Detective Reading

Beginning

• Have ELs answer the questions in a small group or with an effective partner.
• Highlight the context clues that help to determine the meaning of challenging vocabulary words in the text.
• Use rewordify.com to simply the text and reduce the linguistic load.

Intermediate

• Provide learners with sentence frames and stems to help them justify their answers: "The part of the text that supports my answer is ____. I know that the answer is ____ because the text says ____."

Beginning

• Have ELs answer the comprehension question in collaboration with a partner who speaks the same L1 or with a sympathetic non-EL.
• Highlight the part of the text that supports question number two to point beginner ELs in the right direction of answering the question correctly.

Intermediate

• Refer students to the word wall developed in the Introduction section, as they work with their partner to find the supporting details to answer the question.
• Encourage learners to use bilingual glossaries or dictionaries to discover the meanings of unknown words in the text.

Beginning

• Highlight or color code the sections of the text that correspond to each question in the John Muir text (i.e., a pink highlighted section of text will lead ELs to be able to answer question one, a blue highlighted section of text will lead ELs to answer question two, and so on).
• Assign ELs a partner who speaks the same language, and have them first describe in their L1 one possible answer to the question on the John Muir text.

Intermediate

• Read aloud the text to the students for the first reading, pausing to clarify tricky vocabulary and nuanced sentences. Then have ELs read the text a second time with a partner, before they read it independently for the third read.
• Provide learners with a sentence stem to help them justify their answers orally: "These supporting details provide evidence that my answer is correct because ____."
• Allow ELs additional time to complete the John Muir reading comprehension task.