Welcome to the 2019 Alaska Cross Content Conference at West High School in Anchorage, AK, October 25th and 26th with follow up activities at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Sunday, October 27th.
Reading is a key component of communicative competence and important to student success throughout the K-16 curriculum. But how can teachers best help their students develop good skills? Moving beyond the identification of facts, this session describes different strategies for working with reading texts by focusing on skills like summarizing, inference, and identifying tone and audience.
We will examine two main strategies for developing learners' abilities in reading. First, we will focus on identifying and formulating inference and tone questions, and second, we will use the "VISION" approach (Vocabulary, Identification, Summarizing, Interpretation, Organization, Nuances) for comprehending reading texts of all difficulty levels. Vocabulary activities help students recognize important terms and transition words and move them into working with the new lexical items. The identification of the content helps students recognize the main ideas of the text with supporting details. Summarizing activities require students to understand the content and relate it in their own words. Interpretation tasks move students beyond detail questions to examine the deeper message of the text, the audience, and tone. Organizing activities require students to describe how a text is constructed and why, while nuances tasks require students to use inference skills to identify points the author makes but does not explicitly state.
The acronym "VISION" helps teachers remember important phases in working with reading and provides students with an easy strategy for approaching unfamiliar texts. The model will help teachers prepare their students for Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs) as well as the World Language AP exam, and they will receive tips on finding suitable authentic texts.
