Supporting Student Reading Strategies
As a paraprofessional, you’ll assist teachers in helping students develop effective reading strategies. Understanding how students interact with text and how to support various reading approaches is essential for promoting student success.
Reading Strategies: The Foundation of Comprehension
Reading strategies are conscious plans or techniques that students use to make meaning from text. Effective readers apply these strategies automatically, while struggling readers need explicit instruction and practice in their use.
Key Reading Strategies
Predicting
What it is: Using prior knowledge and textual clues to anticipate what will happen next or what information the text will contain.
How to Support:
- Encourage students to make predictions before reading based on title, headings, and images
- Ask “What do you think will happen next?” during reading
- Have students confirm or revise predictions as they read
Visualizing
What it is: Creating mental images while reading to help understand and remember text.
How to Support:
- Prompt students to “make a movie in your mind” as they read
- Ask students to draw what they visualize
- Use sensory language: “What do you see, hear, smell in this scene?”
Connecting
What it is: Relating text to personal experiences, other texts, or world knowledge.
How to Support:
- Teach text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections
- Model your own connections with think-alouds
- Provide sentence starters: “This reminds me of…
Questioning
What it is: Generating questions before, during, and after reading to focus attention and deepen understanding.
How to Support:
- Teach different question types (literal, inferential, evaluative)
- Use question stems like “Why did…?” or “How might…?”
- Create question anchor charts for student reference
Inferring
What it is: Reading “between the lines” to draw conclusions not explicitly stated in the text.
How to Support:
- Use the formula: “Text clues + Background knowledge = Inference”
- Practice with short passages that require inference
- Ask “What can you conclude based on…?”
Determining Importance
What it is: Identifying key points, main ideas, and essential details in a text.
How to Support:
- Teach text features that signal importance (headings, bold text)
- Practice distinguishing between main ideas and supporting details
- Use highlighters or sticky notes to mark important information
Summarizing
What it is: Synthesizing and condensing text into essential points using one’s own words.
How to Support:
- Teach the “Somebody Wanted But So Then” framework for narratives
- Use graphic organizers to capture key information
- Practice identifying unnecessary details to eliminate
Monitoring Comprehension
What it is: Being aware of understanding while reading and employing fix-up strategies when comprehension breaks down.
How to Support:
- Teach students to pause and check their understanding
- Demonstrate fix-up strategies: re-read, read ahead, visualize
- Use comprehension signals: green/yellow/red to indicate understanding
Reading Strategy Instruction Models
Before-During-After (BDA) Framework
An organizational structure for implementing reading strategies at different stages of the reading process.
Before Reading:
- Activate prior knowledge
- Set purpose for reading
- Preview text features
- Make predictions
During Reading:
- Monitor comprehension
- Visualize content
- Make connections
- Generate questions
- Use fix-up strategies when confused
After Reading:
- Summarize key points
- Evaluate and reflect
- Extend thinking
- Connect to other texts or experiences
Gradual Release of Responsibility
An instructional model that progressively transfers responsibility from teacher to student.
- I Do (Modeling): Teacher demonstrates the strategy with think-alouds
- We Do (Guided Practice): Teacher and students practice together
- You Do Together (Collaborative Practice): Students practice with peers
- You Do Alone (Independent Practice): Students apply strategies independently
Supporting Students with Different Reading Profiles
Emergent Readers
Characteristics: Developing phonemic awareness, learning letter-sound relationships, building sight word vocabulary
Support Strategies:
- Use picture walks before reading
- Point to words while reading aloud
- Encourage pattern recognition in predictable texts
- Build phonological awareness through games and activities
- Practice sight word recognition
Developing Readers
Characteristics: Growing fluency, expanding vocabulary, developing basic comprehension skills
Support Strategies:
- Provide guided reading support
- Practice echo and choral reading for fluency
- Use graphic organizers to track story elements
- Introduce simple comprehension strategies
- Build vocabulary through word study
Fluent Readers
Characteristics: Reading with appropriate rate and expression, focusing on deeper comprehension
Support Strategies:
- Teach more complex comprehension strategies
- Encourage critical thinking about texts
- Support inferential and evaluative questioning
- Deepen vocabulary knowledge
- Introduce various text genres and structures
Struggling Readers
Characteristics: Difficulty with decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and/or comprehension; may avoid reading
Support Strategies:
- Provide additional modeling and guided practice
- Break tasks into smaller, manageable chunks
- Use multimodal approaches (visual, auditory, tactile)
- Pre-teach vocabulary and concepts
- Offer appropriate reading level materials
- Provide additional processing time
English Language Learners
Characteristics: Developing English proficiency alongside reading skills; may be proficient readers in their first language
Support Strategies:
- Connect to prior knowledge and cultural backgrounds
- Use visuals and realia to support comprehension
- Provide bilingual supports when available
- Pre-teach vocabulary with visual supports
- Allow for code-switching and first language use
- Practice cognates (words similar in both languages)
Specific Study Strategies for Reading
SQ3R
A comprehensive reading study strategy for textbooks and informational text.
