TEACHING READING

MODULE 5
DIRECTED READING
THINKING ACTIVITY
Reading comprehension lessons have traditionally
focused on a passage followed by questions
which served to test rather than to teach. The
question were designed to find out if the student
understood rather than produce understanding.
The interactive view of reading implies
that questioning be aimed at drawing
inferences, one of the dimensions of
comprehension processing . How does
a teacher achieve this?
The answer is Directed
Reading Thinking Activity
(DRTA), also called Guided
Reading Thinking Lesson
(GRTL) by Hittleman (1989)
DIRECTED READING THINKING
ACTIVITY
• The Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) is
a comprehension strategy that guides students
in asking questions about a text, making
predictions, and then reading to confirm or
refute their predictions. The DRTA process
encourages students to be active and thoughtful
readers, enhancing their comprehension.
DRTA is premised on two thoughts
1. the reading material
communicates
2. reading is a thinking
activity
•In this strategy, the students reading is
guided to predict what each page is going
to be about, to read silently to check
predictions and finally to prove their
interpretations of what the author said.
3 stages comprise a DRTA
lesson
1. the act of inquiry
2. the processing of information
3. the validating of answers
TEACHER ACTIONS STUDENT ACTIONS
Activating thought (What do you Predicting (setting purposes)
think?)
Agitating Thought (Why do you Reading (processing ideas)
think so?)
Requiring Evidence (Prove it.) Proving (testing answers)
• Through DRTA, students learn these strategies: 1)
examining information, 2) hypothesizing, 3) finding
proof, 4) suspending judgment, and 5) making decisions.
These are applied in the following steps:
1. predicting from titles and picture clues
2. predicting from first page clues
3. predicting from one or more subsequent pages
4. predicting from the point just before the story climax
 Jonathan Livingston Seagull
(an excerpt)
It was morning and the new sun sparkled gold
across the ripples of the sea.
A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the
water, and the word for breakfast flock flashed
through the air till a crowd of thousand seagulls
came to dodge and fight for bits of food. It was
another busy day beginning.
 But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat
and shore, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was
practicing. A hundred feet in the sky he lowered his
webbed feet, lifted his beak and strained to hold a
painful hard twisting curve through his wings. The
curve meant that he would fly slowly and now he
slowed until the wind was a whisper in his face, until
the ocean stood beneath him. He narrowed his eyes
in fierce concentration held his breath, forced
one......single......more.....inch.....of......curve.....
Then his feathers ruffled, he stalled and fell.....