Instruction
Programs and Materials
Do materials and program...
- teach comprehension strategies directly and explicitly?
- incorporate multiple strategies?
- use strategies in a variety of contexts and contents?
- teach the strategy in text students can "work with" (simplify the task)?
- teach students to become strategic (when to use the strategy, why to use it, how to use it)?
- provide enough practice and examples to learn and apply the strategy?
Materials and programs should...
- Explicitly teach listening and reading comprehension strategies.
- Provide a range of examples for initial teaching and practice.
- Provide independent practice activities that parallel requirements of instruction.
- Begin with pictures and simple sentence to teach comprehension before moving to paragraphs and longer text passages.
- Use text passages in which the main idea or comprehension unit is explicitly stated, clear, and in which the ideas follow a logical order.
- Use familiar vocabulary and passages at appropriate readability levels for the learners.
- Use familiar topics during initial learning.
- Use familiar, simple, syntactic structures and sentence types.
- Use both narrative and expository texts.
- Progress to more complex structures in which the main ideas are not explicit and passages are longer.
- Insert questions at strategic intervals to reduce memory load for learners.
- Teach skill or strategy with the aid of carefully designed examples and practice.
- Continue skill or strategy instruction across several instructional sessions to illustrate the applicability and utility of the skill or strategy.
- Connect previously taught skills and strategies with new content and texts.
- Cumulatively build repertoire of skills and strategies that are introduced, applied, and integrated with appropriate texts and for authentic purposes over the course of the year.
For more information about evaluating and selecting reading programs and materials, visit the Curricula section of this website.