The Direct Reading Thinking Activity GLAD Strategy for Building Vocabulary

What is the Direct Reading Thinking Activity Strategy (DRTA)? 

It is a GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) strategy for reading that helps students think while they read, by making predictions before reading, then confirming or changing their predictions after reading. This is a great strategy to support multilingual learners in using context clues while reading to understand the text or passage, as well as to figure out word meanings. 

📝 First, before reading the text, students look at the pictures and text features on the passage or just at one paragraph, depending on the skill level of your students and if you want them to focus on a specific vocabulary word in that paragraph. Then, students write down their predictions on the word's meaning, or what the text is about, what they know or think is happening in the pictures, and so on. It is like a picture walk, but using text features. 

📝 Next, students read the text. While reading, students look at text evidence for their predictions. If they know how to annotate, they could do that while reading. 

📝 After reading, give them time to discuss what they read with the small group or a partner. Then, have them look at the predictions and use evidence from the text to confirm, reject, or change their predictions. Make sure to provide sentence starters or sentence stems. Have them share with the class. 

This activity can be done in a whole-group lesson or in a small group lesson. Students can complete the organizers on their own, with a partner, or you could make a bigger version on chart paper to do it with the whole class. 

Why should you try this strategy? 

It helps students: 

• Use context clues to guess the meaning of new or hard words. 

• Understand the text better by thinking and checking as they read. 

• Build academic vocabulary by using text features, such as pictures and captions, to figure out word meanings. 

• Be more engaged, as it is like a detective game. 

• Understand how to use text evidence and why it is important. 

• Learn how to go back to find important information from the text.  

Click here to get a free copy of my DRTA organizers. 

For more resources and strategies to use with multilingual learners:

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