Reading Strategies to Develop Higher Thinking Skills for Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This paper reports an action research project which examined the foreign language reading comprehension of public school eighth graders who experienced a directed reading-thinking approach with strategies for comprehension and application. The strategies used were prediction, prior knowledge, graphic organizers, and questions. Data analyzed included participants' perceptions of the usefulness of the strategies and students' work on the graphic organizers and reading worksheets. Findings showed that participants thought that the strategies and an interactive reading task improved reading comprehension. The majority of students used English to answer knowledge, comprehension and a good number of application questions. The answers to the application questions provided by the less proficient students were, despite their use of Spanish, unclear.

Keywords

• Foreign language teaching
• reading comprehension
• directed reading-thinking approach
• thinking skills
• reading strategies