Story Grammar: is an organizing guide for reading. It refers to the principal components of a story: main character, action and outcome. Many of the strategies incorporate the components of story grammar in their steps. For example, this technique has been applied using story maps and by asking generic questions based on the components.³⁷

Questioning and paraphrasing (Reciprocal Teaching- Brown and Palincsar 1988): involves questioning, summarizing, clarifying and predicting. It is organized in the format of a discussion. The practitioner models the strategy first by:

• Reading a portion of the text orally and summarizing the main idea in his/her own words
• Self-questioning during the reading and posing post-reading questions for the learners
• Clarifying the meaning during the reading
• Predicting what will happen next.³⁸

Once the practitioner has modeled this process a few times, learners can be encouraged to take a leadership role. This strategy is designed to improve comprehension by focusing on the important information in the material and stimulating active involvement with the material.

Story mapping (Idol 1987): uses the elements of story grammar. The learners can fill a map with the setting, characters, time/pla ce of the story, the problem, the goal, the action that took place and the outcome. Once again, this strategy is only effective if the learner is taught how to use the strategy first.³⁹

PASS reading strategy:

P - Preview, review and predict: learners read the heading and one or two sentences, they think about what they already know about the topic and what the text might be about.

A - Ask and answer questions: learners ask content-focused questions (5 - w'ts), monitoring questions (is my prediction right? does this make sense?) and problem-solving questions (do I need to reread this section? should I get help?).