Literacy involves explicitly teaching comprehension strategies to students. Teachers should model, explain, and have students practice comprehension strategies with support. They should continue using strategies independently over multiple school years. Good readers use strategies like activating prior knowledge, making connections, questioning, visualizing, inferring, summarizing, evaluating, and synthesizing. Strategies work best when combined and include opportunities for reading, comprehension instruction, peer learning, and discussion. Specific strategies like annolighting and three-level guides provide scaffolds to help students interact with texts at a literal, interpretive, and applied level.

1. Literacy Understanding key ideas about Comprehension …

2. Literacy defined? A broader definition of comprehension is one that includes the possibility of multiple text interpretations and readers’ reactions and responses to their reading.

3. Comprehension Skills need to be explicitly taught. Michael Pressley says "The case is very strong that teaching elementary, middle school, and high school students to use a repertoire of comprehension strategies increases their comprehension of text. Teachers should model and explain comprehension strategies, have their students practice using such strategies with teacher support, and let students know they are expected to continue using the strategies when reading on their own.."

4. Furthermore …”Such teaching should occur across every school day, for as long as required to get all readers using the strategies independently -- which means including it in reading instruction for years.”

5. Visual Texts What do you see? It is important to un-pack what readers ‘see’ in texts, to correct misconceptions.

6. What do good readers do? Use Prior Knowledge Make Connections Question Visualise Infer Summarise Evaluate and Synthesise

7. ACTIVATING PRIOR KNOWLEDGE Readers activate what they currently understand or misunderstand about the topic and use this knowledge before, during, and after reading to clarify misconceptions and understand the text.

8. MAKING CONNECTIONS Readers relate what they read to personal experiences (text-to-self), to information from other text (text-to-text), and to information about the world (text-to-world) in order to enhance understanding of self, text, and life.

9. QUESTIONING Readers ask questions about the text and the author's intentions and seek information to clarify and extend their thinking before, during and after reading.

10. VISUALISING Readers create images in their minds that reflect or represent the ideas in the text. These images may include any of the five senses and serve to enhance understanding of the text.

11. INFERRING Readers think about and search the text, and sometimes use personal knowledge to construct meaning beyond what is literally stated.

12. SUMMARISING Readers identify key elements and condense important information into their own words during and after reading to solidify meaning.

13. EVALUATING Readers judge, justify, and/or defend understandings to determine importance based on stated criteria.

14. SYNTHESIZING Readers create original insights, perspectives and understandings by reflecting on text(s) and merging elements from text and existing schema.

15. USING STRATEGIES TOGETHER Readers combine strategies as needed to come to a fuller understanding of text. Strategies interact with each other, overlap, and are recursive. They are not "stand alones."

16. FOUR major areas that improve comprehension Large amounts of time for actual text reading, Opportunities for teacher-directed instruction in comprehension strategies, Opportunities for peer and collaborative learning, and Opportunities for students to talk with a teacher and one another about what has been read. A program that provides these opportunities will set the stage for students to be interested in and to succeed at reading; that interest and success build the intrinsic motivation that all students need to sustain continual learning.

17. Strategies … Literacy is the vehicle in which learning content and skills are delivered … there are many different vehicles teachers could implement within their pedagogical practices.

18. Strategy 1 -Annolighting We have all had the experience of suggesting that students highlight the text that they are reading, only to watch them indiscriminately highlight nearly every word on the page. It is clear that learning how to highlight a text as a part of a reading strategy requires some instruction, including some modeling and guided practice.

19. If done well, highlighting can become a very effective reading tool; if done poorly, it is most likely a waste of a student’s time, energy and ink. "Annolighting" a text combines effective highlighting with marginal annotations that help to explain the highlighted words and phrases.

20. Strategy 2- Teacher Direted Thinking Activity (TDTA) The strategy utilizes pre-reading, reading, and post-reading questions and discussions. What are the purposes of a TDTA? Teachers use this strategy in an attempt to build on the knowledge that students already know and apply it to new information and situations. Students are provided with a framework to organize and recall information form texts.

21. Strategy 3 - Three level Guide The Three-Level Guide is a reading strategy used to develop comprehension skills. The guide is a series of statements about a text, some true and some false. These statements are divided into three levels:

22. Level One: Literal Statements (at the surface level of the text) Level Two: Inferential / Interpretive Statements (at a “between-the-lines” level) Level Three: Applied Statements (at a “beyond-the-text” level)

23. What are the purposes of a Three Level Guide? To provide a scaffold from which students can interact with difficult texts at different levels. To stimulate an active response to meaning at the literal, interpretive,and applied levels. To help students develop a good sense of the conceptual complexity of text material. This guide/scaffold allows students to record their reading comprehension at three levels: Literal Level–Understanding the literal meaning of the words and ideas in a reading selection. Interpretive Level–Grasping the "message" of the selection or understanding what the author meant by the passage. Applied Level–Relating the selection's message to other experiences or contexts.

24. For a more comprehensive exploration of these concepts… Read the article: Improving Reading Comprehension in Secondary Schools – an exploration of the core principles, core skills and key strategies teachers need to know to improve reading comprehension levels of their students across the curriculum! This can be downloaded in the Theory section on the Wiki!