- Survey: Preview headings, images, and summaries
- Question: Turn headings into questions to answer while reading
- Read: Read actively to answer the questions
- Recite: Recall main points in your own words
- Review: Go back over material to solidify understanding
KWL Chart
A graphic organizer that tracks:
- K – Know: What students already know about a topic
- W – Want to Know: Questions students have about the topic
- L – Learned: What students learned from reading
This strategy activates prior knowledge, establishes purpose, and summarizes learning.
Cornell Notes
A structured note-taking system with:
- Main section: Detailed notes during reading
- Left column: Key questions or vocabulary added later
- Bottom section: Summary of the material
This method promotes active engagement and better recall of information.
Reciprocal Teaching
A collaborative approach where students take turns leading discussions using four strategies:
- Predicting: What might happen next
- Questioning: Generating questions about the text
- Clarifying: Addressing confusing parts
- Summarizing: Synthesizing the main ideas
Techniques for Supporting Reading Comprehension
Structured Think-Alouds
Model thought processes during reading by verbalizing your thinking. Say things like:
- “I’m wondering why…”
- “This reminds me of…”
- “I’m confused by this part because…”
- “I think this means…”
Graphic Organizers
Visual tools to organize information from text:
- Story maps for narrative elements
- Venn diagrams for comparisons
- Concept maps for relationships between ideas
- Sequence charts for chronological events
- Cause-effect diagrams for relationships
Close Reading
Careful, purposeful rereading of a text to deepen understanding:
- First read: For general understanding
- Second read: For text structure and vocabulary
- Third read: For deeper analysis and connections
Text Annotation
Teaching students to mark text while reading:
- Underline main ideas
- Circle unknown vocabulary
- Write questions in margins
- Use symbols (!, ?, *, etc.) to mark reactions
- Summarize paragraphs in the margin
Common Reading Challenges and Interventions
Decoding Difficulties
Signs: Struggles with sounding out words, frequent guessing based on first letter
Interventions:
- Explicit phonics instruction
- Word family practice
- Decodable texts that match current skills
- Multi-sensory approaches (tracing letters while saying sounds)
Fluency Issues
Signs: Slow, labored reading, lack of expression, word-by-word reading
Interventions:
- Repeated readings of the same text
- Choral reading with a fluent reader
- Echo reading (adult reads, student repeats)
- Timed readings with graphing progress
- Reader’s theater for expression practice
Vocabulary Limitations
Signs: Limited understanding of grade-level words, skipping unknown words
Interventions:
- Pre-teaching key vocabulary
- Creating personal dictionaries
- Word walls with visual supports
- Semantic mapping (word webs)
- Context clue instruction
- Multiple exposures to new words
Comprehension Problems
Signs: Can decode but doesn’t understand meaning, can’t recall what was read
Interventions:
- Explicit comprehension strategy instruction
- Text-dependent questioning
- Stopping to summarize at regular intervals
- Visual representation of text content
- Background knowledge building
- Think-alouds to model comprehension processes
Technology Tools for Reading Support
Text-to-Speech Tools
Applications that read text aloud, supporting students with decoding difficulties while allowing them to focus on comprehension.
Usage Tips: Pair with follow-along reading; gradually reduce support as skills develop.
Interactive E-Books
Digital books with embedded supports like dictionaries, highlighting, and note-taking features.
Usage Tips: Teach students how to use features strategically; don’t let the technology distract from reading.
Graphic Organizer Apps
Digital tools for creating visual representations of text structures and relationships.
Usage Tips: Start with templates and gradually have students create their own organizers.
Reading Fluency Apps
Applications that record student reading, track rate, and provide feedback.
Usage Tips: Focus on both rate and expression; celebrate improvements over time.
Key Points to Remember about Student Reading Strategies
- Effective reading strategy instruction follows a gradual release model: modeling, guided practice, independent application
- Different reading profiles require different types of support
- The Before-During-After framework helps organize strategy instruction at each stage of reading
- Study strategies like SQ3R and KWL help students approach text systematically
- Techniques like think-alouds and text annotation make reading processes visible
- Technology can support strategy use when implemented thoughtfully
- The ultimate goal is to develop independent readers who automatically apply appropriate strategies
Check Your Understanding: Student Reading Strategies
1. Which reading strategy involves students creating mental pictures to help understand text?
2. In the Gradual Release of Responsibility model, what comes after “I Do”?
3. Which strategy would be most appropriate for a student who can decode words but struggles with understanding the text?
4. What do the letters in SQ3R stand for?
5. Which of the following is an effective way to support English Language Learners with reading?