GENERAL INFORMATION
In this article, Kirstina Robertson highlights ELL instructional strategies based on the five components of reading as outlined in Teaching Children to Read by the National Reading Panel (2000), phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.
Learn more about ways to improve the reading skills of your middle and high school students.
STRATEGIES
For other strategies to build background knowledge and prior reading activities, please see the Oral Language and Vocabulary Development pages
An anticipation guide is a comprehension strategy to use pre-reading. This strategy activates students’ prior knowledge about a new topic or idea.
A strategy to read a piece of text multiple times, with each reading digging deeper into its meaning.
This strategy interrupts a student’s reading of a text, giving the student a chance to think about what is being read. Be sure to watch The Wingman video for an idea on how to engage your reluctant reader.
SWBS (Somebody Wanted But So) is an organized way to summarize reading. This strategy works well for struggling readers, as it assists them in deciphering what is important parts of the text to include in a summary.
Implementing Quartet Quiz at the close of an activity or reading puts students in charge of what they "got" and what remains "fuzzy" and positions the teacher to clear up any misconceptions and use student generated questions to drive further instruction.
GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS
Using the 'refined search' feature with the Resource Type set as 'printouts and the 'printout type' as 'graphic organizers', three pages of graphic organizers are generated that include information about each printout, how to teach with it, and ideas to try.
A comprehensive collection of pre-formatted graphic organizers that you can integrate into activities and lesson plans or use by themselves.
The Knowledge Framework (KF) is a powerful organizational tool that improves students' ability to comprehend and organize material. It incorporates critical thinking skills with language and content across subject areas and grade levels.
WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. WordSift helps anyone easily sift through texts -- just cut and paste any text into WordSift and you can engage in a verbal quick-capture! The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text.
RESOURCES FOR SCAFFOLDING
Rewordify simplifies difficult text and creates learning activities to complement the reading.
A free tool to evaluate the readability of text that you enter or scan.
This tool allows teachers or students to enter any text to have it read aloud. Users can adjust the speed of the text to account for different proficiency levels.
ONLINE TEXT RESOURCES
This is a free resource of leveled fiction and non-fiction reading passages to use in the classroom. Includes: Passages that pair with books; text sets; themes; and lesson plans.
This is a free resource teachers can use to expose students to expository text via news articles on topics such as war & peace, science, money, law, and the arts. In addition, thelexile level of each article can be adjusted to allow for easy differentiation of instruction.
This is a free collection of hundreds of reading passages for grades K-12 teachers can use with students to practice reading comprehension.
Contains a selection of short illustrated books that are read aloud to students. Perfect for elementary students.
Fiction and non-fiction stories for elementary students are written in English, but can be narrated in over 30 languages.
