Reading is not everyone’s cup of tea. There are some students that genuinely like reading, maybe even love it, but a sizable number tend to lack enthusiasm when working with the required texts. Whatever their feelings are, reading and understanding challenging material is a crucial skill that is not only important in the workplace but in so many high-stakes areas of life. Simply put, skillful readers have an upper-hand.

For LTEL students, reading is often one of the areas that they test lower in compared to the grade-alike peers. Whether it’s a lack of vocabulary exposure or difficulty breaking apart the structure of a text, LTEL students have additional layers to unpack as part of their tracking of the key information.

These extra steps can get frustrating to students– especially to students that have not yet established the “student habits” that successful students consistently practice. Asking questions, trying every task even when unsure, using feedback, turning in work on time. These are a few habits that can make a huge difference in terms of the ability of a student to maintain focus and willingness to try even when the work is challenging. When students lack these habits, any additional hurdle can be grounds to stop trying. But alas, that is a conversation for another post.

For today, let’s focus on what we can do to lessen the stress of a challenging text while inviting students to break it apart into pieces that are both understandable and relevant.

#1: Chunk the text.

This is a tried-and-true method for a reason. Chunking reading is a strategy that goes a long way for all readers, but especially LTELs. There are many ways to do this, whether it is to use a graphic organizer structure, have students draw lines to signal stopping points, or have a strategic reading schedule to break apart longer texts like novels.

Chunking visually lessens the amount of text for students to focus on. While the amount of reading is ultimately the same, the chunks of reading seem more accessible because it allows for a short “break” in between sections. This can be an explicit break to process or just a suggested one to help students get ready to move from one topic or event to the next.

Chunking can especially work well if there are text-dependent questions alongside the chunked reading sections. Which brings me to…

#2: Make your own text-dependent questions.

I am big believer in creating my own curriculum. While I know that there are some great resources out there in wide world of the internet, I prefer to create curriculum based on what my students need. While I am sourcing fiction and nonfiction texts to read based on our school’s guidelines, the daily activities and summative tasks are nearly all created or collaborative materials that were made with our real students in mind.

As stated above, alongside chunking reading, I make and use text-dependent questions that are specifically designed to break down the key aspects or practice a key skill for the course. I like this method because I can be strategic about the types of questions that I ask based on the skill we are practicing and assessing for that unit. For example, for one of our units, nearly all of the questions are inference-based. Students need to answer by referencing the text and then making an inference in connection to that quote.

I can see this skill working beyond English classrooms too– whether it’s tracking cause and effects for social science, a concept or process for science, or data in a math word problem. Text-dependent questions are a great tool to scaffold difficult texts by guiding students to focus on what is most important and relevant to future tasks.

#3: Read and interact with a purpose.

For this strategy, I recommend picking a specific skill or focus that will work towards the main objective of the unit. In my practice, I usually have one or two skills that students are explicitly taught and assessed on (for example, making text-based inferences or analyzing a word’s connotation within the context of the text).

So when we’re reading a complex text, I have students write our purpose at the top. The purpose might be to track a character’s feelings (characterization) or to explore a specific topic. Using a highlighter, a very popular tool in my classroom, students are to highlight or underline places in the text that help answer the focus we went over before reading. If the text is on the long end or at the beginning of the year, I will usually project the reading and model this before they continue on their own.

I like this practice because it makes reading seemingly intimidating texts approachable and visually interactive. It also pushes them to really think about what the text is saying in order to determine whether a line is worth highlighting or not.

A good follow up activity is to pick a couple of their highlighted quotes and explain how those meet the focus of the activity. For example, what are the character’s prevalent feelings throughout the text? How do these change as the story develops? Since they have the evidence already, this makes it easier for students to leap into the writing and critical thinking component that makes their processing really stick.

#4: Build a strategic reading schedule.

One of the big hurdles English teachers navigate are creating reading schedules. In most of our classrooms, it is nearly impossible to do all of the reading during class time. In my experience as student, I recall that we did the reading outside of the classroom with perhaps a few minutes at the end of class to start the reading if there was time to do so. It’s not shocking that many of my classmates admitted they didn’t do the reading, especially in light of the rising popularity of what was then an up-and-coming website called Sparknotes that could summarize chapters into paragraphs. Because I, for the most part, liked reading and had an unreliable internet connection at home, I didn’t resort to reading summaries but this practice of skipping the reading is something that is not new nor is it going away any time soon.

So what’s a teacher to do? Like most things in life, balance is key. I try to create a balanced reading schedule that allots time to read the most impactful or “meaty” parts of our books during class so that we can unpack with some processing activity either as we read or afterwards. While I used to cut out chapters of books and pose them as extra credit chapters, I have now moved into trying to offer a balanced schedule that does require students to read on their own (I try to give no more than 20 pages per “night”, given that we are on block schedule so they have a couple of nights to do this reading) while reserving the most crucial parts of the book for in-class activities.

This is a tough task for teachers, as we have to re-read the book and think about it through both the teacher and student lenses in terms of what is most important for the unit and what seems like a doable amount of reading. While I know that not all students will read for homework and some will rely on the summaries readily available by either AI or internet searches, I am an optimist at heart and I believe that there are students that will opt to read and will appreciate the thought behind the reading schedule.

For LTEL students, reading the “meatiest” parts together is also a great strategy to help them break down parts that have a big pay-off, such as defining and contextualizing a particular term or explaining a particular motif or theme. What we read together is often the most connected to the essay or performance assessment tasks, so this it’s a good way to ensuring that students are able to access parts of the text they can later reference and use for these important next steps.

#5: Use expert readers when reading aloud.

Popcorn reading. Do you remember that from your childhood days? I sure do… and I’m only partly traumatized by it. As an EL student, I was lightly tormented by popcorn reading. While I liked reading for fun and felt that I knew a good amount of vocabulary, I was also aware that my pronunciation was hit or miss. There were many words I stumbled over or mispronounced and while it was a learning experience, I can honestly say that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was actually reading because I was thinking instead about how I was reading. Was I too quiet? Too slow? What was that word coming up? Did I just skip a line?

Because of my fraught relationship with popcorn reading, I don’t do it. I also rarely call on students to read aloud unless they volunteer to do so. Reading aloud is a different skill than reading silently– it’s a skill that is definitely useful but not necessarily one that I want them to practice every day. Since LTEL students have a range of backgrounds and experiences, many of them struggle as I did when reading aloud due to limited knowledge of pronunciations of words out of their familiar contexts. For others, it’s the pacing and stamina that intimidates them, as some of them are scoring low in terms of their reading comprehension skills.

Regardless, I have a feeling that I can’t be the only person what stops thinking about what I’m reading to focus on how I’m reading. And for this reason, I reserve the responsibility of reading aloud to either me or an audiobook. For short stories or articles, I usually read these aloud and try my best to put on my “story time” persona to make the story more engaging and make the pauses to process intentional. For novels, I usually use audiobooks since these are read by professional readers that are doing just that– making the reading interesting, alive, and engaging. With so many resources to access expert readers, I feel that practices like popcorn reading are mainly useful in terms of keeping students on edge and hopefully paying attention to jump in when they are called but not so much in terms of actually processing the reading.