Reading Skills vs. Strategies - What's the Difference?

After our Wed. 10/6 class discussion on reading comprehension and the need for teachers to understand how to deepen student comprehension skills and strategies in a unified manner, I asked myself what is the difference in meaning between skills and strategies?    I found an article by Afflerbach, Pearson & Paris (2008) which provided clarification. The authors say “skill is associated with the proficiency of a complex act and strategy is associated with a conscious and systematic plan” (page 365). 

The authors feel there are three sources of confusion when asked what’s the difference between reading skills vs. strategies:  1) diverse historical uses 2) inadequate definitions and 3) inconsistent use in classroom instruction, books and in formal documents.  For example, in education circles, the word skills has been used for about 100 years and the word strategies became prevalent in the 1960s. Furthermore, Afflerbach, Pearson & Paris state “strategies entered everyday practice in classrooms when they because a part of basal instruction in the early-mid 1990s.  The authors also believe that many people in the educational process (policy makers, curriculum developers, administrators, test makers and teachers) use the two terms inconsistently and rarely define and understand the terms.  Some of the examples provided when educators sited their definitions to the authors were “Skills make up strategies” or “Strategies lead to skills” and “Skill is the destination, Strategy is the journey” (page 365).  These anecdotal definitions really confused me and the authors state there is confusion in the educational system and the authors believe that the confusion needs to be resolved “because how we conceptualize and define reading skills and reading strategies has important implications for reading practices and reading policies” (page 364).

 The authors really tried to clarify the difference in their article: “Reading skills are motivated by goals of fluency, effortlessness and accuracy, they give rise to pride in ability not effort.  Reading strategies are motivated by control, good decision making, and adaptability; they reinforce self-efficacy based on both ability and effort” (page 370).  I got a lot of background information when I read this article, but it was something I needed to understand better.  There is a definite need to teach reading skills and strategies in an explicit fashion and what might work for many children as far as practicing basic skills for letter recognition may not work for struggling readers who really need to be first taught specific strategies for visual and auditory distinctions. This topic on reading skills vs. strategies was a definite eye-opener for me.

Source:

Afflerbach, P., Pearson, P.D., & Paris, S. G. (2008). Clarifying differences between reading skills and strategies.  The Reading Teacher, 61, 364-373.