ESL Strategies

Strategies for Improving Reading

Ever set foot in the classroom with a lesson on reading for academic purposes armed with strategies for note taking, summary writing and supporting details in mind? Or with the learning outcome of inference from context?

As an ESL teacher, my job is to get students reading quickly but effectively and as any ESL teacher would tell you, the skills for these are clustering or chunking words, reading main ideas from tops of paragraphs and the twin stars, skimming and scanning.

Yes, but there has to be more than these strategies right? As an ELT myself, I have found that students do not know really how to read effectively.

Which is why after scouring the Internet researching resources and strategies, I feel the leader of structured reading for academic purposes has to be ELT developments in the US. Working within a British curriculum, we have none of the wonderful support material that ELT in the US use as a matter of course.

Support materials such as graphic organisers, thinking and reading tools, structured levels of challenge in reading texts and reading for research guidelines are all essential in training the mind and the eye to work in sync.

I would recommend ELT use these wonderful strategies used in this link as guidelines in planning for and practice in their reading classes. Also recommended are the support materials mentioned previously, all available at this link. Those who are adventurous could look into a wonderful new way of reading independently called the PDP Cornell Notes strategy, of which this is an example. If you would like to try in class, do read how in this very helpful sheet which outlines the steps and template you would use. Do try it as many teachers in mainstream lessons have found it very useful for revision and summary writing.