Strategic Reading for
Success
Or
Learning to Learn how to Read
What Has Made Us Successful
Readers of a Foreign Language?
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A nurtured enjoyment and love of reading from an early age in our own
language
Support from family members: e.g. bedtime stories, discussing the
newspaper over breakfast, etc.
Regular active and passive exposure to the written word in various
contexts throughout our lives
A circle of friends who also read for pleasure and make reading a topic of
conversation
A tendency towards learning styles that lend themselves well to the
written word (e.g. visual, intrapersonal (emotional) …)
A fascination with words and their meanings, and the relationship
between sounds and how they appear on the page
A particular love for an author or genre that impacted us at a critical life
moment
An ability to understand, digest and employ successful reading strategies
in L1 and FL1
An exposure to authentic and stimulating texts at school
Inspirational teachers who brought reading alive in the classroom
Strategic Classrooms and Strategic
Learners
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Student-centred classrooms in which
students learn how to learn make for
successful readers:
- Strategy instruction and
opportunity to engage actively with the
strategies for real purposes
- Personalised learning to meet
the needs of the individual learner
- AfL to support the development
and progress of strategy acquisition
Developing the Strategies and
Learning the Foreign Language
Door to total
independence
Gradual Steady Progress
Response to
texts
Prereading
Understanding
the skill
STRATEGIES
Engaging
with reading
STRATEGIES
STRATEGIES
Increasing confidence and
autonomy to read and engage
Writing is published
Message
Style
Lexicon
+
Register
Concepts and ideas fall
on and influence
society
Structure
Grammar
Meanings
Inspiration
Ideas fished out as events
and experiences
Knowing your Learners and their
Preferred Learning Styles: VAK
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Visual learners will read best by seeing
words carefully set out in an appropriate
font with sensible line breaks. Think about
the colour of the text and the background.
Also think about the presence of any
related pictures or images. Try not to
clutter the page. With wall displays and
revision prompts, ensure written work is
placed just above eye level (from a seated
position).
Knowing your Learners and their
Preferred Learning Styles: VAK
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Auditory learners will benefit from having
the chance to listen to the text while
reading along. They will also tend to read
aloud and will appreciate sound effects
and will pick up on the use of voice by the
speaker. (Think about instructions you
give for silent reading). Good activities
may involve exploiting walking dictations,
role play modelling and gap fills with song
lyrics.
Knowing your Learners and their
Preferred Learning Styles: VAK
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Kinaesthetic learners will also enjoy reading
aloud, perhaps while moving around. They will
probably enjoy reordering paragraphs or cartoon
strips. They will enjoy taking on the role of
reader for dialogues and put on a fake voice /
accent. They will engage with interactive postreading activities that involve re-enacting the
story, devising their own role play, making a
model of a scene from the story, or drawing a
picture, etc. They will be the walker in the
walking dictations. Working with dictionaries to
find new vocabulary under competitive conditions
gets kinaesthetic learners excited.
What is your preferred intelligence?
Take the test on the handout
and find out!
It matters to know your preferred
intelligence, because this will often influence
the methods and activities you adopt in
c l a s s . Yo u d o n ’ t w a n t t o a l i e n a t e y o u r
students or only teach to one or two
p a r t i c u l a r
l e a r n i n g
s t y l e s .
Reading Strategies Linked to Other
Multiple Intelligences
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Naturalistic: Reading a poem about nature / weather / animals, etc., while seated
outside in the school grounds.
Interpersonal: Read a conversation in pairs or small groups and then act it out /
write their own based on the text.
Intrapersonal: Skim and scan the passage for subtle emotions, feelings,
insinuations and judgements. Ask for personal feedback on how the text makes the
students feel or want to react. Let students write an alternate ending or a personal
response. Good texts may include diary entries, love letters, agony aunt columns,
etc.
Logic / mathematical / technological: Set reading tasks that are in the form of logic
problems or puzzles. Crosswords and other word games are appropriate here.
Devising strategy games and treasure hunts or orienteering activities works well.
