How can a teacher create interest in students to make them want to read?

It seems likely that one of the main reasons students do not do their reading, or if they do, they are not engaged, is because they are not interested in the topic, or they do not think that they can understand it.  Even for those who do the reading, if they are only reading because they have to and not because they want to, they are not getting the same amount of value from the reading than if they wanted to read it.  It is necessary for students to want to do their reading and to believe that they can understand it.  For many students this state of mind does not come naturally, at least not in all subjects.  Instead, the students need to be made interested in the reading and be shown that they will understand it. 

The job of making students interested typically falls on their teachers.  Chapter 6 of Content Area Reading gives several tips on how to make students interested in reading their assignments.  One method is the use of story impressions.  In this method, the teacher takes significant words from the story and places them in order of their appearance in the story.  The students then use those words to predict what the story is about, and how it plays out.  The students write down their predictions, and then can compare their predictions to the actual story while reading.  I really like this idea.  It can be used for more than just stories.  For example, it can be used in history where the names of historical events and figures replace the important words and students predict the historical timeline and events.  This method gets students to anticipate the reading and develops their skill of prediction, an important reading skill.  Students will be interested in reading so that they can see how close their predictions are to the actual story. 

Another method discussed is the use of anticipation guides.  In an anticipation guide, the teacher makes statements and the students state whether they think the statement is true or false.  The students then do the reading assignment to discover whether they were correct or not.  This is another good strategy.  Not only does it get students predicting, but it also prepares them for the major ideas of the text they will be reading.  This way students will know what to expect, and what to look for in their reading. 

These are just a couple of the strategies mentioned in the chapter, but I picked these two because they were my favorite.  I think that these two would effectively create a sense of curiosity in the students to make them want to do the reading.  I think they will also prepare the students for the reading that they will be doing.