Oral Reading – About This Unit

Back to: Module: Helping Students Read

In the last unit, you learned about the how different parts of written language interact to help students understand what they read. This unit will discuss things that readers bring to the text to help them read and understand what they’re reading. We call this strategic reading, and it is the final step on the road to understanding texts.

Core Concepts

Strategic reading involves planning for actions that take place before reading, during reading, and after reading. These actions link the individual skills and techniques a reader possesses to the goal of understanding the text. Readers instinctively use certain strategies depending on the text they’re reading. With good instruction, they can also learn other strategies and how to make good choices about which strategies to use.

What is “Strategic Reading” and Why is it Important?

Reading comprehension happens when a learner puts all the reading skills together so he or she can understand a text. Strategic reading or reading with purpose involves a kind of planning. It’s a plan to read with a particular purpose in mind. Some typical purposes are: (1) reading in order to learn factual information, (2) reading in order to perform the steps in a process, and (3) reading in order to broaden your horizons.

Key Vocabulary

AJAX progress indicator
  • Fading
    The gradual removal of an instructional support or "scaffold."
  • Guided Silent Reading
    An instructional method in which an educator provides instructional scaffolds to help students derive meaning from texts they read silently.
  • Inference
    A conclusion drawn from evidence and reasoning. In reading comprehension, it means to make a judgment about a text's (or a portion of a text's) deeper meanings or implications that goes beyond facts or conclusions presented explicitly.
  • Strategic Reading
    A planning process that helps students comprehend texts by giving them tools for before-reading, during-reading, and after-reading activities that will help them understand what they read.