Although I am not teaching in a school at this point in time, I am spending quite a bit of time tutoring my sister in law who is in 8th grade. She comes by the office after school and we work on her homework together. She is a very intelligent girl, but she struggles with self confidence and has been diagnosed with a tracking problem. This causes her to really struggle with her reading. I have been using the think aloud strategy with her for quite some time. We will take turns reading from her text book or chapter book. Some of the think aloud strategies that I have used are:
- stopping to make an inference. I wonder what they mean when they say ...
-stop when I don't understand a word or phrase... Let's re-read this. Maybe look up the word in our dictionary?
-stop and ask a question about where the author is going... This must mean that...
My sister in law has started to pick up on some of these strategies. She will stop and ask me a question about what a particular word means or just add some thought about the direction the story is going in. I think that this is a very useful strategy, but it does get some getting used to. I think that it would be more difficult to do in a larger class setting. I am curious what the rest of you thought....
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I have taught classes full of struggling readers for long time. So far, what has helped me is to read and reread the texts few times before I finally could control my mind and think like a struggling reader. When I am ready to assign these texts, I become keener on predicting their comprehension breakdowns. In classroom, my students are fond of using either an elmo projector (for books, magazine articles, etc,) or a separate projector hooked to my computer (for online texts). The whole class can read the text on the white board and I have learned to juggle between inviting one student helping another student to think aloud and inviting all student think aloud together.
ReplyDeleteAnother reason for reading texts few times is to make careful judgment to know what I can expect from my students with their oral summaries. They knew that I wouldn’t allow them read entire text on the white board. They also knew that I could identify a passage that they could read and they didn’t want to be caught dead for not trying hard enough. Eventually, they respected my demands and they learned to make good use of whole-class text reading on the white board for their thinking aloud activities.
-RJ
I have found keeping a reading journal with specific directed activities you want the students to do or think about as they read helps, because you can change it up and make it more interesting, and it makes them accountable to read.
ReplyDeleteMarci, I"m so glad you have taken it upon yourself to help your sister-in-law. And I'm so glad that it's helping her.
ReplyDeleteSue