Second Language Reading: A Curricular Sequence for Teaching Reading Strategies

ABSTRACT This article presents a sequence of activities to teach reading strategies. In implementing the sequence, the classroom teacher will carry out the following steps: (1) teach students to think aloud while reading; (2) identify students' reading strategies; (3) help students to understand the concept of “strategy” and to recognize that some strategies are successful, some unsuccessful, and others only “seemingly” successful; (4) help students to identify strategies thaat they use to decode native language texts containing unknown words; (5) help students to identify strategies that they can use to decode foreign language texts containing unknown words; (6) provide instruction/practice/integration for specific reading strategies; and (7) identify students' reading strategies and compare them to the strategies students used before instruction. Suggestions derived from the authors' experiences with the activities are provided.