Rethinking Postreading Tasks: Engage Students Sooner for Better Results

Through this extensive, year-long blog series on reading instruction for multilingual learners of English (MLEs), we finally arrive at the end of the series. We’ve have walked you through planning for reading, establishing background knowledge, and many practices during reading to help your students achieve better reading outcomes. It’s now time to talk about practices postreading.

Why Postreading Engagement Shouldn't Always Be “Post” Reading

Reading instruction can integrate not only listening and speaking skills, but also writing skills, and the perfect time to do that is after reading a segment of text. Though “postreading” can mean after a chapter is finished, a preferred practice is to create a writing engagement task after a segment of text. Depending on your students' age and proficiency, “a segment” of text can mean

• • a few stanzas,
  • a few paragraphs, or
  • a few pages.

The writing engagement task serves as an opportunity to

• • process content,
  • develop academic writing skills, and
  • provide valuable formative feedback.

If, however, the writing engagement task comes at the end of the chapter or even at the end of a children’s book, we lose out on these benefits. There’s too much content for students to process, we lose the opportunity to authentically develop academic writing skills in the context of the reading, and we cannot gauge students’ understanding of the text.

Postreading Engagement With Young MLEs

Reading to young MLEs can be a magical experience. It can captivate their little minds and take them to places they haven’t been before. Teachers can read to and with MLEs, and MLEs can read independently. What we do after reading, or postreading, can deepen their thinking by engaging students in creative and thoughtful processes.

Shared Writing

After reading a sentence, page, or section, we can stop and young MLEs can practice verbalizing and writing through experiences with the teacher, such as shared writing. In this situation, after reading, the teacher selects a portion of the text and uses it as a model. The class works together to analyze the text and then write their own version. This interactive approach provides writers with peer support and engagement.

Story Boxes

Young MLEs benefit from engaging in practices such as oral language development, peer interaction, and play. Story boxes provide another postreading opportunity for young MLEs to engage with language through peer interactions in a fun and creative way. A story box is a box filled with objects connected to the book that was read.

For example, a story box for the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie might include a small toy or stuffed mouse, cookie, cup, plate, and play milk. Students interact with the objects to retell and reenact the story with the peers. Although story boxes are not writing, they can lead to writing experiences.

Once MLEs have listened to the teacher read the text and engaged in exploratory play with the text, you can segue into writing in various ways depending on your students’ needs. Consider engaging in a shared writing or having students draw and label the significant events from the story in order.

Postreading Engagement at the Secondary Level

In a secondary context, the two-sentence formula for writing a text-dependent postreading engagement is as follows:

• • Sentence 1: Thinking verb + content.
  • Sentence 2: Direction to use a specific sentence structure

The first sentence in the writing prompt contains a thinking verb, which is a distinct cognitive action such as describe, explain, infer, predict, analyze, summarize. The content refers to events, ideas, and people in the text. The second sentence contains instructions on a specific sentence structure students are to use to communicate their ideas. Instead of using grammatical terms for the sentences (e.g., compound, complex, subordinating conjunction, adverbial phrases) that often confuse students, the preferred method is to provide a specific word or phrase that students must use to begin their response. For example:

Describe how Salva from A Long Walk to Water demonstrated leadership while at the refugee camp. Start your sentence with Since.

Instead of giving students a full sentence starter where they are not really composing full sentences but are actually filling in empty spaces, the instruction to “Start your sentence with…” scaffolds their writing by scaffolding their thinking. In the example above, students are intentionally practicing writing a complex sentence by starting with the subordinating conjunction since. This approach can help steer away from students becoming dependent on us to give them sentence starters. Our job is to develop students who can stand independently, propped up by the skills we’ve carefully helped them acquire, one segment of text at a time.

This, however, doesn’t mean we leave them without guidance. We will have to teach them, prior to this task, the sentence structure that uses since, but now teaching this subordinating conjunction has meaning as students have to use since in relationship to the text.

When planning reading instruction, we don’t have to plan for separate grammar instruction. As we design prompts that direct students to use specific sentence structures or grammatical concepts, look for authentic opportunities to teach these grammatical concepts through the central text. When done with intentionality, reading instruction can activate the use of all the other language domains at an academic level. 

As we close this series on teaching reading, remember that how we engage students in reading can transform comprehension into expression. When reading becomes a springboard for authentic communication, our instruction becomes truly impactful.