An Interactive Strategies Approach to Content Reading.

Abstract

Learning from text is the major goal of content reading instruction. To be effective, such instruction must maintain content as the primary focus while actively engaging students in the process of skilled textbook reading (Herber, 1978). Like any instruction, it must also account for social, affective, cognitive, and metacognitive aspects of learning (Ruddell and Speaker, in press). This article describes an approach to content reading instruction that emphasizes both content and process, and encourages reader response in social, affective, cognitive, and metacognitive realms. It begins with the Content Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, an adaptation of Stauffer's DRTA (1969), followed by the Group Mapping Activity (Davidson, 1982) and the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy (Haggard, 1982). This approach is designed to increase students' ability to (1) use prior knowledge and experience to form hypotheses about (or predict) outcomes in text and organize new information (Anderson, 1977; Goodman, 1976; Rumelhart, 1984; Rumelhart and Ortony, 1977); (2) identify key elements and relationships in text (Thorndike, 1917); and (3) acquire vocabulary needed to label important concepts (Herber, 1978; Johnson and Pearson, 1985). Figure 1 identifies requisite student and teacher behaviors during instruction and the interactive strategy associated with each.