Strategies for Developing
Reading Skills
Reading is a process of constructing meaning by interacting with text; as
individuals read, they use their prior knowledge along with clues from the text
to construct meaning.
A strategy is a plan selected deliberately by the reader to accomplish a
particular goal or to complete a given task (Paris, Lipson, & Wixson, 1983;
Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991).
Language
instructors are often frustrated by the fact that students do not automatically
transfer the strategies they use when reading in their native language to
reading in a language they are learning. Instead, they seem to think reading
means starting at the beginning and going word by word, stopping to look up
every unknown vocabulary item, until they reach the end. When they do this,
students are relying exclusively on their linguistic knowledge, a bottom-up
strategy. One of the most important functions of the language instructor, then,
is to help students move past this idea and use top-down strategies as they do
in their native language.
