Daniels and Zemelmans chapter 11 focuses primarily on the difficulties students face in decoding texts across content areas. The chapter provides the reader with multiple strategies that can be used to help foster student critical thinking and understanding.
Read-alouds is one strategy mentioned throughout the chapter that I find to be very helpful within the foreign language classroom. This strategy involves instructors modeling the correct pronunciation and syntax of text along with the proper way of decoding the text into useful information. With the internet, smart phones, and wikipedia, students are forgetting how to think critically for themselves; Think alouds are an awesome tool in helping students to understand how certain inferences are drawn according to context.
Providing students with alternative forms of material is another suggestion that I find to be beneficial in all content areas. Students learn and comprehend material differently, and it is important as teachers to support all different learners by providing different means of materials and activities to engage our students. I found this chapter to be very informative on the development of reading skills and currently implement some of the mentioned strategies in my own foreign language classroom.
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