how to teach reading and writing

Here are some tips to teach reading and writing.

1. Teaching Reading

1. Remember to consider your student’s interests and goals when planning any kind of lesson and when choosing teaching materials.

2. Help build your student’s background Information by reading and discussing interesting news articles.

3. If your student has children, encourage him/her to read to them. Discuss the importance of letting children see their parents reading.

4. Model what good readers do. (We don’t complete worksheets! We do talk about books and other things we’ve read!)

5. Encourage silent reading.

6. Spend time in our library and become an expert on books at your student’s level.

7. Talk about the strategies that good readers use: drawing conclusions, finding the main idea, reading for specific information, sequencing material, making predictions, understanding text organization, summarizing.

8. Encourage reading outside of the lessons.

9. Many of the lesson ideas on this site make use of "manipulative letters"; these could be magnetic letters like the ones that might be on your fridge, or "Scrabble" letter tiles, or ones you make yourself with a marking pen and card stock.

10. Include Word Recognition, Vocabulary Instruction, Fluency Practice and Comprehension Strategies in every lesson.

By raising students' awareness of reading as a skill that requires active engagement, and by explicitly teaching reading strategies, instructors help their students develop both the ability and the confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom. In this way they give their students the foundation for communicative competence in the new language. Teachers can help their students become effective readers by teaching them how to use strategies before, during, and after reading.

Before reading: Plan for the reading task

v Set a purpose or decide in advance what to read for

v Decide if more linguistic or background knowledge is needed

v Determine whether to enter the text from the top down (attend to the overall meaning) or from the bottom up (focus on the words and phrases)

During and after reading: Monitor comprehension

v Verify predictions and check for inaccurate guesses

v Decide what is and is not important to understand

v Reread to check comprehension

v Ask for help

After reading: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use

v Evaluate comprehension in a particular task or area

v Evaluate overall progress in reading and in particular types of reading tasks

v Decide if the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task

v Modify strategies if necessary

2. Teaching Writing

1. Struggling writers tend to focus on the mechanics of writing rather than the ideas they are trying to express. As the tutor, you need to initially focus on reading the student’s writing versus evaluating it. Later when the student is more fluent will be a better time to focus on writing conventions such as spelling and punctuation.

2. Many students are very reluctant to write anything, let alone a complete essay. Start small and provide lots of topic suggestions

3. When students write about a topic that they know and care about, their motivation and ownership increase.

4. Encourage your student to write frequently and regularly.

5. Have your student read his writing aloud to you, and give positive feedback.

6. If you need help teaching writing, Steck-Vaughn’s GED Essay has an excellent step-by-step process that students seem to really like.

The easiest way to improve writing scores is to use the Fry Formula. The
students must write at grade level. It only takes a few minutes to show the students how to use this formula. Next, you spend an extraordinary amount of time on making sure that the opening sentences don't start with the, a, and, I or any other simple word. They must start with the most important part of the topic sentence by using a phrase.

1. Directions for Use of the Fry Readability Graph

· Randomly select three 100-word passages from a book or an article.

· Plot the average number of syllables and the average number of sentences per 100 words on the graph to determine the grade level of the material.

· Choose more passages per book if great variability is observed and conclude that the book has uneven readability.

· Few books will fall into the solid black area, but when they do, grade level scores are invalid.