Strategic Reading for Success

1. Strategic Reading for Success Or Learning to Learn how to Read

2. What Has Made Us Successful Readers of a Foreign Language? • A nurtured enjoyment and love of reading from an early age in our own language • Support from family members: e.g. bedtime stories, discussing the newspaper over breakfast, etc. • Regular active and passive exposure to the written word in various contexts throughout our lives • A circle of friends who also read for pleasure and make reading a topic of conversation • A tendency towards learning styles that lend themselves well to the written word (e.g. visual, intrapersonal (emotional) …) • A fascination with words and their meanings, and the relationship between sounds and how they appear on the page • A particular love for an author or genre that impacted us at a critical life moment • An ability to understand, digest and employ successful reading strategies in L1 and FL1 • An exposure to authentic and stimulating texts at school • Inspirational teachers who brought reading alive in the classroom

3. Strategic Classrooms and Strategic Learners • Student-centred classrooms in which students learn how to learn make for successful readers: - Strategy instruction and opportunity to engage actively with the strategies for real purposes - Personalised learning to meet the needs of the individual learner - AfL to support the development and progress of strategy acquisition

4. Developing the Strategies and Learning the Foreign Language Gradual Steady Progress Door to total independence Response to texts Engaging with reading STRATEGIES Pre-reading STRATEGIES Understanding the skill STRATEGIES Increasing confidence and autonomy to read and engage

5. Writing is published Message Concepts and ideas fall on and influence society Style + Register Lexicon Structure Grammar Meanings Inspiration Ideas fished out as events and experiences

6. Knowing your Learners and their Preferred Learning Styles: VAK • Visual learners will read best by seeing words carefully set out in an appropriate font with sensible line breaks. Think about the colour of the text and the background. Also think about the presence of any related pictures or images. Try not to clutter the page. With wall displays and revision prompts, ensure written work is placed just above eye level (from a seated position).

7. Knowing your Learners and their Preferred Learning Styles: VAK • Auditory learners will benefit from having the chance to listen to the text while reading along. They will also tend to read aloud and will appreciate sound effects and will pick up on the use of voice by the speaker. (Think about instructions you give for silent reading). Good activities may involve exploiting walking dictations, role play modelling and gap fills with song lyrics.

8. Knowing your Learners and their Preferred Learning Styles: VAK • Kinaesthetic learners will also enjoy reading aloud, perhaps while moving around. They will probably enjoy reordering paragraphs or cartoon strips. They will enjoy taking on the role of reader for dialogues and put on a fake voice / accent. They will engage with interactive post-reading activities that involve re-enacting the story, devising their own role play, making a model of a scene from the story, or drawing a picture, etc. They will be the walker in the walking dictations. Working with dictionaries to find new vocabulary under competitive conditions gets kinaesthetic learners excited.

9. What is your preferred intelligence? Take the test on the handout and find out! It matters to know your preferred intelligence, because this will often influence the methods and activities you adopt in class. You don’t want to alienate your students or only teach to one or two particular learning styles.

10. Reading Strategies Linked to Other Multiple Intelligences • Naturalistic: Reading a poem about nature / weather / animals, etc., while seated outside in the school grounds. • Interpersonal: Read a conversation in pairs or small groups and then act it out / write their own based on the text. • Intrapersonal: Skim and scan the passage for subtle emotions, feelings, insinuations and judgements. Ask for personal feedback on how the text makes the students feel or want to react. Let students write an alternate ending or a personal response. Good texts may include diary entries, love letters, agony aunt columns, etc. • Logic / mathematical / technological: Set reading tasks that are in the form of logic problems or puzzles. Crosswords and other word games are appropriate here. Devising strategy games and treasure hunts or orienteering activities works well. • Musical: Play suitable background music while a story is read, have sound effects, use songs with their lyrics. Poetry and discussions around rhythm and rhyme and word play work well. • Philosophical / ethical: Have a moral debate or group discussion about the issues raised in a text. Select texts of a religious nature or of a controversial ethical nature. Keep to topical issues that are relevant to the students’ ages. Let students have input into choice of material for reading – even looking for their own material. • Verbal: Reading aloud, discussions, Q + A sessions, debates, oral comprehension tasks, arguing a point of view, explaining the meaning or idea of the text orally to the class …

11. What is Strategic Reading? • “Reading is a process of constructing meaning by interacting with text: as individuals read, they use their prior knowledge along with clues from the text to construct meaning.” • “A strategy is a plan selected deliberately by the reader to accomplish a particular goal or to complete a given task.” Source: www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/st_read0.html

12. Strategic Teachers By adopting a strategic approach to our pedagogy, we are empowering students to learn how to learn effectively and develop the skills they need for when they leave the safety of school or college. The strategies we adopt will serve to scaffold our students’ interactions with texts of all kinds and help them towards greater achievement and success.

13. Strategy Models Hermeneutic Spiral (Müller-Michaels, 1996) I Pre-reading Context, structure, first impression, striking features II Analysis People, time, language, style, Motifs, themes, narrative structure, conflicts, problems III Deep understanding Author’s intention, actualisation

14. And now for some more specific strategies that you could try in the MFL classroom.

15. Pre-Reading Strategies Answer these questions: Who is the author? Who is the intended reader? What visual stimulus is there? What can we infer from the title (or other means) about the topic / issue / vocabulary / style and register? Brainstorming and mind maps to warm students up to the topic / issue of the text Anticipation guides to focus readers The QAR Strategy (Question-Answer Relationships): ‘right there’ questions, ‘think and search’ questions, ‘author and you’ questions and ‘on my own’ questions Students pose their own questions in advance about what they want to find out

16. Strategies for Engagement with Texts • Annolighting • Annotating • Conversations across time • Inferential reading • Interactive notebook (also post-reading strategy) • Key concept synthesis • Listening to voice

17. Post-Reading Strategies • Collaborative annotation • Dense questioning (cf. thinking skills and questioning techniques later) • Interactive notebook (also a strategy to use while reading) • RAFT – based on suggestions generated from class discussions, students respond to the text by choosing a Role, an Audience, a Format and a Topic on which to write a response. • Drawing sociograms to demonstrate relationships between characters / people in texts

18. AfL Students write their own questions on texts for their peers Survey students on their use of strategies and get them to discuss the success of various strategies Students set their own targets for improvement Focus on one or two strategies at once. Don’t try to assess many in one go Strategic Reading: Assessment for Learning

19. AoL At KS3, develop tests and exams that test both the strategies students need to succeed in reading as well as the content and linguistic comprehension Differentiate tests where possible to suit different learning styles: e.g. have open-ended questions with a choice of tasks At KS4, test strategies that will help students both pass the exams AND prepare them to be independent readers in the future – select specific questions. Do not need to test a whole reading paper in one go for strategy instruction (NB whole paper testing is of course important for practising timing, speed and getting a feel for the real exam). Test a variety of registers and styles – especially formality. Students need to be good at reading between the lines for emotions and reactions (especially for the higher paper) and need to recognise tenses and other grammatical structures (such as modifiers and negation). At KS5 test students on their ability to paraphrase, extract key details, judge and evaluate emotions / impressions and respond in their own words to a stimulus. Students need to be trained to look for synonyms and recognise collocations / connotations, false friends / cognates and have an understanding of idiom and morphology. Strategic Reading: Assessment of Learning

20. Lunch break and time for reflection and discussion of reading strategies