Help! My College Students Cant Read

Teaching Vital Reading Strategies in the Content Areas

By (author) Amelia Leighton Gamel

Publication date:

21 March 2015

Length of book:

190 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475814569

Help! My College Students Can’t Read: Teaching Vital Reading Strategies in the Content Areas is designed as a resource guide for content area instructors who have no specific training in the field of literacy but want to help the struggling readers in their classrooms. This book provides simple, step-by-step ideas for introducing and embedding reading strategies within all content areas without sacrificing a lot of valuable class time. This easy-to-use resource will equip instructors to not only help their students be stronger readers in general, but to be stronger readers of content-area academic texts.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Active Reading
Modeling Active Reading in the Classroom
The Bottom Line
Toolbox
Putting It to Work
Professional Spotlight Reading Interview
Appendix

2 Determining a Purpose
Getting Students to Buy In
Applying Their New Skills to Reading
Pre-reading Strategies to Determine Purpose
Pause and Sum Up
Making Predictions
Being Savvy Readers
More Help to Stay Engaged
The Bottom Line
Toolbox
Putting It to Work
Professional Spotlight Reading Interview
Appendix

3 Determining What’s Important
Focused Reading Assignments
Intentional Focus
Read, Scan, or Skip?
Annotating a Text
Intentional Reading Demonstration
The Bottom Line
Toolbox
Putting It to Work
Professional Spotlight Reading Interview
Appendix

4 Developing Higher-Level Questions
Using Focus Quadrants to Teach Questioning Strategies
Teaching Students to Apply Questioning Strategies to Reading
The Bottom Line
Toolbox
Putting It to Work
Professional Spotlight Reading Interview
Appendix

5 Making Connections
Using Comparisons to Aid Understanding
Using Learned Information to Understand New Information
Drawing Inferences
Building Background Knowledge
The Bottom Line
Toolbox
Putting It to Work
Professional Spotlight Reading Interview

6 Navigating Unknown Words
Typical Student Default Strategy
Getting Students to Buy In
Vocabulary Resources
Prefixes, Root Words, and Suffixes
Using Familiar Words to Understand Unfamiliar Words
Swapping Words
Context Clues
Vocabulary Prompts
Vocabulary Lists
The Bottom Line
Toolbox
Putting It to Work
Professional Spotlight Reading Interview
Appendix

7 Creating Visuals to Enhance Comprehension and Recall
Getting Instructors to Buy In
Teaching Students to Create Visuals as They Read
The Bottom Line
Toolbox
Putting It to Work
Professional Spotlight Reading Interview
Appendix

8 Keeping It Real
Does Teaching Reading Strategies Really Change Anything?
How Much Time Does It Really Take?
Making the Most of Your Time
The Bottom Line
Professional Spotlight Reading Interview
Appendix

References

Our students today are not only distracted by the same things that distracted us, they are bombarded by a constant stream of information via their technological devices. This coupled with the practice of reading excerpt and information in short bursts rather than entire books, compounds the inability to concentrate and read for meaning. This book contains great suggestions to approach key issues in reading that can be addressed by faculty in any content area. It gives college faculty the tools and strategies to help a generation of digital learners focus and read with purpose.