Providing Access to Textbooks for ELL: Reading Guides

Jill Kerper Mora
San Diego State University

The purpose of a reading guide is to organize and condense material from a textbook to enhance comprehension and for use as study guides and class notes, where lecture notes can be correlated to textbook information.

1. Direct students' attention to the Table of Contents. What does it tell about the textbook chapter? What are the main ideas or points covered in the chapter? How many are there? Are there subtopics or sections under each main idea? What are they? Focus on the chapter title. How does it prepare students to read the chapter with enhanced meaning? Have students formulate two or three questions about the reading based on the title.

2. Where is the main idea (thesis) of the chapter located. Have students identify section, page and paragraph. What are the section headings or subtitles?

3. After identifying the main idea (thesis), have students read the chapter summary. Have students locate points in the chapter where the ideas from the chapter summary are addressed. This could be a sentence by sentence analysis if the summary is well organized and compact.

4. Have students locate and read or write out in outline form, the topic sentence of each paragraph and the concluding sentence. Remember that the concluding sentence may not be the last sentence, since often the last sentence is a transitional sentence to the ideas presented in the next paragraph. Based on this analysis, students identify the type or purpose of each paragraph.

5. Focus on a single paragraph or a few important paragraphs and have students locate the main idea and supporting details. Write these in outline form. This is a good exercise to jigsaw, with different groups of students or individuals within a group working on different paragraphs to complete a full outline of the chapter.

6. Based on the reading guides they produce, have students write their own summary of the chapter. Adjust this activity according to the language proficiency levels and writing abilities of L2 learners so that the linguistic and cognitive demands of the task are challenging but not frustrating for the students.

Source: Snow, M. (1993). LEAP: Learning English-For-Academic-Purposes.  Los Angeles, CA: CSU Los Angeles. 

 Planning for Teaching Concepts & Vocabulary 

Teaching concepts in a clear and well-defined manner is essential to EL students' comprehension of content-area texts. Below are the planning steps and elements to be taken into account in teaching concepts:

Identify an important concept or key idea in a content-area lesson. Choose a more complex or abstract concept that lends itself to a higher level of analysis. The characteristics of concepts are as follows:

 Degrees of concreteness

Concrete, semi-concrete, abstract: Can a person see, hear, touch, taste or feel the concept or aspects of the concept? Or does the concept involve combining multiple thoughts and ideas that are remote in time and space?

 

Nature of critical attributes

 Is the concept narrowly defined through a few converging features or characteristics versus broadly defined with divergent and multiple features or characteristics?

What critical attributes distinguish this concept from other related concepts? What rules or criteria define the concept? Which qualities, characteristics or attributes are essential in classifying this concept into its class or category? Does the concept represent a system? If so, how are the component parts related to each other? How do they act on each other and respond to each others actions? Are there clear examples and non-examples that illustrate and distinguish the concept rule or criteria?

 Form or manner in which learned

 Consider how students may have experienced or be familiar with the concept, i.e., its representational forms within the students’ experience: By doing it? By seeing it depicted or represented vicariously? Through symbols or language? Perhaps students have experienced aspects of the concept or are familiar with some representations of the concept, but have not linked these together to appreciate their inter-relationships. Or are they merely unfamiliar with the labels and words used to define and describe the concept? Does the concept have personal and public dimensions?

 Context in which learned

Is the concept being learned or taught in a formal context such as in school or training program? Or is it learned primarily or initially in an informal context such as a social setting or through casual observation? If a concept learned informally is a component of an academic lesson, how is the informal learning of the concept being linked or transferred to the formal classroom setting and for what purpose?

Analyzing Vocabulary Related to Concepts

 Word level analysis

 Examine the word naming a concept for prefixes, suffixes, and or root words. This morphological analysis will reveal the meanings embedded within words according to their structure.

 Cognates

 Teaching cognates is a way of relating new words in English to known words in a students’ native language. Often words that are common in a student’s L1 will be “big words” or less commonly used terms in English.

 Deceptive words
 Deceptive transparency: infallible; shortcomings
Words with a deceptive morphological structure: outline, nevertheless, discourse
Idioms
False friends
Words with multiple meanings: abstract, state, since
Synforms: cute/acute, available/valuable, conceal/cancel, price/prize, industrial/industrious

Words you can’t guess when there are non-existent contextual clues, unusable contextual clues, misleading and partial clues or suppressed clues