Selecting an appropriate text . As a sign of their independence, we want students to self-select texts as early and as often as possible. We also want them to know what kinds of texts they are selecting and to recognize important structural features of texts someone else selects for them, so they can satisfy school-imposed and personal purposes for reading. For example, in the integrated language arts curriculum, students are taught story genre and structure. SAIL teaches students to recognize and use story structure and genre in satisfying their own reader needs, including the simple joys of reading, recognizing, understanding, and remembering.
Story structure becomes a reader's tool rather than an abstract curriculum end in itself.
Deciding how to process the text . A striking characteristic of many unsuccessful readers is the inflexible, dogged manner in which they move through text, attending to nothing but surface structure. To break this dysfunctional, text- processing behavior, we change the goal from accurate oral reading to getting the gist. Simultaneously, we force students to process authentic, interesting text much more rapidly, chunking large units of text. We start with good stories at or above grade level that students can read for gist within one reading period.