Middle School Content Area Reading Strategies
Helping Students in Grades 6-8 More Effectively Read for Information
Jul 28, 2009
As children leave the early elementary grades, and certainly by the time they begin middle school, the emphasis on learning to read has become an emphasis on reading to learn. Those who approach content area reading tasks (science, social studies, math, etc.) without an appropriate repertoire of reading strategies are at a distinct disadvantage and often fall far behind their peers in background knowledge and the ability to keep up with their assignments and grades.
Middle school content area teachers can help their students succeed by incorporating prereading strategies specific to upcoming assignments into their daily instruction. By spending a little time previewing text format, explaining new vocabulary and concepts, and practicing appropriate reading strategies, teachers can significantly improve comprehension of their content area texts, as well as overall understanding of course material.
Previewing Text and Format
Content area text is formatted differently from narrative text, and as such, requires a different stance when reading. Middle school students benefit from previews that highlight section titles and subtitles, boldface words, pictures and captions, diagrams, charts, and other sidebar information. Discussion of these features and how readers use them to contribute to their own understanding can serve as a model and a guide for those learning to read content area text more effectively.
Explaining New Vocabulary and Concepts
When teaching new material, it is important to first activate the prior knowledge held by the students, to clarify what they already know, generate questions about what they might find out through their reading, and identify concepts that will need further explanation. Strategies such as the KWL, Anticipation Guides, or Concept Mapping – all of which allow students to share what they already know about a subject – are effective tools for initiating conceptual discussions.
New vocabulary should also be introduced, and if it is not easily understood through the text itself, defined and explained before reading. If the new vocabulary words are essential to the understanding of the passage, but are adequately explained within the text, they may be reviewed and discussed after reading instead. In this way, students have been prepared to meet the new words, but are encouraged to independently and strategically discover their meaning themselves.
Practicing Content Area Reading Strategies
By teaching and practicing content area reading strategies within the course of daily instruction, teachers give students concrete ways they can study more productively on their own. Teach students to convert titles and subtitles into questions, to read introductions and study questions first in order to frame the text, to anticipate and take notes on the main ideas of the passage, and to actively link new information with what they already have learned.
Reading for information varies greatly from reading for pleasure, and students must approach the task with a different set of strategies in order to be successful. Middle school teachers who take the time to teach content area reading skills within the context of their subject areas help students become strategic learners now, in high school, and beyond.
Further Reading
Fisher, Douglas, and others. 50 Content Area Strategies for Adolescent Literacy (Teaching Strategies Series). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006.
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