The reader learns to associate what he's reading with something that he can identify with. Three levels of connecting are identified: text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world. Text-to-self connects something in the reading with something in the life of the child. Text-to-text reminds the child of something else that has been read. Text-to-world identifies with something the child knows from beyond his immediate family experience.. When teachers and parents are reading aloud to a child, they can help implement this strategy. Ask questions to help the reader recall experiences, prior readings, family travels or television programs viewed.
One of the hallmarks of active reading is activating curiosity. Educators can model asking questions before, during and after reading, demonstrating how to keep track of questions and how to find the answers. Students are encouraged to read actively to understand the material so that they can formulate questions from it. Questions can be divided into thin -- or factual -- and thick -- or inferential -- questions. Thin questions are those which can be answered from the reading material at hand. Thick questions involve outside knowledge and analysis and are more theoretical, involving opinions and interpretations.
Turning words into mental imagery is a good technique to personalize information. Use words and clues in the reading material to help readers create their own mental video or movie version of what's happening to make a three-dimensional representation of the written world. Active readers experience the magic of mentally visiting other places, times and imaginary worlds while they read. Visualizing is limited to the child's prior experiences, so images will change as the child grows and learns. If an adult models his or her visualization of a specific passage, a child learns how rich the experience can be.
This strategy draws conclusions about what might happen in the future based on what has been read so far. Predicting is sometimes grouped under inferring, which is a more general term referring to things in the past and present as well as in the future. It is popularly called reading between the lines. Predicting depends on the life experience of the reader. Explain that prediction involves making a reasonable guess about what will happen based on what facts and conditions are in the book and what the reader already knows about life. Then as reading continues, children can compare their predictions against what actually happens.
This strategy is easy to understand but hard to teach. Basically, you boil down the reading to the key ideas and concepts. This is difficult to do even if the student understands the reading. Students need to have this modeled for them and need to be taught strategies to perform this strategy. Have students write successively condensed versions of the reading based on notes they've taken or selective underlining. Use the journalistic tool of encapsulating who, what, why, when and where in the lead paragraph of an article. One teacher told students to send a telegram summarizing the reading where each word cost an imagined 10 cents and they were limited to a finite amount of money based on the nature of the reading.