ABSTRACT
Teaching reading in schools needs to focus on developing one or more of these elements. This chapter addresses: modelling the reading process, asking questions, developing vocabulary, and supporting background knowledge. Shared writing is a popular strategy in many primary classrooms: the teacher models the process of writing, showing children how a skilled writer creates a text. Teachers can share the process of reading, making explicit how a mature reader makes sense from a text, navigates an unfamiliar word or infers an idea from the text. The traditional model of a child reading a text and then answering a series of questions on it is a long way from the rich, discursive questioning that drives the effective teaching of reading. The chapter considers some practical strategies for developing children's reading, but we have failed to mention the most important strategy of all: reading. It also considers some ways that schools and teachers can support children to read widely and often.
