Literacy Navigator is a modular supplementary intervention that helps students develop the reading comprehension skills they need to navigate the texts used in their content-area courses and measured by high-stakes reading assessments.
A New Approach
America’s Choice Literacy Navigator’s approach targets students, including English language learners, who are comfortable with social language or who are adequate readers of literary text but struggle to comprehend content-area text. To remove content as a barrier to comprehension, Literacy Navigator:
- Uses instructional strategies based on cognitive science and reading research
- Explicitly teaches the commonly used structures found in informational texts, such as cause and effect, sequence, and claim and evidence
- Builds recognition and understanding of elements critical to comprehending content-rich, dense passages connecting words, pronoun reference, substitute words and phrases
- Builds knowledge of and fluency with academic language and common tier-two vocabulary
- Uses graphic organizers and focused writing tasks to help students understand and demonstrate relationships among ideas
- Scaffolds student application of comprehension strategies through focused reading of increasingly complex text
- Uses embedded assessments (pre-tests and post-tests) to identify additional instructional needs and monitor student progress
The old strategies aren’t enough
America’s reading problem persists despite decades focused on teaching students common comprehension reading strategies. While visualizing, making predictions, and summarizing can help with literary text, they are of limited use with informational text. Content-rich text requires a different set of skills to both understand expository text features and build relevant background knowledge.
Students need opportunities to articulate ideas, discuss findings, and examine new knowledge to help them internalize content information. Computer-based programs, which tend to isolate students, are not enough.
