FROM RESEARCH TO THE CLASSROOM: LITERACY STRATEGY INSTRUCTION
“What Does It Take to Create Skilled Readers? Facilitating the Transfer and Application of Literacy Strategies” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (Voices from the Middle, 2008)
“Our concern is that these strategies are becoming ‘curricularized.’ By this, we mean that the strategies—rather than text—are becoming the center of instruction. One publisher even markets this curricularization by noting that the program teaches ‘one strategy at a time.’ We can’t find any evidence for the effectiveness of teaching one strategy at a time, especially with pieces of text that require readers to use a variety of strategies to successfully negotiate meaning.”
Summary
In this article, Fisher and Frey highlight the impact of the “super six” reading strategies that have come from the research on the behaviors of good readers—building background knowledge and making connections, predicting and inferring, questioning, monitoring, summarizing, and evaluating—on reading instruction. They express concerns over “curricularization” of the strategies which leads to teaching strategies one at a time and in isolation. This approach leads readers to a narrow and rigid understanding of how and when strategies should be used rather than creating the conditions for developing them to learn and apply strategies in a consolidated, authentic, and automatic way.
Instead, Fisher and Frey recommend a classroom structure that relies on the gradual release of responsibility: focus lessons, guided practice, collaborative learning, and independent learning.
The gradual release of responsibility model requires that learners experience multiple engagements with literacy strategies before they are expected to use them on their own. The authors believe that modeling is essential as it provides students with something to approximate as they attempt to become skilled readers. From their research, they have identified four categories of thinking for teachers to model:
- Comprehension: focus on the comprehension strategies for making meaning based on cluse from the text students will be reading.
- Vocabulary: model using word-solving strategies, including context clues, word parts (prefixes, suffixes, roots, bases, and cognates), and resources (people, the Internet, and dictionaries).
- Text Structures: identify the organizational structure of the text and note the signal words readers can use to support their understanding of the specific text structure as well as how they can use knowledge of the text structure to help them understand the text.
- Text Features: explain that text features (headings, captions, illustrations, charts, tables, graphs, table of contents, glossary, index, etc.) are added by authors and editors to help us understand the words and model how they aid comprehension.
Takeaways For the Classroom
- Examine the text students will be reading to identify its complexity and use this as the basis for strategy instruction. Teach and model for students the strategies they will use to comprehend the text.
- Use the gradual release framework to organize reading instruction. Begin with focused direct instruction that includes modeling, thinking aloud, and guided practice.
- Provide students time for authentic independent practice in text and for collaboration with peers.
- Ensure there is time for a debrief so that students can discuss, share, and consolidate their thinking through discussion and writing about reading.
- Be explicit that readers consolidate strategies and model what this looks like in multicomponent strategy instruction. Design activities that promote the use of multiple strategies and not single strategies in isolation.
Conclusion
“These teachers understood that skilled readers are able to consolidate strategies and activate them at appropriate times. They also understood that the modeling phase of instruction presented an ideal time to demonstrate how a skilled reader could apply several comprehension strategies simultaneously in order to make meaning. This modeling encourages students to transfer their learning of strategies to an increasingly consolidated practice. Furthermore, the gradual release of responsibility framework promotes application to ne texts, resulting over time in skilled readers who activate strategies automatically.”
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