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CILR 607 Critical Review Article #2
CILR 607 Critical Review Article #2
CILR 607
Teachers are always on the lookout for the next great strategy, skill or program that will
elevate their students from struggling readers to superstars. It’s no wonder in the current climate
of high stakes testing with funding and school ratings bound to those testing scores. In Reading:
What Else Matters Besides Strategies and Skills, authors Affleblack, Cho, Kim, Crassas and
Doyle (2013) suggest that the “Big 5” (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and
comprehension) aren’t the only things students need to become proficient readers.
Summary
In Reading: What Else Matters Besides Strategies and Skills, the authors suggest that
besides cognitive reading skills, students also need affective reading skills to support their
growing abilities. These skills include metacognition, motivation and engagement, epistemic
The authors systematically discuss why cognitive skills are not enough for developing
readers and how using these four factors in the classroom will help students develop into
successful readers. Additionally, the authors highlight best practices in using these four factors
that demonstrate how teachers can teach these skills in their classrooms. Finally, they spotlight
how “when we rely on test scores to demonstrate “superior” approaches to reading instruction,
we will continue to be locked into a system that uses only cognitive strategy and skill as
Critique
In Reading: What Else Matters Besides Strategies and Skills the authors highlighted that
as educators, we tend to ignore metacognition, motivation and engagement, epistemic beliefs and
high self-efficacy as important factors to be taught and supported in the classroom along with the
cognitive reading skills. They did an excellent job highlighting how each of the areas could be
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taught within the classroom and what that instruction might look like. However, these scenarios
were not complete. The authors should have used an additional scenario describing what
implementation of all four strategies might look like. Also, the authors only provided one
suggestion of how to implement these factors within the classroom, where having more than one
idea would be helpful to get a broader picture of what using these factors in the classroom might
look like.
The authors highlighted how a teacher might use metacognition, motivation and
engagement, epistemic beliefs and high self-efficacy to improve reading performance in the
classroom. They chose to describe each of these factors in differing grade levels, which help
elementary and intermediate teachers think about how they might teach these factors within the
engagement, epistemic beliefs and self-efficacy have considerable influence on how our students
grow toward accomplished reading” (p. 442). By showing how these factors could be taught
within the classroom, they were able to highlight the benefits and structure needed to help
While it was helpful to see each of these factors highlighted in isolation, it would have
been helpful to see how a teacher could use these strategies in concert with one another to best
support struggling readers, who likely have need of more than one of these strategies. In
Chapter nine of Best Practices in Literacy Instruction, they suggest that “isolated strategy use
focus on teaching students the ‘strategy’ rather than teaching student ‘to be strategic’.
Subsequently, teachers have come to focus on strategies as things to be taught, rather than
actions to be fostered. The difference between teaching students a ‘strategy’ and teaching
students to be ‘strategic’ is that strategic actions require intentionality” (p. 228). When fostering
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that intentionality, it is important to understand how to best support students with a variety of
strategies to meet their metacognitive, motivation and engagement, epistemic beliefs and self-
efficacy needs, more than just one snapshot of a practice teachers are employing in isolation.
Therefore, providing teachers with additional ideas or suggestions would help teachers identify
how to use these strategies to best help struggling readers build the cognitive as well as affective
Reflection
Overall, I enjoyed this article and liked the way that the author highlighted practices to
help students build their affective reading skills. I do agree that there is more to reading than just
cognitive reading skills, but it is easy to focus exclusively on those skills to help struggling
readers. I recently spoke with our second-grade teacher who said that her students could read
above grade level, but that they were struggling with comprehending what they are reading. It
has led me to think through the idea of how do we best support all readers to think critically and
feel like they are capable of doing the reading they are being asked to do?
After reading this article and our textbook, I am planning lessons that will begin teaching
students how to be strategic in their reading. I’ve already started mapping out a lesson using Tic-
Tac-Toe to explain strategy and merge it with students using strategies during their reading. It
also made me consider how I build critical thinking skills with my students and how I will
provide additional perspectives on the same events within our social studies units. Finally, I have
started highlighting the types of questions that I will start asking my students to help build their
metacognition and understanding that we use strategies to be strategic, not just to learn strategies.
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References
Afflerbach, P., Cho, B.-Y., Kim, J.-Y., Crassas, M. E., & Doyle, B. (2013). Reading: What Else
10.1002/trtr.1146
Morrow, L. M., & Gambrell, L. B. (2019). Best practices in literacy instruction. New York: The
Guilford Press.