Content-Area Reading Goals

Why should content-area teachers check out this resource? In this video, Dr. Bill Lewis highlights many goals that teachers must focus on to make their students better content-area readers. He also gives statistics that show that many students do not have the literacy skills that they need in life. For example, 40% of high school graduates do not have the literacy skills that many employers are looking for. Almost half of all students that graduate from high school! At the end, he explains what we as teachers must do to help our students become better content-area readers. We must teach students how to "read to learn" rather than "learn to read."

As the reading states, a lot of times we as readers can read something without really knowing what we are reading unless we have a key word or context for the passage. We can drive somewhere without paying attention to where we are going if we have been there many times, but when we go to a new destination, we study the GPS beforehand and pay close attention to the roads and landmarks while we are going. The passage suggests that students need to do this when reading their textbook, so how do we get them to do this?

Prior knowledge and key words can help us to understand an entire passage that may be foreign to us otherwise. We as teachers need to give the students the right key words to help them unlock the schema in their heads to understand passages in their textbook. I used to hate reading my textbook because most of the material was new to me, so I didn’t understand it. The reading says that the only way to learn new information is by attaching it, connecting it, and integrating it with information that we already have. As teachers, we must provide students with the right key words, so that they can build on top of prior knowledge to comprehend the text. Students have the prior knowledge to understand it, but it is up to us to activate this prior knowledge in their heads to help them unlock the schema for the passage, so that they can comprehend it. It is hard to understand new text if you don’t have a clue about what it is referring to because it is new information, but if you know what it is about, you can build the new information based on your prior knowledge of the subject.

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