readung strategies

1. Basic Reading Strategies
USB ID1-101
Prof. Patricia Murillo
Oct 2008

2. What is a Strategy?
A strategy is an activity used
to help students increase
their reading abilities.

3. Why Are Strategies Used?
We use strategies for the following reasons:
• Reading makes more sense for struggling
readers when strategies are used
• Good readers use strategies naturally
• Strategies make reading more fun!

4. Before You Start…
Before you start:
• Decide the purpose of your reading –this will determine what
strategy will work best for you.
• Ask questions before you start reading –this facilitates
understanding.
• Approach your reading armed with a pencil or highlighter.
• Underline key words and ideas that you need to remember.

5. Basic Reading Strategies
• Try and try again
• Zoom in on the text
• Note taking
• Concept maps & Graphic organizers
• Identify the main ideas
• Identify rhetorical patterns
• Reading in detail
• Summarize and Paraphrase

6. Try and try again
If you cannot understand a text, try and try
again using all available sources such as:
• guessing using contextual clues
• using the knowledge of parts of speech

7. Zoom In on the Text
What if a word, a phrase or an entire sentence
caused a breakdown in understanding?
• Go back and reread a sentence or part of a
sentence that was confusing.
• Once you have identified the part or parts, you
can refer to other sources such as guessing
from context.

8. Note Taking
• Try to note down in the margin, at the end
of the paragraph or on a piece of paper, the
point the writer was making.
• Take good notes that will be useful to you
now, and also intelligible in a few months time
(specially for books).

9. Concept Maps & Graphic Organizers
• Mind maps and concept maps are good ways to
understand complex material and the connections
between ideas.
• Mind maps connect ideas together visually.
• Graphic organizers help you classify and structure
ideas.
• Timelines help you highlight key events.

10. Identify the Main Ideas
• Identify the main idea of a paragraph by
locating the topic sentence.
• The topic sentence often comes at the
beginning of a paragraph.
• Use graphic organizers to determine the
main idea.

11. Identify Rhetorical Patterns
Rhetorical Patterns are ways of organizing
information that are commonly used in
technical writing, such as:
• Classification
• Cause / Effect
• Fact / Opinion
• Problem / Solution

12. Reading in Detail
• Sometimes it is important to read every
word carefully and every example, and to
read the whole article, chapter or book.
• You may need to do this if it is particularly
relevant to some writing you are doing, or
clearly presents a concept with which you are
having difficulty.

13. Summarize and Paraphrase
• Summarizing is how we take larger selections of
text and reduce them to their bare
essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points
that are worth noting and remembering.
• Webster's calls a summary the "general idea in
brief form"; it's the distillation, condensation, or
reduction of a larger work into its primary notions.
• Paraphrasing is putting ideas into your own
words.

14. In Sum…
• Use one, all, or a mix of strategies of
your choice.
• Think actively as you are reading about
the significance of the text and the
connections between it and other things
you have been reading.
• Enjoy reading and learning!

15. References
• http://www.readingquest.org/strat/summarize.html
• http://tlu.ecom.unimelb.edu.au/pdfs/reading3ed.pdf