Elite 8 Reading Strategies
From Lori Oczkus’s Super 6 Comprehension Strategies, 35 Lessons and More for Reading Success and Gretchen Courtney
- Questioning – Good readers ask purposeful questions before, during, and after reading to determine meaning or further understanding.
- Imaging (Visualizing) - Readers use a variety of sensory and conceptual processes (mental mapping) to understand texts. They imagine the sights, sounds, smells, see motion, hear dialogue and develop meaningful ways to develop their understanding.
- Predicting – Predicting involves the use of text clues and the students’ prior knowledge as they make logical forecasts about what will occur next in the text.
- Inferring - Inferring is a difficult strategy that separates good readers from poor readers. High-level thinking is needed when students use text clues and prior knowledge to draw conclusions about past and present events.
- Making Connections – Good readers use their schema or prior knowledge to help them understand the text. When reading, they make connections to text, experiences or general world knowledge.
- Monitoring – Keeping track of comprehension is what monitoring is all about. When students monitor their comprehension, they check to make sure they are visualizing, pay attention to unknown words, and notice when they do not understand text or are even not paying attention to what they are reading.
- Summarizing – Summarizing is a difficult and complex strategy for many students. They need to separate the important parts of the text from the unimportant details as they tell the text in sequence. Summarizing is also the big picture, author’s message, theme and main idea all rolled into one.
- Evaluating – Good readers are like little judges, weighing and evaluating before, during, and after reading. They evaluate whether they liked the text or not and how they did as readers.