Four Reading Techniques to Improve Student Motivation

December 10th, 2008 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Reading Teaching Strategies

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In Michigan’s Oakland County Intermediate School District, students are reading at grade level or beyond. With the help of a literacy initiative, those who aren’t reading at grade level are brought up to speed in a semester or less. Once these students are successfully reading at their grade level, motivation follows.

Laura Schiller is the literacy consultant for the Oakland Schools. She offers four techniques that you can use right away to boost student motivation and literacy in your classroom.

Metacognition. Schiller said that the most important tool that students need is the ability to think about what they read, or metacognition. Teachers explain their thinking while reading a text aloud, using the Think Aloud strategy.

“A teacher models her thinking while she’s reading the text,” Schiller said. “You don’t read a biology textbook like you would a novel, but teachers don’t always make this apparent.”

When modeling metacognition for students, Schiller said that teachers should use the word “I.”

“As soon as teachers say ‘you,’ it’s like a lesson,” Schiller said.

Comprehension. As teachers, we need to think about the kinds of questions we’re asking kids, Schiller said.

During a teacher training, Schiller gives participants a gibberish sentence. The words are nonsense, but syntactically it’s an English sentence. She asks participants factual questions about the sentence and everyone in the group can answer them, even though the sentence is meaningless.

Those meaningless answers are like the answers teachers receive when they assign questions at the end of a chapter, Schiller said. Questions at the end of a chapter require the student to parrot answers, not perform inferential thinking.

“It’s the inferential thinking questions that are important,” Schiller said. “Literal questions don’t get a student to comprehend the material.”

Writing. Writing is the other half of the literacy equation. To communicate well, students need to both read and write. Like reading, writing looks different in the math classroom than in the English classroom.

To illustrate this point, Schiller places a plastic flower on each table in a teacher training session. She asks teachers from all disciplines to write about the flower from the standpoint of what they teach. Math teachers write about the flower in terms of math, science teachers write about the flower in scientific language, and English teachers might write about how the flower is really a symbol.

This activity hits home with content area teachers, Schiller said. Writing is different in each subject and teachers need to offer students instruction about how to write for each discipline.

Discourse. Students love to talk. This natural, social instinct can be harnessed to improve motivation and learning.

Schiller said that researchers have found patterns in teacher questioning that follows a model of “Guess what’s in the teacher’s head.” Teachers use the same pattern of initiating a question, waiting for a response, and evaluating the response to find out how much students know.

The problem, Schiller said, is that usually only one kid in class responds to the question. That leaves 24 students who haven’t demonstrated their knowledge.

Schiller recommends what she calls the Turn and Talk method. Every kid has a partner and partners discuss open-ended questions. See what they come up with and share with the rest of the class to improve student engagement and motivation.

“English Language Learners benefit from this extra rehearsal and kids you otherwise don’t hear from benefit, too,” Schiller said.

Research coming soon. Schiller’s literacy efforts go beyond these four techniques. In her district, students take a reading assessment. Based on the scores, students who are reading below grade level are placed in a small group of six students. For one semester or less, the small group works with a highly skilled teacher to improve reading comprehension. At the end of a short amount of time, they’re reading at grade level and join the regular student population.

The evidence that students are learning in these small groups is anecdotal, Schiller said. That anecdotal evidence is good, though, and it looks like the literacy program is working. In January 2009, Schiller will gather the raw data on these students to see if the numbers support what classroom teachers are seeing.

“We don’t have years to catch kids up,” Schiller said.

But, in Oakland County Schools, a semester might just be enough.

Tags: achievement, reading, research

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