Module 16 Discussion: Reading and the Second Language Learner

To facilitate the reading comprehension and advanced phonological skills for all students, I would use strategies that help to build comprehension through various listening and speaking activities. These would include teaching students to use the following strategies when reading both narrative and expository texts: activate prior knowledge, learn to make inferences that go beyond the literal information in the text, understand various text structures and how to use them to understand a text, teach students to stop and visualize as they are reading, ask and answer various levels of questions and learn to retell a narrative text or summarize an expository text. Much of this is going to be modeled through the use of language and students will have time to practice these strategies in all content areas. Instructional conversations will be especially valuable for building comprehension. Also the use of leveled texts and decoding instruction/vocabulary instruction will also be useful.