Reading for Intermediate and Advanced Learners, Spring, 2011

RAFT
The RAFT strategy helps to improve students reading comprehension and allows them to write for geniune purposes. The RAFT acronym stands for: R-Role of the writer, A-Audience for the writer, F-Format of the writing, T-Topic to be addressed in the writing. To prepare the activity, the teacher must analyze the important events or information the student needs to understand from the text. Then the teacher must brainstorm ideas of roles, audiences, writing formats, and topics to address when relating to the text. Students can be given the list of ideas for each area, or the whole class may be given the same role, audience, etc. The teacher should also help students discuss an understanding of their role and have students brainstorm the role with peers. The teacher can also provide examples of specific RAFT projects for students to consult before writing their own piece. This strategy can be applied to all content areas: for a math example: Role-Parts of a graph, A-TV audience, F-Script, T-How to read a graph.
Students take the role, audience, format, and topic to combine in an original writing piece that engages students based on their comprehension and interpretation of the text and class discussion.

Sketch To Stretch
This strategy helps students to discuss their individual questions from the text/assigned readings with the rest of the classroom. In the strategy, students choose the most important idea from their reading or reading log and create a visual representation of the idea. They are then asked to write why they chose to represent this particular idea, how it is important to them personally, and give an explanation of the visual they drew to represent it. The discussion of these visual ideas is started when the students participate in a "gallery" tour of the artwork. Students hang pictures around the room or leave on their desks while the entire class wonders about to look at the visual representations. Students make note of the name of the artist that created a powerful piece and this artist later stands before the class to explain how/where their drawing was created from the text. The discussion will then begin because students will make a connection to the text, the art, and their own lives.