Engaging readers is crucial for educators, writers, and communicators alike. When readers actively participate with a text, they achieve deeper understanding, improve retention, and develop critical thinking skills. Effective instructional strategies are key to fostering this engagement. In this post, we will explore methods that encourage active reading and help readers connect meaningfully with the material.
Six Strategies for Reading Engagement
To effectively involve students in reading activities, it is crucial to abandon outdated, inefficient, and detrimental methods like round robin and popcorn reading. Considering the effectiveness of practice, we should substitute these "one student reads at a time" approaches with techniques that engage 50-100% of students simultaneously. The six strategies are:
Cloze. Cloze reading is a reading engagement strategy in which the teacher, while reading the text aloud, strategically selects words to leave out while reading aloud for the students to chorally read as prompted (Hasbrouck, 2010),
Echo. Echo reading is a reading engagement strategy in which the teacher models fluent reading by reading aloud a portion of the text, such as a sentence, paragraph, or page, and students echo back with similar pacing, intonation, and expression. This pattern is then repeated for as long as desired.
Choral. Choral reading is a reading engagement strategy in which two or more students, even a whole class, are reading the text simultaneously (Bessette, 2020). The benefit of this strategy is it allows striving readers scaffolded support via the more proficient readers and the teacher models appropriate pacing.
Duet. Duet reading is when two partners, one strong reader and one striving reader, are paired together to read a text aloud in unison.
Partner. Partner reading is pairing two students up using strategic partnering (see section below for a description of strategic partnering). The pair takes turns reading part of the passage aloud. It may be a page at a time, a paragraph at a time or even a sentence at time depending on the length of the text and students’ stamina (Hasbrouck, 2010). Both students should have the text in front of them and should be tracking the text as their partner reads. The stronger reader will be able to provide prompts for unknown words for the striving reader when it is their turn to read.
Whisper. Whisper reading is just what it sounds like. It is students reading independently in a whisper voice. Each student has the text in front of them and the teacher queues when the class should start reading, usually with a 1, 2, 3, begin type prompt.
So, the next time you work with a small group or an entire class on a text, consider trying one or two of these strategies. Student engagement will increase, and the practice they receive will positively affect their reading outcomes.
A more detailed description of these strategies and specifics for their use will be available in my book, Raising Up Readers, being released in June 2025.
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