Abstract:

Despite ample evidence about the value of reading strategies in developing learners’ comprehension skills and overall academic literacy, there continues to be very little explicit and continuous strategy instruction in classrooms, and teachers remain reluctant to take on reading strategy instruction. A compounding factor seems to be that at a teacher-training level ample attention is paid to the professional development of teachers for teaching reading, but little attention seems to be paid to the professional development of comprehension instruction. As Sailors (2008) states, new teachers still enter schools “with the understanding of how to teach comprehension […] based on how they were taught to read”. Pretorius (2010) confirms that “[r]eading as a knowledge-based discipline hardly features in the teacher training curriculum, and an evidence-based approach to reading instruction even in a degreed teaching qualification is practically nonexistent”. This study investigates to what extent (if any) teachers’ own reported use of reading strategies transfers to their teaching. A group of 61 student teachers were given a text to read followed by a survey in which they identified the reading strategies they applied. Thereafter they were asked to compile a comprehension lesson plan. The lesson plans were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively for evidence of the use of the strategies they reported using in their own reading. The results show that although teachers report using a variety of strategies, little to no transfer of the strategy use occurs to their teaching, thereby emphasizing the need for the explicit teaching of comprehension development skills at teacher training level.