Teaching students different types of reading strategies will help them prepare to read a variety of different types of texts and gather information more safely and efficiently when doing work. In class, if teachers only focus on having students pull information from texts, students will only know how to blindly pull information they read online as well.
This is why it is important to not simply teach close reading strategies using a single novel or textbook, but to explain to students a variety of different approaches to reading and what contexts each approach will end up being more useful. When students have a toolbelt of different reading strategies, they will be better equipped to tackle different types of texts and not be fooled into thinking they can always trust reading material they come across.
A recently released study looked at how elementary teachers were teaching texts to their students and focused on the strategies they employed when helping students read for gaining information. This informational reading is a different type of reading from reading for pleasure or analytical reading and requires a different set of skills to do well.
The researchers found that the majority of elementary teachers were “rated as low scoring for strategy use” and so were largely ineffective at giving their students strategies to use when dealing with unseen texts. The researchers explained that “the highest quality instruction” showed a range of reading exercises explicitly going over reading strategies, giving examples, and talking about individual texts to test understanding and application of the reading strategies discussed. (Quinn and Paulick)
Rather than just telling students what to read and then testing them on what has been assigned, teachers need to focus on teaching students how to read using different types of reading. Different types of reading strategies will help to build literacy, not just through increasing vocabulary, but also by allowing them to use these reading strategies to be able to evaluate unstudied texts, making them more independent in the future.
Instead of just reading and pulling information from single texts, teachers should encourage students to use a variety of different types of reading strategies to understand concepts more fully. Rather than the teacher being the sole arbiter of all knowledge and the provider of all content, students should be pushed to bring in their own sources, use a variety of research techniques online, and more extensively understand topics rather than only a single source intensively.
What Are Reading Strategies?
Reading strategies are different ways that a person might approach a text in order to gain information from it. While reading might seem like it can only be done in one way, reading sentence by sentence, there are actually many different reading strategies that are useful in different contexts.
Different types of reading strategies will help create more independent learners who will not simply have to rely on a teacher to tell them what is right or wrong. These different reading strategies should be fully explained, discussed, and practiced in every subject, not simply in a literature class.
Each different context will require slight variations in how students go about searching for new texts as they research or to answer their questions. The below strategies are 4 of the most common reading strategies used when doing research and will give teachers a baseline that will need to be modified to fit their specific curriculum.
- Close Reading
Close or Intensive reading is the deep and focused reading of a single source to gain information. When intensively reading, students will ensure they read every word, take notes on important ideas, and try to make connections within the text.
Close reading is the type of reading most often done in school. Students are assigned a single text and are told to pull information from it to use on later projects or tests.
This intensive reading is very important for students to be able to truly understand any single text fully and not simply make assumptions based on initial impressions. However, many schools only provide high quality texts such as textbooks, famous novels, or political speeches to analyze.
Analysis is important as it is reading in order to understand the author’s intentions and meaning, but this does not teach critical thinking as the students are not to question messages, but simply to find them. Evaluation is different from analysis as it requires students to not only analyze the author’s intentions, but also to evaluate whether what they have said is valuable based on whether it achieved its goals and connected with verifiable facts.
Both analysis and evaluation are types of intensive reading as they focus on a single text, but evaluation often requires students to pull from other texts and sources to make claims about the main text being studied. Evaluation teaches better critical thinking skills as it teaches students not to simply accept everything they read or blindly trust that authority figures always give factual information.
Being able to intensively read single texts is very important to be able to understand a text’s purpose or judge whether it was effective in reaching its audience. If a student can not intensively read a singular text, they will struggle with being fooled by catchy titles or surface level tactics.
Close reading is especially important for information and health literacy which is often tested by social media posts making claims about current events and health information using little snippets of information to lure them to click into an article to read more. If students simply read the title or snippet, they may be too quick to make a judgment based on shallow reading that does not verify the quality of the source or understand how the claims in the title are not quite as they first appeared.
- Extensive Reading
Extensive reading is the reading of multiple texts and making connections between them to gather information. When reading extensively, students will often not be expected to read every word from every text, but look at a wider variety of sources to gain an understanding of a topic.
Extensive reading does not require students to focus so much on authorial techniques in detail, but to look at the answers to their questions from a variety of perspectives in order to find the commonalities between sources. Rather than looking at a single source and evaluating whether it is good or bad, extensive reading has students look at many different sources to answer questions.
Extensive reading is much better for answering questions such as “Are vaccines harmful?”. While intensive reading can tell whether a single source’s information answering the question is reliable or not, it can not be used to actually reliably answer questions themselves.
Just as scientific theories are not based on a single study, but a vast body of research, students should not answer questions based on one source’s answer to that question.
Close reading can be thought of as scientists peer reviewing a single source, while extensive reading is more like scientists writing literature reviews going over all of the studies done on a topic in order to answer research questions.
Extensive reading skills can be unnatural for students who are used to being handed all of the correct answers by their teachers. Teachers themselves may be confused and worried about much harder lesson planning because they think that extensive reading means they need to provide students with many different texts to look at.
