It is difficult to convince people that problems can arise from bits of text they are hardly aware of. Some of the strategies required (eg working out what reference words like it and this refer to) may be dismissed unless the practice material offers genuine difficulties. It is important not to work on a skill unless you can demonstrate that problems occur.
The time to raise an issue is when the students have been brought face to face with a problem, and can therefore see the point of practicing a strategy to deal with it. If you can manage without training on some of the duller aspects of text attack (dealing with complex syntax, for instance), so much the better--but not at the expense of leaving the students helpless. My view is that a certain amount of specific strategy training is helpful, but that most of it should be ongoing, as problems are encountered in the text.
If you are not clear about the purpose of an exercise, or not convinced of its value, it is better not to use it, because it is easy to make training seem pointless.
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This seemed to me to be really good advice. In my teaching career, very often I have been required to do certain lessons on teaching reading strategies as part of the curriculum I was following. In most of those lessons, the students were completely disengaged from the lesson, and often I had trouble making the students believe that the lesson was valuable for them.
Therefore, this advice of not bothering with a reading strategy until a demonstrable problem occurs seems to me like really good advice.
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