Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension
Vocabulary
Instruction targets three tiers. Tier 1 words are basic and learned in conversation (dog, happy). Tier 2 words are high-frequency, cross-domain academic words that mature readers need - contrast, reluctant, fortunate, maintain - and they are the best target for explicit instruction because students rarely meet them in everyday talk. Tier 3 words are low-frequency and domain-specific (photosynthesis, archipelago). Teach words through context clues (definition, example, contrast, inference), morphological analysis (roots, prefixes, suffixes), and rich discussion rather than copied definitions. Homophones, homographs, and multiple-meaning words are frequent question fodder.
Comprehension
Separate literal from inferential questions, and separate topic (what the text is about) from main idea (the point the author makes about the topic) from theme (a universal message, usually in fiction). Know common text structures - description, sequence, compare-contrast, cause-effect, problem-solution - and that signal words reveal them. Know strategies (predicting, questioning, visualizing, monitoring, summarizing) as deliberate moves a reader chooses, distinct from skills. Know the QAR framework: right there, think and search, author and me, on my own. Text complexity has three legs: quantitative (readability scores), qualitative (structure, levels of meaning, knowledge demands), and reader-and-task considerations.
Traps
Theme is confused with main idea; Tier 2 and Tier 3 labels are swapped; context clues are assumed to be definitions only; a strategy is described as a skill.
Worked example
A student meets the sentence: the witness was reluctant to speak. Reluctant is Tier 2 - frequent across subjects, unlikely to be learned from playground talk, and therefore worth direct instruction.