Customer Reviews

Explaining Reading: A Resource for Teaching Concepts, Skills, and Strategies

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gerald G. Duffy is a former classroom teacher and professor emeritus at Michigan State University. He draws upon his many years of experience and his considerable expertise in Explaining Reading: A Resource For Teaching Concepts, Skills, And Strategies to provide the reader with a solid guide for aiding in their teaching literacy to students who are slow to absorb the skill. Individual chapters cogently provide examples and ideas for explaining vocabulary, teaching word recognition, comprehension strategies, and a great deal more. Explaining Reading is highly recommended as an excellent and detailed advice guide -- especially for classroom teachers and home schoolers involved in a literacy instructional program.

This is a wonderful book to use while working with teachers in your building. Use it as a resource for yourself or share it with teachers to support what you are saying or modeling in their classrooms. After you have identified the strategy or skill the students are having trouble with, locate the skill in the index. Then read through the pages as Dr. Duffy describes the conceptual understanding that must be in place for the students to learn the skill. He also outlines how to introduce the skill, model the thinking, scaffold towards independence, apply it in reading and writing, and determine how to know if the lesson was successful. Some topic categories are vocabulary, comprehension strategies, word recognition, and fluency.

I am a tutor for third and fourth graders (employed by the school) and have found this book to be priceless in explaining the strategies of reading to 8, 9 and ten year olds - my target audience. The book is structured well and offers many examples of how to help struggling readers learn the "secrets" of good readers. After looking at several other 'Reading Comprehension' books, I chose this one based on the TOC and the foreward. It has proven to REALLY help me clarify each objective and teach the invisible process of active reading to my students. I'm very excited about the book and what it has to offer. Thanks!

I bought this book last year from Amazon, after being recommended it by a resource literacy teacher. It is very helpful to me, a classroom teacher. I would recommend it as great value for any teacher. I recently had the pleasure of hearing G Duffy speak at a day's conference here in New Zealand. He was so clear, so able to show the recent history of the teaching of reading, and how we might go about showing students the skills of comprehension, and what good readers do. In this book, G Duffy helps teachers model what good readers do. He is realistic and down to earth.

This is a good supplemental text for a literacy coach or reading teacher to have on hand to explain breakdowns in students' reading.