Literacy Strategies
Literacy Strategies to help students become active readers
Literacy Strategies + Text = Engagement
Strategies that you can easily try out
1. GISTing - GISTing is an excellent strategy for helping students paraphrase and summarize essential information. Students are required to limit the gist of a paragraph to a set number of words. Individual sentences from a paragraph are presented one at a time while students create a gist that must contain only the predetermined number of words.
2. Anticipation guides - Anticipation guides (or Opinionnaires) involve giving students a list of statements about the topic to be studied and asking them to respond to it before reading and learning, and then again after reading and learning. While the opinionnaire works well with ideas that are open to debate and discussion, the anticipation guide strategy is better suited to information that is verifiable.
3. Notetaking templates – Templates (dialectical journals) allow students to self-monitor as they read and learn, which leads to an increase in attention, comprehension, and achievement.
4. Vocabulary strategies - Effective strategies require students to go beyond looking up words. They must forge connections between the new and the known via integration, repetition and meaningful use.
5. Developing questions – To better understand the content being presented, it is essential for students to learn to think critically and to ask higher levels of questions. By asking higher levels of questions, they deepen their knowledge and create connections to the material being presented, which allows them to connect to the text.