Customer Reviews

Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners: 30 Research-Based Reading Strategies That Help Students Read, Understand, and Really Learn ... Nonfiction Materials (Teaching Strategies)

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This text is a good addition to an individual teacher's bag of tricks or a school's professional library. Margaret Bouchard has taken many well-known reading, writing, and thinking strategies (and has cited her sources), adapted the strategies especially for use with English Language learners, explained the theory behind their use, and where appropriate, has provided a worksheet to copy. Although most of these strategies can be used with ELLs at any age, the worksheets themselves are appropriate only for younger children, although they could easily be readapted for older students. The main advantage of this text is that although most of these strategies are well-known, having them in one place and having them validated as useful for ELLS is a significant help to teachers who have no ESL or Bilingual help in their school or district. The strategies are not a panacea, however, and some require considerable text or curriculum adaption by the classroom teacher. But -- this should be a realistic expectation of teachers with ELLs in their classrooms. Although the learning theory on which the strategies are based is briefly explained, teachers at the secondary level who are not as familiar with reading theory might not find the backgrounding adequate and might come to feel that these strategies could not make a sufficient dent in the enormous amount of material taught at the high school level.

This book is geared towards younger students but I have used it with adult EFL students and adapted a number of the ideas. It has great ready to go handouts and a number of suggestions that can be reworked to fit any class. I am especially a fan of focusing on questioning students across all levels of bloom's taxonomy and this book provides a simple framework to use or discuss during staff development.