Seven Strategies of Effective Reading

To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one.   Seven Strategies of Effective Reading Strategy Definition Activating "Priming the cognitive pump" in order to recall relevent prior knowledge and experiences from long-term memory in order to extract and construct meaning from text Inferring Bringing together what is spoken (written) in the text, what is unspoken (unwritten) in the text, and what is already known by the reader in order to extract and construct meaning from the text Monitoring-Clarifying Thinking about how and what one is reading, both during and after the act of reading, for purposes of determining if one is comprehending the text combined with the ability to clarify and fix up any mix-ups Questioning Engaging in learning dialogues with text (authors), peers, and teachers through self-questioning, question generation, and question answering Searching-Selecting Searching a variety of sources in order to select appropriate information to answer questions, define words and terms, clarify misunderstandings, solve problems, or gather information Summarizing Restating the meaning of text in one's own words — different words from those used in the original text Visualizing-Organizing Constructing a mental image or graphic organizer for the purpose of extracting and constructing meaning from the text    ........................................................................................................................................ To assume that one can simply have students memorize and routinely execute a set of strategies is to misconceive the nature of strategic processing or executive control. Such rote applications of these procedures represents, in essence, a true oxymoron-non-strategic strategic processing. — Alexander and Murphy (1998, p. 33) ........................................................................................................................................   Written by : Chen for www.tuitionprovider.com