Classroom Reading Strategies: Scaffolding the reading process for students WHO DON'T LIKE TO READ

Don't teachers like to bemoan about how the age of digital literacy has reduced our students' reading attention span to a mere 140 characters tweet?  Even reading the passage for comprehension, let alone the assigned literature text for O Levels, is a mountain of words too high for them to climb.

This website - 

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies#skill1042

very helpfully lists and provides details on how you can scaffold or make interesting the reading process for your reluctant students!  They even categorize the strategies such that you can easily see which are suitable for pre-reading, during reading, or post-reading!

I've actually been taught the Directed Reading Activity and Jigsaw method in my content classes for the teaching of General Paper, to help weaker students better comprehend difficult passages, or to simply get them interested and invested in what they are reading, as opposed to just throwing them the passage and giving them 15 minutes to skim/scan/pretend to read.

So for example, DRTA involves teachers breaking up the passage (or, chunking) and crafting thinking questions pertaining to each part, read on for the full description:

D = DIRECT. Teachers direct and activate students' thinking prior to reading a passage by scanning the title, chapter headings, illustrations, and other materials. Teachers should use open-ended questions to direct students as they make predictions about the content or perspective of the text (e.g., "Given this title, what do you think the passage will be about?").

R = READING. Students read up to the first pre-selected stopping point. The teacher then prompts the students with questions about specific information and asks them to evaluate their predictions and refine them if necessary. This process should be continued until students have read each section of the passage.

T = THINKING. At the end of each section, students go back through the text and think about their predictions. Students should verify or modify their predictions by finding supporting statements in the text. The teacher asks questions such as:

• What do you think about your predictions now?
• What did you find in the text to prove your predictions?
• What did you we read in the text that made you change your predictions?

I do think DRTA is really useful in getting students interested in what they are reading, especially if you get passages which are full of suspense, or which lead up to specific arguments.  If you just hand them the whole body of text, they are likely to be put off by so much text; breaking it up for them is like feeding it to them in bite-sized pieces.

This website is brilliant also because it freely (yay kaching!) provides worksheet templates to aid the use of the specific reading strategy - which is a great help to our design of worksheets.  They even back each reading strategy up with research references, which will help us look smart(-er?), or at least, more aligned with current educational psychology theories in our lesson planning.

Reading strategies sound like really simply activities but I really do believe they can make a world of difference in lesson planning, and helping us as teachers to monitor and facilitate students' understanding of the text.  

Some assessment opportunities:
- As teachers, these readings strategies would form part of our formative assessments as we are better able to control and monitor students' reading and understanding of the texts assigned.
- The specific use of chunking may be used to help scaffold the summative assessments for very weak students as well.