PREPARING READING GUIDES FOR ACCESS TO CONTENT-AREA TEXTBOOKS

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.