlstrom
Editor, Kate Tyler
Associate Editor, Cynthia Fogard
The University of Minnesota is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to its
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