Building Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to Resources

Materials:

CSR is designed to be used in content area textbooks. It has been successfully applied in other expository text such as newspapers and magazines. To teach the strategy, the developers recommend using text that interests students and provides sufficient context for vocabulary terms and comprehension.

• instructional text
• independent text
• expository

Reading Task:

Textbook reading is the reading task students need to be able to do in most content area classrooms. For transfer to occur, the strategy should be practiced in the content area classroom with regularly assigned classroom text.

• authentic purpose
• transfer activities

Instructional Approach:

The teacher models each of the strategies through a think aloud and provides guided and independent practice. Students apply four reading strategies while working in mixed ability groups. Group interaction strategies must be taught to insure respect for and inclusion of all students. Students are taught specific roles. The roles rotate and students may perform more than one role at a time. The mixed ability grouping allows fluent language speakers to scaffold language learners.

• modeling, guided practice, independent practice
• cooperative learning

Student Scaffolds:

Before reading, students preview to predict what they know about the topic and what they will learn. During oral reading in small groups, they apply strategies of "declunking" to decode unknown words and to state succinctly the most important ideas. After reading, they write out the most important ideas learned in their learning logs.

• pre reading
• during reading
• post reading

Adaptation by Teachers:

3 (On a scale of 1-4 with 1 being low and 4 being high)

Teachers instruct students in the steps of the strategy, but the reading materials and structure of the cooperative groups are adapted to the teaching context.

Adaptability/Congruence with Classroom Curriculum:

CSR is applied in the context of regular classroom instruction.