12 Strategies for Teaching Reading

Anticipation Guide 
A list of statements that are related to the topic of the text your students will be reading. Before reading the text, students indicate for each statement whether they agree or disagree with it. Anticipation guides elicit students' prior knowledge of the topic of the text and set a purpose for reading.

Concept Cards 
These cards help students learn vocabulary words. They are similar to flash cards, but result in students learning more than just definitions. Concept cards help students learn both general and technical vocabular that they encournter in their readings and encourage students to interact with new words.

Directed Reading Activity (DRA)
 A DRA provides students with instructional support before, during, and after reading. This strategy serves a number of purposes: teaches word identification skills, elicits students' prior knowledge, teaches specific reading skills, sets a purpose for reading, and encourages students to monitor their comprehension while they are reading.

Graphic Organizers for Pre-Reading
illustrate the relationships among key concepts and terms in a text or unit of study. They preteach the main concepts and terms in a text, providing students with a mental framework on which to build new knowledge.

Jigsaw Sentences 
This strategy encourages students to form complete sentences by piecing together segments of sentences that are written on pieces of paper. It helps students learn to use semantic and syntactic clues to make sense of words and sentences.

Know, Want to Know, Learned (K-W-L)
This is an instructional reading strategy that is used to guide students through a text. The K-W-L strategy elicits students' prior knowledge, sets a purpsoe for reading, and helps students to monitor their comprehension.

The Sound Burglar 
This strategy helps young readers develop phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is a basic building block for phonics, which is the relationship between sounds and letters.

Story Road Maps 
Maps encourage young readers to identify main events in a story, recognize sequence, and visualize ideas and events in a story.

Using Text Structure
A mistaken assumption made by many teachers is that the proficient reader of literature will, in turn, be a proficient reader of expository text. The trouble that many good readers of literature tend to have with expository texts has to do, in part, with text structure. Teaching students to recognize common text structures found in expository texts can help students monitor their comprehension.

Word-a-Likes
The Word-a-Likes strategy helps young readers develop phonemic awareness.

Word Webs (also known as semantic mapping)
Webs illustrate how key words or concepts are related to one another through graphic representations. They teach students to see how new concepts can be defined and related to other concepts.