In fact, teachers can breathe easy, because the best approach to extensive reading is actually to provide students with fewer texts. The expectation should not be that teachers give sources, but that they ask questions. Students are the ones who should use extensive reading on the internet to bring sources to the class discussions.
This is why extensive reading is actually very useful not just for information and health literacy like close reading, but also for digital literacy. Students need to be taught how to follow embedded links, use Google Scholar, and research topics online as this is not something that comes naturally.
Many people given an article online and asked to evaluate it will simply read the text and give their feelings based on prior experiences and biases. Very few people will research the author to check their credentials, follow the embedded links to verify sources are saying what the author claims they are, or Google other similar articles before formulating an opinion on a topic.
- Skimming
When skimming, students read only parts of a text to see if it connects to or answers questions the student is working on. Skimming is a type of reading often used while extensively reading many different types of texts looking for ones that might be useful to look at more intensively.
A common reading strategy taught to students when teaching skimming is telling them to read only the first sentence of each paragraph. Being the topic sentence, the first sentence often explains what the rest of the paragraph will be about, and is especially useful in text types where paragraphs are many sentences long.
In most online articles however, authors are actively discouraged from writing paragraphs with more than two to three sentences due to how algorithms rank articles on search engines. Because of this, it is important to teach different types of reading strategies for different text types.
Online, it makes a lot more sense to read the title and headings rather than the first sentence of every paragraph. This allows the student to find the information they are looking for much more quickly and not waste time reading unrelated content that does not help them answer their question.
As mentioned before however, it is important to teach students balance with this approach as titles can be misleading. Skimming is not a type of reading to do alone, but a way to figure out what content is worth reading using the intensive strategy discussed above.
When students find a title of an article that seems to answer their question, they should open the link and skim the article’s headings to find sections that are relevant to their question. They should then intensively read those sections in order to verify the quality of the source and see if they need to do more extensive reading on the topic to back up claims made in the text.
This type of reading helps build some functional literacy as it helps a person get better at efficiently reading content to solve their daily problems. People do not have time to read every single thing they are sent or shown on social media. Skimming is therefore useful to see which content is worth reading on further and which can simply be dismissed as not useful for their current needs.
- Scanning
Scanning is a type of reading where students look for specific words or phrases in a text to find sections of text that answer their questions more fully. Scanning is different from skimming in that skimming is the opening of a text without searching for a specific word or phrase, but simply seeing if ideas are relevant whereas scanning is looking in a document that has already been deemed useful for a specific word or phrase.
Scanning is also another functional reading strategy that can help students to be more effective in many research applications. Many texts can be extremely long and require hours of intensive reading to understand fully, but scanning allows students to go through texts to answer very specific questions.
For example, a student might want to remember what part of a novel a character said or did a specific thing to be able to analyze that part more fully. Rather than skimming through the first sentence of every paragraph of the entire novel, they can scan the pages more quickly looking for that character’s name or other indicators that they have found the right part of the book.
Scanning is not just useful for long novels either. Scanning is especially important for understanding longer scientific articles and the data contained within them. When looking at a research study, there will be a lot of context information given and detailed breakdowns of their research approaches. While important, this information is not always the first thing a student needs to look at when opening a scientific study.
A student might begin by skimming the article’s abstract to see if the study actually covers the topic they are researching and then move on to scanning for more specific information once they have decided the study is on the right topic. Common things to scan for are the conclusions, but also important to scan for are the data tables which visually show the information collected by the researchers in a way that can be numerically analyzed and evaluated.
Students might find that the data does not contain enough data points to back up the claims that the authors are making or they may discover that the data is full of inconsistencies ignored by the researchers when making their broad statements in the abstract and conclusion.
This is an important skill to help students build their numerical literacy as data is something easy to manipulate and cherry pick for less principled authors who simply are looking for exciting stories to get readers to click their work. Math teachers need to teach students how to understand data in statistics classes, but all teachers need to teach students how to scan various works to find that data in the first place so that it can be evaluated.
Conclusion
Teachers need to teach reading strategies explicitly as schools currently encourage students to simply accept information in lectures and texts provided as fact. Teaching reading strategies can help to make students better critical thinkers and independent learners.
Students who can use a variety of reading strategies will be better equipped than the average student to handle unseen texts and will be able to be more critical as they move into adulthood. Information is much easier to come by in the digital era filled with news at the click of a finger
Schools currently focus far too much on thinking of literacy as simply the ability to read words and input information, but true literacy requires students to not only know what words mean, but whether those words hold any value and truth. True understanding comes from knowing where to go to get needed information and having the reading strategies to efficiently find the answers to solve problems and find out what is right.
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References
Quinn, Alexa M., and Judy H. Paulick. “First‐Year Teachers’ Informational Reading Instruction: Prevalence, Quality, and Characteristics.” Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2021, pp. 227–253., https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.390.