Musical: Play suitable background music while a story is read, have sound effects,
use songs with their lyrics. Poetry and discussions around rhythm and rhyme and
word play work well.
Philosophical / ethical: Have a moral debate or group discussion about the issues
raised in a text. Select texts of a religious nature or of a controversial ethical
nature. Keep to topical issues that are relevant to the students’ ages. Let students
have input into choice of material for reading – even looking for their own material.
Verbal: Reading aloud, discussions, Q + A sessions, debates, oral comprehension
tasks, arguing a point of view, explaining the meaning or idea of the text orally to
the class …
What is Strategic Reading?
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“Reading is a process of constructing
meaning by interacting with text: as
individuals read, they use their prior
knowledge along with clues from the text
to construct meaning.”
“A strategy is a plan selected deliberately
by the reader to accomplish a particular
goal or to complete a given task.”
Source:
www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/st_read0.html
Strategic Teachers
By adopting a strategic approach to our
pedagogy, we are empowering students to
learn how to learn effectively and develop
the skills they need for when they leave the
safety of school or college. The strategies
we adopt will serve to scaffold our students’
interactions with texts of all kinds and help
them towards greater achievement and
success.
Strategy Models
Hermeneutic Spiral (Müller-Michaels, 1996)
I Pre-reading
II Analysis
People, time,
language, style,
Motifs, themes,
narrative structure,
conflicts, problems
Context,
structure, first
impression,
striking features
III Deep understanding
Author’s intention,
actualisation
And now for some more specific
strategies that you could try in
the MFL classroom.
Pre-Reading Strategies
Answer these questions:
Who is the author?
Who is the intended reader?
What visual stimulus is there?
What can we infer from the title (or other means) about the topic
/ issue / vocabulary / style and register?
Brainstorming and mind maps to warm
students up to the topic / issue of the text
Anticipation guides to focus readers
The QAR Strategy (Question-Answer Relationships): ‘right
there’ questions, ‘think and search’ questions, ‘author and
you’ questions and ‘on my own’ questions
Students pose their own questions in advance about what they want
to find out
Strategies for Engagement with Texts
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Annolighting
Annotating
Conversations across time
Inferential reading
Interactive notebook (also postreading strategy)
Key concept synthesis
Listening to voice
Post-Reading Strategies
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Collaborative annotation
Dense questioning (cf. thinking skills and
questioning techniques later)
Interactive notebook (also a strategy to
use while reading)
RAFT – based on suggestions generated
from class discussions, students respond
to the text by choosing a Role, an
Audience, a Format and a Topic on which
to write a response.
Drawing sociograms to demonstrate
relationships between characters / people
in texts
Strategic Reading:
Assessment for Learning
AfL
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Students write their own questions on texts for
their peers
Survey students on their use of strategies and get
them to discuss the success of various strategies
Students set their own targets for improvement
Focus on one or two strategies at once. Don’t try
to assess many in one go
Strategic Reading:
Assessment of Learning
AoL
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At KS3, develop tests and exams that test both the strategies
students need to succeed in reading as well as the content and
linguistic comprehension
Differentiate tests where possible to suit different learning styles:
e.g. have open-ended questions with a choice of tasks
At KS4, test strategies that will help students both pass the exams
AND prepare them to be independent readers in the future – select
specific questions. Do not need to test a whole reading paper in one
go for strategy instruction (NB whole paper testing is of course
important for practising timing, speed and getting a feel for the real
exam). Test a variety of registers and styles – especially formality.
Students need to be good at reading between the lines for emotions
and reactions (especially for the higher paper) and need to
recognise tenses and other grammatical structures (such as
modifiers and negation).
At KS5 test students on their ability to paraphrase, extract key
details, judge and evaluate emotions / impressions and respond in
their own words to a stimulus. Students need to be trained to look
for synonyms and recognise collocations / connotations, false friends
/ cognates and have an understanding of idiom and morphology.
Lunch break and time for reflection
and discussion of reading
strategies