Instructional Strategies for Content-Area Reading Instruction

Students with reading disabilities in middle and high school grades need assistance in content-area reading to integrate new information with their prior knowledge, to obtain important information from the text, and to remember what they have read. Thus, content area reading instruction is an important component of all secondary curricula and includes strategy instruction in word identification, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the components of content-area reading instruction and to describe instructional strategies that can be used to teach students with reading disabilities how to approach content area reading.