Whether you are the subject teacher or the basic skills teacher, you should understand the structure of written information.

Once you know the optimum structure for a type of information, you can show learners how to read for meaning and write to be understood. For example, how are instructions written for construction work, for cooking, for operating a computer system? How do they differ? What characterizes a persuasive memo arguing for a change in procedure? What counts as valid proof in a technical or scientific presentation?

Once familiar with the styles of documentation and discourse in your subject, you can develop guides for reading, writing, and even oral communication. The guides can take a number of forms: a series of questions that direct the learner to think and learn about your subject; an outline of steps; a graduated set of tasks that enable the learner to read, write, or speak about a whole piece.

Ultimately, you are trying to replicate the kind of thinking required to understand a given subject or discipline. Mohan (1986) gives an example of a series of questions that would help learners through the thinking required to read and solve word problems in math:

Multi-level groups