Making Sense

This book about small-group strategy instruction gives explicit and concrete ways to teach students reading comprehension strategies as they learn English. We suggest that lessons begin once students are familiar with school routines and are comfortable with the teacher and each other.

These strategy lessons are part of a comprehensive literacy program. They are not a complete program by themselves. What makes them effective is the classroom environment that teachers create to support EAL/D and ESL students, or English Language Learners. The first section of the book, "The Nuts and Bolts of Small-Group Strategy Instruction for English Language Learners", explains how to create the conditions to make this work.

The strategy lessons are divided into five sections based on English language proficiency:

• Preproduction lessons
• Early Production lessons
• Speech Emergence lessons
• Intermediate Fluency lessons
• Advanced Fluency lessons

The instructional materials (books, charts, notebooks, and so on) listed in these lessons may often be used with students with more or less language proficiency. Because every student's needs are different, always check for understanding to make sure the materials are comprehensible and support oral language development.

Within each section, the lessons are further divided by comprehension strategies:

• Making Connections (Using Prior Knowledge to Make Connections to Text)
• Asking Questions
• Visualising (Making Pictures in Your Mind)
• Inferring (Reading Between the Lines)
• Determining Importance in Non-fiction and Informational Text (not in Beginning stages)
• Synthesising Information (not in Beginning stages)

Each of the sections begins with a vignette of younger students learning strategies, along with lessons for teaching strategies and a book list of possible anchor texts (Harvey and Goudvis 2000). In addition, there is a section on older students at that particular stage of language proficiency that includes a vignette about students, strategy lessons and a list of books.

These small-group strategy lessons come from our experience teaching reading comprehension strategies to English Language Learners.