Establishing Shared Reading Strategy Use Across the Core Curriculum at the Middle School Level

This master's project addressed a critical issue in middle school education. Middle school teachers are increasingly asked to provide reading instruction within thier content area, yet many are ill equiped to implement such instruction. This project resulted in a research based, user friendly guide for middle school teachers on how to five reading strategies across the middle school curriculum. The guide provides middle school teachers with clear descriptions and examples of the strategies and illustrates how each can be used across the subject areas of Language Arts, Math, Social Studies, and Science. The goal of the guide is to provide middle school teachers with resources that enable them to use these same reading strategies in hopes of providing consistency for students and a common ground for teachers to discuss the reading comprehension needs of thier students. Based on a thorough review of the research literature, I selected five strategies most beneficial for English Language Learners, which could also be modified for other learners. The strategies needed to be context-embedded, to provide opportunities for tapping prior knowledge and making personal connections, and to develop skills for predicting, inferring and summarizing. The limitation of this project is that it has not been implemented at a school site yet. However, it provides a framework from which a school site action plan for shared reading strategy curriculum may be developed.